search engines?

 


    Well, Google finally has closed down the "scroogle scraper", which
made it possible (or, at least, claims to make it possible) to escape
the ads, the tracking, the "customized" results, etc.
https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi
    The hope is that the condition is temporary; try not to be too
disappointed, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Google and Microsoft,
it seems, are considerably closer to accomplishing what DEC, Adobe, Sun,
Oracle, et al. could not: Dominate end users' gateways to and impose
their own de facto "standards" for the Internet in general but,
specifically, the WWW. It's that ol' moneyhummmm, folks. Anybody have a
reliable search engine that he can suggest? No, asshole, "they" is _not_
the correct personal pronoun....
--
the Balvenieman
"You know what they say: Once you kill a cow,
You gotta make a burger" --Lady Gaga

 



  [ ... ]

So use http://www.dogpile.com  and avoid most of the Google junk, while
still searching there, Yahoo, Ask, and other search engines.


Gary


--
Gary Heston  gheston@hiwaay.net   http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/

Did you hear about the new saint, San Adreas? He's the patron saint of
blame, it's all his fault.

 


gheston@hiwaay.net (Gary Heston) wrote:


    Well, I was doing so but there's something about dp that's
subjectively and irrationally sucky. I spent a fair portion of Tues (11
May) conducting unscientific side-by-side comparisons of easily-found
search services including google, dogpile, metacrawler, lycos, clusty
and monstercrawler.com. I used a difficult-to-parse phrase, "when garden
onions bloom", and the exclusions string, "-ebay -book -books -auction
-amazon -iphone -alibaba". I judged results by comparing the number of
each service's hits containing actual information about growing onions
in a garden relative to sites selling devices to make "blooming onions",
recipes for same, etc. AWA their positions in each results page, when
possible.
    The clear winner was monstercrawler; runnerup is ixquick.
Unfortunately, both present sponsored links (but they're clearly
marked); AFAICT, monstercrawler does not offer a browser plugin and some
of ixquick's user preferences do not "stick" despite cookies. However, I
have not yet checked for a conflict with my browser settings. Besides, I
ran out of whisky....
    None of the so-called "metasearch" engines addresses the issue of
Google's Web History, which is its greatest downfall in terms of
productivity. Maybe today {after I've prepped the beans bed for
planting, got the lawn mower running and (maybe) changed out the starter
on The Last USA-made Motor Vehicle I'll Ever Own Even If Someone Gives
It To Me}, I'll do some actual content comparison between the more
productive engines' first pages of results.
    Lordy, do I ever miss Veronica, gopherspace..... To bad, the
commercial interests of the WWW, along with the massive ignorance of the
masses (grinning), killed them off just as I expect they eventually
shall do to UUNET because of little demand and increasing pressure on
the resources.
--
the Balvenieman
"You know what they say: Once you kill a cow,
You gotta make a burger" --Lady Gaga

 

On Tue, 11 May 2010 10:58:55 -0500, Balvenieman

Talk about defacto standards...

My degree's in English, and I prefer the neutral "they."  Rules for
usage have changed over the centuries, and this one seems logical.

--
Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclickend und giffengrabben.
Ist easy droppenpacket der Routers und overloaden der Backbone
mit der spammen und der me-tooen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei
die Dummkopfen. Die mausklicken Sichtseeren keepen das Bandwidth-
spewen Hands in die Pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken.

 




    Well, site indexing is disappointingly superficial but that's
common to all of the search engines. A well-crafted exclusion string can
help you avoid many of the results that you may regard as spam. I've
found that adding, "-ebay -book -books -auction -amazon -iphone
-alibaba" to every search phrase greatly decreases spammy results. No, I
_don't_ do all of that typing; I use the autotyping feature of a nifty
little program called "allchars" ( http://allchars.zwolnet.com/  ) to
insert the phrase with only four keystrokes.
    My two biggest objections to Google is its insidious use of
cumulative user data to target ads across the WWW. Thousands of sites
that participate in G's "adsense" free-money program routinely connect
users to Google when they log on so that G can "tailor" the ads based on
guess what? The newest wrinkle is the use of "web history" to
presumptiously "tailor" search results to what it determines to be your
interests based on guess what? Google tries to obfuscate the issue but
you'll find information here:
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer “704