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Do You Google?February 19, 2011 I don't know if you've been keeping up with the political/tech news lately (an obscure category, to be sure), but do you know what all Google's been up to? Take a look at this list: * Google employees are among the advisors to President Obama. Now, normally, this wouldn't be too upsetting, but these are not normal times. Now. Google has some incredible technology, and if you're in a business with an on-line presence, utilizing their resources makes good business sense. However, their technology allows them to manipulate the order in which searched-for items appear when you do a search. Imagine you're researching a particular issue, and mostly left-leaning articles appear first when you execute the search, regardless of their actual popularity or relevance? Does that happen? I don't think so, but I don't know. Do we really want someone to have this much power? The next time you're on a site, particularly if you're using Firefox, take a note of all the URLs that are accessed while your page is loading (it's in the lower-left hand corner of the Firefox browser), and note how many times Google's name comes up (in particular, google-analytics). That's a scary amount of information they're accumulating. So, what am I saying? I'm just making observations of things that just don't seem headed in a great direction. Personally, I've switched search engines to Bing (yeah, that's Microsoft, and they've been Nazi-like in the past as well - just ask Netscape. Oh right, they're no longer in business¦). There's also Yahoo, which has been struggling lately - maybe they could use some help. Want to stay with Google - fine. At least you've made a conscious decision. Personally, this all looks a little too conspiratorial for me. Wait - is that helicopter I hear black? 2021 update: Try Freespoke. Works great, and none of the political/privacy issues of the other "big" search engines. |
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