Search results from Google search

On Wednesday, 4 of the tech CEOs testified before some Congressional committee and one or more asked the Google guy about search results, saying that google sites were given priority, or something like that.

What was he talking about? Are you sure or only surmising?

Is he talking about the top 2 hits that are clearly marked "Ad"? It doesn't bother me that they put advertising first, and I ignore it most of the time, unless my search question is unlikely to find something specific, or I see that it hasn't.

What did the Congressman mean by "google sites"?

Reply to
micky
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Google owns youtube, among others. I find that youtube is annoyingly prominent in google search results.

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton

I use google advanced search and have been eliminating hits that contain "pinterest" .. I don't know who owns pinterest - but it sure is prominent noise in my searches. " - pinterest " or similar in a normal google search might do the same thing < ? >

Also - sometimes I will add " edu " or " gov " to increase the chances of finding a more-useful hit. Clearing the browser cache regularly also gives them a little less to target you with. John T.

Reply to
hubops

Google always pushes their paid ads to the top of the stack. I used to use Scroogle until Google shut them down. They stripped the ads and the difference in the hits was striking. They also were not tracking the user. It is getting harder to stay anonymous these days, virtually impossible for normal browsing.

Reply to
gfretwell

This list is getting old but there are alternatives.

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Reply to
Dean Hoffman

There's always Tor.

Reply to
Muggles

I actually prefer to not be anonymous for normal browsing because google is smart enough to work out that I like wikipedia and usually shows a wikipedia article on the first page except with medical stuff.

Reply to
Rod Speed

Do are you agreeing that that's what the Congressman meant, just the two (ever three?) paid ads at the top of the search list?

Besdies the lack of ads, what sort of differences were there?

Tracking doesn't bother me, but more importantly for me here, the Congresscritter didn't bring that up.

Reply to
micky

Are you agreeing that the Congresscritter was referring to the 2, maybe once in a while 3 ads at the top of the search list?

They're labeled ads, so I just don't see how they can be bad. Google search has very little advertising.

Reply to
micky

Most of the time, I don't want to buy one, I just want information. Wading through a page of ads to get there is cumbersome. Scroogle usually popped up what you were looking for right away. It was such a threat to Google's ad revenue that they specifically rewrote the front end of their search engine to kill them.

The fact that it totally anonymized the search was nice too if privacy means anything to you.

>
Reply to
gfretwell
[snip]

THere are alternatives to Ms. Google, with one of the favorites being "duck.com" (formerly duckduckgo.com).

It has the _HUGE_ advantage of not tracking your searches and NOT maintaining a search history.

Reply to
danny burstein

It's still duck-duck-go in my browser - after typing duck . com

I'll give it another try - I tried it and Bing a few years ago - but went back to google.

Anyone remember savvy search ? it was the best - back in the yahoo and alta vista days .. John T.

Reply to
hubops

It just looks that way because goggle filters out a lot of the conservative-right content.

Reply to
devnull

Sounds good to me!

Reply to
Rightie

Google does too, nearly always on the first page of hits.

Reply to
Rod Speed

Which defaults to DuckDuckGo for searches. It can be amusing when you hit an Amazon page and the price is in Deutsche marks or guilders.

For further amusement we use TimeTrex for payroll management. I have no idea how it happened but when I logged in this morning the screens were in Magyar. I can hack my way through most Germanic or Romance languages but a Uralic language is out of my league. I'd be better off with Russian.

Reply to
rbowman

duck.com resolves to

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on my box.

Reply to
rbowman

Eyup. Something like six months ago [a] duckduckgo.com was able to acquire the shorter name.

[a] who the f*ck knows what the actual time frame was... the C-19 shutdowns have badly messed with my internal clock.
Reply to
danny burstein

I use it. I also dabble with SlimJet on a different machine.

Reply to
gfretwell

To clarify, a DNS lookup for

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resolves (via CNAME) to duck.com, which in turn resolves to 184.72.104.138.

A DNS lookup for

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resolves (via CNAME) to duckduckgo.com, which in turn resolves to 52.149.246.39.

Clearly, duck.com does not resolve to duckduckgo.com, since resolving implies DNS. Instead, duck.com and

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get you to duckduckgo.com via HTTP 301 Redirect, which is completely different from DNS resolution.

*** Command outputs

dig

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7199 IN CNAME duck.com. duck.com. 7199 IN A 184.72.104.138

dig duckduckgo.com

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21420 IN CNAME duckduckgo.com. duckduckgo.com. 20 IN A 52.149.246.39

curl -v

formatting link

  • Rebuilt URL to:
    formatting link
  • Trying 184.72.104.138...
  • TCP_NODELAY set
  • Connected to
    formatting link
    (184.72.104.138) port 80 (#0)
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently < Server: nginx < Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2020 04:11:11 GMT < Content-Type: text/html < Content-Length: 162 < Connection: keep-alive < Location:
formatting link
< Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000 < Expires: Sun, 01 Aug 2021 04:11:11 GMT < Cache-Control: max-age=31536000 < <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>nginx</center> </body> </html>
  • Connection #0 to host
    formatting link
    left intact
Reply to
Jim Joyce

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