Goodby Google
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| hkwint Jul 28, 2008 2:39 PM EDT |
Goodbye Google. I don't need you anymore. First I needed you because you were better than the sinking ship Altavista. Than because ask.com decided to focus on a different kind of people and because I don't like MSN. Then I needed you because Yahoo! helps to violate human rights in China. However, all this time I was tired of your meddlesomeness. Just freakin' leave me alone! I don't want no stinking cookies only expiring in 2038! I don't want to be spied and my e-mail coupled to my search results! Leave my e-mail alone! I still use stinkin' MS Hotmail because you read my e-mails! OK, Mooter was kind of usable, and I know I should use it if I respect my privacy. But I always forget. But that's all over now. You will be deleted from my search engines in Firefox. I'm ready for your succecessor. At least I hope. I hope I don't come back this time. So farewell. If you're looking for me, I'll be here; along with some of your co-workers: http://www.cuil.com Best, and good luck spying on the rest of the world, and please keep SoC alive; Hans |
| caitlyn Jul 28, 2008 2:45 PM EDT |
It's worse than that. I'll be posting an article on O'Reilly this week about political bias at Google and it's impact on Google Earth and Google News. The only reason I haven't posted yet is that I want this story, which will undoubtedly be controversial, to be incredibly well researched and well sourced with lots of links. The bottom line... I can't trust Google to provide accurate and unbiased information. Cuil and Mooter are good choices. Alta Vista isn't half bad nowadays either. |
| gus3 Jul 28, 2008 3:19 PM EDT |
@hkwint: Are you sure you didn't mean "successor" rather than "predecessor"? Or maybe you know something I don't. |
| vainrveenr Jul 28, 2008 3:29 PM EDT |
Quoting:Leave my e-mail alone! I still use stinkin' MS Hotmail because you read my e-mails! OK, Moodle was kind of usable, and I know I should use it if I respect my privacy. But I always forget..... although at the same time some possible concerns could arise from MS's plans to try taking a large slice of the search-engine business away from Google. AAMOF, Microsoft's current plans are to acquire at least Yahoo's search-engine as the following LXer newswires of the last month or so do affirm: - 'If Yahoo Implodes, What's the Effect on Open Source?', submitted courtesy of LXer Editor-in-Chief Scott_Ruecker at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/104349/ - 'New Microsoft Bid for Yahoo Search?' submitted courtesy of the same at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/104732/ - 'Microsoft Crosses a Line' submitted courtesy of the same at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/105212 - 'Independent Yahoo is better for business: Google' submitted courtesy of the same at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/105239 - 'Yahoo Recruits Dev Army With Open Search Move' submitted courtesy of the same at http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/105214 Given that the much-anticipated Yahoo Annual Stockholders meeting is in several days, it will be interesting to see what deals in the search industry arise from this event. Will Microsoft COMPLETELY acquire Yahoo ?? Will Microsoft succeed in acquiring a subset of Yahoo including its ENTIRE search business ?? Will there be any efforts of Yahoo to thwart an MS acquisition of its search business by somehow joining up with Cuil (and maybe with Google too?) --- thus eventually reducing the ramifications of intense governmental antitrust concerns with this ?? Will Microsoft ITSELF be making possible overtures to Cuil, to Mooter, or to other newly-arising search engines ?? All in all. the common expression "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't" could really apply in either direction with these questions. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 28, 2008 3:48 PM EDT |
Quoting:Leave my e-mail alone! I still use stinkin' MS Hotmail because you read my e-mails! Uh, you do know that Microsoft has rolled out SenderID across Hotmail, even though SenderID was rejected by the world at large? The nice effect of which is that you won't receive quite a few mails from non-hotmail accounts. Replies get through, but someone sending a message to you out of the blue (because they read something you wrote for example) have a fairly high chance of being filtered out. And I don't mean put in your spam box. I mean silently dropped, with no indication to you or the sender that the message ever existed. It tells the sender "thank you for the message. It was received and delivered correctly" but then put in Window's equivalent of /dev/null. If you want an e-mail provider that leaves your mail alone, do it yourself. Low-spec server are cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. Alternatively, a VPS is also very cheap. |
| Bob_Robertson Jul 28, 2008 4:25 PM EDT |
I don't mind Gmail. Their spam filtering is pretty good, so I run my mail through a Gmail account, inbound. Outbound, my ISP requires me to use their SMTP server. Anything important, I ask people to encrypt. I like the FireGPG Firefox add-on. |
| Libervis Jul 28, 2008 5:18 PM EDT |
I have my email on my own server and download it via pop using thunderbird, though I was looking for some service which I can trust to host all my mail for me so I don't have to worry about it on my computer (when I do reinstalls or switch distros for instance). So far I switched to nothing though. Suggestions welcome. About cuil, that's seems pretty neat, but then I got this error when I entered a bit longer search phrazes. "Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again." I did try again, but it keeps saying that. The problem with new search engines is that if they're introducing a new way of searching that people aren't used to they're likely to almost habitually and without much thought just switch back to using google. So some sort of compatibility in terms of user interface and the style of displaying results should exist. |
| TxtEdMacs Jul 28, 2008 5:29 PM EDT |
hkw..., Just perhaps your parting words to Google were a bit premature. In my testing today, it went from bad to worse. Yes I too would be interested in another search engine, however, until it even comes near to its claims of superiority I will defer any shift. Earlier today I saw they knew of my site, with pages and pages of references. But it was a mess. Later in the day their engine was swamped. Not too much later, essentially "never heard of your site". Worse yet were the subsequent pages that were loaded previously were just email addresses, many on Hotmail. Quite inexplicable. |
| Scott_Ruecker Jul 28, 2008 8:05 PM EDT |
Seems interesting, the description for LXer is inaccurate but I like the presentation. I will use it and see what it does. It feels like a DayLife webpage.. http://www.daylife.com/ |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 28, 2008 10:29 PM EDT |
The widely varying results seem to be caused by the way that Cuil stores it results. Google is basically one big database on one big network filesystem. Cuil seems to be splitting out the data over different clusters depending on the subject. E.g. Linux on one cluster and Microsoft on another. This has upsides and downsides. The upside is that, if something becomes very popular then only one or two clusters are affected and they only need to add hardware to those one or two clusters. The downside is that the quality and quantity of search results on Cuil currently vary widely, depending on how overloaded the cluster is that your subject is on. BTW: I haven't found an authorative source yet that says this is indeed the setup that Cuil uses, but I've read lots of comments from people that speculate or seem to know that this is how Cuil works. |
| hkwint Jul 29, 2008 7:38 AM EDT |
Caitlyn: I'm looking forward to reading your article. I'll stay tuned!Quoting:Are you sure you didn't mean "successor" rather than "predecessor"? Yeah, sure, you're right. Thanks! Also Moodle should be Mooter indeed, thanks vainrveenr. Must have been sleeping. Quoting:Uh, you do know that Microsoft has rolled out SenderID across Hotmail, even though SenderID was rejected by the world at large? The nice effect of which is that you won't receive quite a few mails from non-hotmail accounts. No, didn't know that. I always knew hotmail stinks, but it's the danger of fire and electricity bill which prevents me from running my own server at this moment. That's why I was looking for a less then 2 Watt server and was goin to buy my own domain - but scanning the contract for my own domain failed because I used a wrong pencil to sign it. Stupid excuses, all of them. But I'm making some slow progress however. BTW, freeriding Microsoft still feels fun; using KMail & Freepops to receive my mails so I don't have to watch the stinking ads on Hotmail msn.com when logging out and not having to use the clumsy webinterface which meant trouble for Linux users anyway. My e-mailaddress also has a bit of a non-material value since it's already 9 years in use, which is quite long for a hotmail address I believe. But if they boycott my 'genuine' mails while still delevering 14000 spam messages over the past six months on the other hand (sounds like another genuine disadvantage program, doesn't it?), yeah, I'm out. Quoting:"Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again." Sounds like a lot of people are curious just like I was. In fact that shouldn't be bad? TxtEdMacs: Yeah, I may be premature. Sad to hear of all those bugs. When I searched for Linux News or my own name it still worked very well, even showing some 'banners' for the search results. For LXer it showed the Pre-installed Linux vendor database instead of the logo, but I understand they just started. I hope they don't mess up. I understand Cuil was 'built' using 'only' $33 million, so the results are quite good except for the bugs TxtEdMacs lists if you ask me. Compare that to the billions Google has right now; it's quite some achievement. Google has a de-facto monopoly on searching the web these days it seems, so it doesn't listen to customers when they want more privacy (OK, a tiny bit last month). With some real competition things just might change a little bit I hope. If I were Cuil I'd place some GoogleAds on my page to receive some revenue, ahum. Also, Google's PageRank patent is probably invalid I read (and if that's true so are most other Google patents), http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/105780/index.html so anyone can use that technology if that's true. Wikipedia, dmoz and Cuil should serve most of my needs I hope. However, as long as Firefox defaults to Google people like me will probably keep using it unless they really want to stop doing so. Strange that Mozilla doesn't default to dmoz, the Mozilla directory project by the way. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 29, 2008 7:50 AM EDT |
Quoting:it's the danger of fire and electricity bill which prevents me from running my own server at this moment. E-mail hosting is really cheap. A few euro's per month at most. A random google hit says $24/year at tuffmail. There's bound to be tons of other providers around. |
| rijelkentaurus Jul 29, 2008 8:07 AM EDT |
I use Network Solutions to host a domain for my family, and I have a Google Apps domain (the free one). The Google Apps domain is only $10 to register it at GoDaddy, and you get 6+gb of space per user, and you have access to it from anywhere you have a browser. You can also IMAP it and it has an app for a Blackberry. |
| rijelkentaurus Jul 29, 2008 8:14 AM EDT |
HAHA, just realized this is a "Goodbye Google" thread. How funny at me to suggest Google Apps. :-) |
| hkwint Jul 29, 2008 8:21 AM EDT |
Sander: I chose Yourhosting.com, they will provide me a domainname which will forward all mail to that domain to a mail-address selected by myself. I'll use my ISP's address I think, and after that I can change ISP's without changing mail-address. Hope my next mail address also lives for nine years! |
| techiem2 Jul 29, 2008 8:56 AM EDT |
Well since we're discussing it, here's how I have my non-gmail (for gmail I just use the webmail) primary email setup: I have email through my web host (futurequest) for my domain. Futurequest has web access to their email system (which is good for the occasional times when my home server or inet connection is down......) as well as pop and smtp (fortunately they run their smtp server on a few ports since some isps *cough*comcast*cough* block outgoing port 25). I believe I can setup forwarders in the domain control panel, but I don't bother with that. At home I have my server retrieve mail from my domain account and my other accounts (yahoo, hotmail, etc), process the mail, and dump it into my maildir. I run dovecot imap so I can access it with any imap client. I currently use the horde system for interfacing with it (so I have an easy way to get to it from anywhere). I use the free no-ip.com service to give me a nice domain name for my house. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 29, 2008 9:35 AM EDT |
Quoting:Sander: I chose Yourhosting.com, they will provide me a domainname which will forward all mail to that domain to a mail-address selected by myself. Yourhosting redirects to http://myhosting.com/ I take it you only have their domain plan? You might want to reconsider and go for http://myhosting.com/Email-Hosting/ for 3,70 a month. IMAP and webmail is a wonderful thing to have. |
| TxtEdMacs Jul 29, 2008 1:04 PM EDT |
As promised, I checked out Cuil.com again. A marked improvement from the first set, albeit in appearance only. There seems to be a selection of articles supposedly linked to snatched bits from my summary lines, but I had to guess the content. Worse was that the associated links, e.g. to LXer just got the current front page and others were of even less worth finding the articles. None that I tested reached any article. Granted, some links seen on Google can get you similar experiences, however, those are the exception this seems to be the rule for the present. In addition, I am seeing the gibberish pages again consisting of a mass of email addresses. What's their purpose? Found those by hitting "cool link", this time rather than supposedly being the content.. The items are nicely laid out, but had I not known what they were referring, I would have been simply confused..That is because there were no article titles to guide the reader. I wonder too about the associated graphics. One looked like a road block, I hope that was unintentional, but all too appropriate. Yes a great improvement over my first day's experiences, but not really anywhere near being useful. I hope others are seeing better, more complete result sets that have more meaning. |
| tuxtom Jul 29, 2008 2:23 PM EDT |
Without encrypting your email just about anyone could teach their dog to read it no matter where you host it. |
| TxtEdMacs Jul 29, 2008 3:24 PM EDT |
Further results: getting better, but NOT there yet.Quoting:http://smart-proxy.com/nph-proxy9123559.cgi/000110A/http/http/lxer.com/... Smart proxy anything but: Quoting:The page cannot be found Cut out the first part and put a colon and an extra slash after the second "http" and it shows the article when the rest of the link is included. A miracle, it works. Improving considerably in content and almost real links. Still not sure what I am going to see. Some links actually work and are correct. Odd seeing my comments on a php book where I thought someone was using my alias. It said July 30, 2008, which could be true in the U.K. Then I remembered this was a fluke on that site where whenever the comment was written it showed the current data (plus about six hours). This has promise. Not sure I will drop Google, but I will compare and contrast results. |
| vainrveenr Jul 29, 2008 4:15 PM EDT |
Just performed a search based upon terms within another popular LXer thread.
Search terms: LXer Slackware (as separate non-quoted words) Google yielded 32,100 hits fast! 0.58sec Google's first pagehit yielded the titles LXer: Slackware: the classic distro that's as timely as ever. LXer: Groups - Slackware ; LXer: Slackware 12.1 First Impressions - LinuxQuestions.org LXer: GNOME SlackBuild GNOME 2.22.1 Released for Slackware 12.1 ... LXer: Slackware 12.1 released. (://URLFAN) Companies selling preinstalled Linux and no-OS babbledog: LXer: Slackware 12.1 - The Newest Release of the Oldest ... PATCH: initscript/Slackware/rc.networkmanager: msg#00010 Bookmarks Bookmarks Toolbar Folder Add bookmarks to this folder to ... CLICK (Anyway, nice post, glad to see it made LXer so people are reminded Slackware is out there and is a viable choice -- especially for people looking to keep an ...) Cuil yielded 5,956 hits reasonably fast. Cuil's first pagehit yielded a 3-column view of LXer: Slackware: the classic distro that's as timely ... LXer: Slackware alert: glibc XDR overflow fix (SSA:2003-141-03) LXer: Slackware alert: CA-99-13: minimal fix for ... LXer: Slackware alert: Apache 1.3.14 available LXer: Slackware alert: cvs recompiled against updated ... LXer: Slackware alert: tcpdump denial of service (SSA:2004-108-01) LXer: Slackware alert: Emacs 20.6 updated updates LXer: Slackware alert: metamail security update LXer: Slackware alert: cvs security update (SSA:2004-108-02) LXer: Things I like about Slackware LXer: Where Slackware?: Slackware 11.0 RC1 Screenshot ... Note that Google seems to get the most timely pieces using the above search terms on its first page, whereas all of Cuil's 3-column listings in this search bring in actual LXer pages rather than just the _content_ which contains 'LXer' and 'Slackware'. Uncertain which of the two is better or worse at this point. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 29, 2008 10:38 PM EDT |
I've been testing Cuil again as well. It's a lot better than monday's rush, but still needs work. They do seem to be reasonably fast in updating though. On monday my website wasn't indexes, so I send them an e-mail as suggested on theit webmaster's page. Today I'm fully indexed. Still a far cry from the ~1 hour it takes Google, but my request was done by e-mail :-) Google seems to be better with popular and recent content. Cuil seems to be better when you're trying to (re)find some piece of obscure information you remember reading somewhere. I'll keep on testing. Cuil needs work, but it is a lot better than anyhing that's tried to challenge Google for quite some time. |
| hkwint Jul 30, 2008 6:51 AM EDT |
Quoting:Cuil seems to be better when you're trying to (re)find some piece of obscure information you remember reading somewhere. Exactly what an LXer writer needs. At least I do! |
| TxtEdMacs Aug 02, 2008 11:47 AM EDT |
Anyone tested recently? I have seen a strange case of alternating finds to absolutely nothing for the same query. In my case it could be they are landing on the forth page that has that message. However, the first three are not that good. Moreover, a number remain trash results comprised of no more that a packed set of email addresses. I haven't got a clue where those might have arisen. Anyone doing better or is a case where most are satisfied? Or more cynically has everyone moved on to the latest exciting non-event? [No attempt at humor anywhere in this particular message; see it as uncharacteristically with all serious tags.] |
| hkwint Aug 05, 2008 7:42 AM EDT |
Last time I tried it, it worked rather well. However, I still have to resort to other search engines - including Google - if the search doesn't turn up what I'm looking for. Patience needed I think. Google wasn't that good after the launch either probably? |
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