How much do you trust google?

[eminent]

Check out this article.
Times (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2688404.ece?)

'' Google?s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest, where we are going in the future and when. ''

Would this effort make the World a better place or is there some Orwellian motive? I can't help thinking that 10 or 15 years ago any such "goal" would have created a Universal uproar.

Rearrange the following well known phrase ... "watching - brother - is - big".

[Th0r]

Google have already said numerous times they wish to have internet pop ups selling us things that we have searched but not purchased. Is it just trying to be user-friendly? or is it really invading our privacy?

[RainKing]

I first started using Google because it was faster and more accurate than Yahoo. I still use it for the same reasons. I am very concerned about privacy issues and, although I'm not one of those conspiracy-theory paranoiacs, I'm very cynical about the motives of government and large corporations. Page and Brin no longer run Google. Typically, the geeks who start these kind of companies sell out to the corporate sharks who build evil empires. It's all about the money. Hell, I only wish I could sell out for big bucks! ;)

Btw, has anyone seen or used gOS (http://www.thinkgos.com/) yet? Is Big Brother after your desktop?

[Th0r]

I first started using Google because it was faster and more accurate than Yahoo. I still use it for the same reasons. I am very concerned about privacy issues and, although I'm not one of those conspiracy-theory paranoiacs, I'm very cynical about the motives of government and large corporations. Page and Brin no longer run Google. Typically, the geeks who start these kind of companies sell out to the corporate sharks who build evil empires. It's all about the money. Hell, I only wish I could sell out for big bucks! ;)

Btw, has anyone seen or used gOS (http://www.thinkgos.com/) yet? Is Big Brother after your desktop?

The peoplec who made YouTube sold out to corporate "sharks" Google. But I agree with your concerns on privacy...
Why should some corporation have access to everything about us?
And why on earth do they need to?
There corporations arent going to fail if they dont know our names and birthdates...

An alternative OS for the masses.
That tells you everything you need to know about gOS

[odin_dax]

Google has the position to record data for accurate marketing. It's all about the money. There's nothing Google isn't doing we didn't know already. I don't use Google except for searching, so I'm not worried about it too much. Google is dipping its hands into a lot of stuff lately, so this may be an issue for all of us in a few years.

[Th0r]

Google has the position to record data for accurate marketing. It's all about the money.

Google the search engine is brilliant. 10 times better than yahoo. Why cant they just be like Wikipedia?
Take donations and not be bought out...

[headcase]

This is one of those risk v. reward things. Yes, you could stop using Google altogether because it's gathering information on you. Equally, you could live as a hermit in a cave to keep out of the "system" altogether. Personally, I prefer having a good search engine and sacraficing the privacy of information on how many times I search for words I don't understand. Like I prefer my luxuries of food and shelter more than I value not relying in The Man.

[Th0r]

This is one of those risk v. reward things.

yes...
I think it is a hard choice...
Privacy or a good search engine [which there are not many of]

[headcase]

What kind of things are you searching for that makes that a difficult decision?

[Th0r]

What kind of things are you searching for that makes that a difficult decision?

Stuff that I dont want corporations to see...

[RainKing]

Stuff that I dont want corporations to see...
You don't want them to identify you as the searcher (use Tor) or you don't want to disclose the search contents?

[Th0r]

Both...
Im already using a proxy, but I dont want my searches to be known by corporations.

[RainKing]

Both...
Im already using a proxy, but I dont want my searches to be known by corporations.

I'm afraid you can't change that unless you find an ethical individual or group that provides "cloaked" search facilities. This is similar to the domain name ripoff, where you submit a domain name availability query on a site, find that it is available, then by the time you try to register the name, it was taken by the folks running the query service. You can always just do a "whois" and use a responsible registrar to avoid this. Unfortunately, I don't see a similar solution for searching. :sad2:

Btw, pardon the alliteration.

[Th0r]

Does anyone know about making your own search engine?

[Stone]

Yes, but don't even think about trying to build something to compete with google unless you have a direct connection to a backbone, many exabytes of storage, thousands and thousands of machines to run your servers, spiders, cache, etc.

If it was easy to do, it would have been done already.

[eminent]

This is one of those risk v. reward things. Yes, you could stop using Google altogether because it's gathering information on you. Equally, you could live as a hermit in a cave to keep out of the "system" altogether. Personally, I prefer having a good search engine and sacraficing the privacy of information on how many times I search for words I don't understand. Like I prefer my luxuries of food and shelter more than I value not relying in The Man.
Nobody's meant to give up google because of this ,personally I think that's an impossibility for a lot of people.....

[eminent]

Yes, but don't even think about trying to build something to compete with google unless you have a direct connection to a backbone, many exabytes of storage, thousands and thousands of machines to run your servers, spiders, cache, etc.

If it was easy to do, it would have been done already.

Congrats.....you stated the obvious.

[headcase]

He answered the question.

[Stone]

Does anyone know about making your own search engine?

Yes, but don't even think about trying to build something to compete with google unless you have a direct connection to a backbone, many exabytes of storage, thousands and thousands of machines to run your servers, spiders, cache, etc.

If it was easy to do, it would have been done already.

@eminent: And your posts (http://forum.rorta.net/search.php?do=finduser&u=1006) are so informative!

[eminent]

Ye I know.

[Stone]

My previous post was sarcasm

[eminent]

I know that to ,btw so was mine. :ahso: