Month: July 2018

Alternative Search Engines 2: Indexes

Whether one can plant trees in Africa by clicking on advertisements https://www.ecosia.org/ with Happiness Officer as staff or trying a serious alternative like metager –  http://www.metager.de . The problem remains: Where do the data, the search indexes come from? Almost all of them transfer their data from the programming interfaces (API) of Google and Bing/Yahoo. For this, either payment must be made, the placement of advertisements or the transmission of user data must be accepted. Some of the alternative search engines still let additional crawlers run across some special areas. But you’re not master of data. If Google and Bing/Yahoo set their API, all of these business models will be destroyed, because a crawler via Wikipedia and Chef can’t create a compelling search engine.
Google’s interest is clear: Google has the monopoly, and if you attack it and destroy the company, this API is an argumentation that you even offer data to the competition themselves. It is basically a building block for maintaining the monopoly.
Where does the data come from? (more…)

Alternative Search Engine 1: Privacy

In the german computer journal Computerbild 6/2018 p. 38/30 contains an article entitled “search without snooping”. The opening credits say: “Google’s search engine is successful because it delivers top results. But it also spys on its users comprehensively. Are there any viable alternatives?” The benchmark of an alternative search engine is then “data and privacy protection” rather than the search results (I will deal with this criterion separately).
In the german computer journal CHIP 4/2018 “Alternative Search Queries” it says: “A glance at the Google data protection statement peppered with subjunctives is enough to find out that Google not only stores search queries and IP addresses, but also personalises the data, uses it for advertising purposes and even shares it with third parties”.
More articles on the web
Search engines without collecting mania. These are the 5 best Google alternatives, Anonymous search engines: searches without snoopers or similar apply the same standard “privacy”.

So the question is: What does Google store and what does data protection mean?

(more…)

Google as a problem

Google has a market share of almost 95% in Germany. A monopoly position can be problematic in several ways:
– Quality of information <- >Advertising.
– Information bubble, if search results are displayed according to previous searches.
– Dominance of the advertising market and online market.
– Social and political aspect: Can political opinion be influenced or even controlled?
So the question arises:
– Can’t other search engines be used? How are their search results to be evaluated? What standards are applied?
– If the search results of the other search engines are not sufficiently suitable, does not an alternative have to be developed by public means?
– If the USA dominates the search engine market with Google and Bing and China with Baidu and Russia with Yandex develop search engines, is it not already necessary for this reason to develop a European search engine?
There are completely different aspects of the subject that we want to examine individually.

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