Why I am boycotting google
After building up a huge dependence on google over the last few years, I have abandoned it almost cold turkey. This site got me thinking: http://www.google-watch.org/
I have several concerns about google. Taken individually, I'm not sure if any one would get me to switch. Taken as a group, I am convinced that I must switch. Here are my concerns:
1. Google keeps a log of every search, including the search string, date/time, and your IP address. They archive these records forever. They are willing to hand them over to any law enforcement agency (in the USA, under the new fascist regime, a warrant is not required). Their policy is not to sell that information, but policies can change. In many cases, your IP address uniquely identifies you, or at least your household.
2. The way google ranks pages favors large sites and multi-national corporations over small businesses and individuals. This makes it harder for competition to thrive, and makes it harder for people to find small sites that might be perfectly relevant and very interesting.
3. Google seems willing to participate in questionable censorship requests by governments and/or citizen groups.
4. Google has become a monopoly, and there are some indications that they may be willing to abuse that monopoly power. So far, they have not done anything blatantly wrong, as far as I know. But monopolies in general are dangerous, and monopolies of information doubly so.
5. Every time you click on a google search result, you are sending your search string to that site. For example, petco.com knows that you searched for "dog nuggets" (as opposed to "cat food") to find them.
6. Google places a permanent cookie on your system that tracks you until the year 2038. There is no justification for having a cookie with an expiration date so far in the future. With it, they could create marketing partnerships with other web sites, and track your surfing.
So, google is now my "last resort" for web searches, and I only use it if I can't otherwise find good results. So far, the search feature of http://yahoo.com has worked just fine for almost all cases. There are plenty of other alternative search engines. There is no need to feed the monopoly.