Google is Terrifying!

wwkirk

Divine
For some reason, Google hates Dogpile's guts! When I installed Dogpile on Firefox (a challenge in and of itself), my access to YouTube was completely blocked. Once I removed it, access was restored. And I'm not just talking about having Dogpile as a default browser. Merely having it installed was a sin.

This pissed me off, so I migrated to Vivaldi. Almost everything was fine, but the native translate app wasn't working. So I installed ImTranslator. The next thing I know, I was redirected to check a permissions box whenever I tried to search with Dogpile.

I removed the app, but the redirects continued. I tried a malware removal app, but still no dice. Finally, I completely cleansed Vivaldi data from my system and reinstalled it. Everything is fine now.

I looked closer and discerned that Google is the default source for the new app.
And come to think of it, I'm fairly certain that Google is the base for the native app, which is why it doesn't work.

My thought is that Google hates Dogpile because it is a meta-search engine which utilizes Google's results. This is probably what pisses them the hell off.

This anti-Dogpile phenomenon appears to be unknown to Internet users at large. Then again, Dogpile is not widely used.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
This is a handy uninstaller if you need one. Whenever I use freeware I use the custom install, take a look at any options it might offer you. Download Revo Uninstaller Freeware - Free and Full Download
It kicks off the program uninstaller but the takes a few extra steps to scan the registry and usually finds stuff to clean up.

Another useful tool is this: CCleaner Makes Your Computer Faster & More Secure | Official Website
Similar but more for app and drive maintenance.

These are low level utilities and with things like that I generally don't let them update; that can become problematic with freeware too. I just remove and reinstall a new version every once in a while. I've used them successfully for years and they can help if you r machine gets bogged down. Mine's jiffy quick and it's old.

I like Vivaldi quite a bit. It has a few quirks like they all do but if I'm still happy with it in a few weeks I may stop using Thunderbird altogether and us Vivaldi instead. One stop shopping.
 

Wade

Stare..... They are always staring
I think I read a few weeks ago that Alphabet/Google had really wanted to show end users that they are not the "all seeing eye" that they have come across as but that the revenue they've managed to acquire as the search king is just too tempting.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
I imagine it something like this
iu
 

wwkirk

Divine
In a way, I get Google's perspective. Dogpile is piggybacking off of them, which must be easier than designing a search engine from scratch.

But at the same time it tickles me that they are doing it!
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Dogpile is piggybacking off of them,

Seems that there were many search engines doing the same thing less than two decades ago...I think places like Altavista were also using Google as a source for their search results...

Also in the past I've used Windows programs before for searching electronic and electromechanical parts that utilized a host of various search engines and sources including Google...

...
 

wwkirk

Divine
Seems that there were many search engines doing the same thing less than two decades ago...I think places like Altavista were also using Google as a source for their search results...

Also in the past I've used Windows programs before for searching electronic and electromechanical parts that utilized a host of various search engines and sources including Google...

...
Infoseek was probably my first favorite search engine. Yahoo barely seems independent any longer. Bing is usually the best for finding images.

Here's a list of current metasearch engines, though Wikipedia says Metacrawler is no longer meta.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
I've lost track of which thread was which now, but I have been noodling with Vivaldi.

With any browser I dial it right down to zero, let it do as little as possible and then gradually open it back up one step at a time. I've cruised past a few niggling things and generally am happy with it. But there was just one thing....

No matter what I did to the settings it always remembered usernames. Not passwords, just usernames from any site I visit. Like popping to hood on a Lotus you'll find other people's stuff in there - makes sense from an an engineering p.o.v. Why reinvent the wheel when others are readily available ?

So to kill that username thing I had to get into it's Chrome parts that it has tucked away. On the browser bar where you'd normally type in ad address just put this in:

chrome://settings/search#autofill

Took care of that in a jiffy. Now I have something else to pick through.
 

coubob

Celestial
This is a handy uninstaller if you need one. Whenever I use freeware I use the custom install, take a look at any options it might offer you. Download Revo Uninstaller Freeware - Free and Full Download
It kicks off the program uninstaller but the takes a few extra steps to scan the registry and usually finds stuff to clean up.

Another useful tool is this: CCleaner Makes Your Computer Faster & More Secure | Official Website
Similar but more for app and drive maintenance.

These are low level utilities and with things like that I generally don't let them update; that can become problematic with freeware too. I just remove and reinstall a new version every once in a while. I've used them successfully for years and they can help if you r machine gets bogged down. Mine's jiffy quick and it's old.

I like Vivaldi quite a bit. It has a few quirks like they all do but if I'm still happy with it in a few weeks I may stop using Thunderbird altogether and us Vivaldi instead. One stop shopping.

I use Glary Utilities Glary Utilities | Glarysoft and Firefox as a browser.
 

wwkirk

Divine
Shocking level of search engines limiting search results...


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI


.

No doubt you have to be creative in certain cases to obtain the kind of results you are looking for. I've also suspected that results may be skewed based on previous search history. But as indicated by the recipe example in the video, a topic doesn't have to be controversial in order for access to search results to be delimited.

A benign possibility I thought of while I was watching, and which was also raised by a YouTube commenter, is that the number of results immediately indicated aren't all actually linked to. The search engine may have tallied up a huge number of potentially relevant results, but only established "ready-links" to a fraction of them in order to save on storage space. This seems logical given the colossal number of searches being performed by an indefinite number of people at any given time. Even if a single link utilizes a rather small number of bytes, the amount of storage space needed overall could be massive given how many of them are requested.

That said, algorithmic skewing and storage economy could both be true.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
The search engine may have tallied up a huge number of potentially relevant results, but only established "ready-links" to a fraction of them in order to save on storage space.

I wonder if that is the same thing Twitter does but on a lesser scale with replies to tweets...I've read a tweet that will say there's 10 replies for example, but when I click on the tweet to read the replies there will be only 1 or 2 replies, not 10...I've also noticed that with tweets that have larger numbers of replies, 100s but I have fast scrolled to read older replies and it doesn't appear that the actual number of replies matches the number stated on the original tweet...

...
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Watch the experiment this guy does on his video on various search engine browsers (including DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo), and observe that they continuously put the SAME EXACT MAINSTREAM NEWS RESULTS on Every. Single. Page. This is unbelievably disturbing.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw


.
 
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