yahoo search results – 352 days old

[Grogan]

You think Google is sleazy? Try a Yahoo search. The first visible list of results (on a laptop screen) for "ccleaner" are all bullshit links that have nothing to do with piriform. A user just happens to have yahoo as their home page, so I thought I'd use the search form to get ccleaner.

The first link is C:Cleaner at c.cleaner.pchelpsoft.com

The second link is another fake... ccleaner.softwarereviewer.info

The third link is Norton Utilities at www.norton.com/Canada (what the Hell?)

The rest are sites promising "super fast!" downloads that only have CCleaner in the name because it's my search query.

Finally, if I scroll down, off screen, I find www.piriform.com

Sorry assholes, I have no sympathy for sleaze. Yahoo now seems about as useful as Bing.

This is why Google wins, every time.

[Grogan]

Just for fun, I clicked on the Norton Utilities link. I can't imagine what use that would be these days. That became near useless when Windows switched to an NT kernel (Windows 2000). Everything that was good in Norton Utilities is absolutely unable to operate the way it did in Win9x. Speed Disk (the best defragmenter ever) is a crippled GUI shell of its former self... just a front end to the Windows defragmenting APIs. Disk Doctor is just a front end for chkdsk etc.

It's the same roster of useless programs, but now it has a "Registry Defragmenter"

(In case anyone doesn't know, Windows consolidates the registry databases automatically. That hasn't actually been a problem since Windows 98 and even less so in modern Windows NT OSes)

All for $59.99!

[MSUredux]

Can't find fault in anything you said about Norton. I gave up on them long ago. They were the bomb back in the day though. Loved Ghost and SpeedDisk. Ah but 'tis just a faded memory now...

[Dark Angel]

They do have one top notch tool that I am happy to admit using. The Norton Removal Tool is the best thing ever for stripping Norton A/V and Norton All-In-One SystemFucker Elite (or whatever their "do everything badly" product is called) off new machines! Highly recommended!

[Grogan]

Yes, yes that's the best program Symantec ever wrote. It's their one masterpiece.

No awards though... after all, it only serves to clean up the mess that they made in the first place.

[dobiegirl]

How bout duckduckgo search?

[dobiegirl]

You think Google is sleazy? Try a Yahoo search. The first visible list of results (on a laptop screen) for "ccleaner" are all bullshit links that have nothing to do with piriform. A user just happens to have yahoo as their home page, so I thought I'd use the search form to get ccleaner.

The first link is C:Cleaner at c.cleaner.pchelpsoft.com

The second link is another fake... ccleaner.softwarereviewer.info

The third link is Norton Utilities at www.norton.com/Canada (what the Hell?)

The rest are sites promising "super fast!" downloads that only have CCleaner in the name because it's my search query.

Finally, if I scroll down, off screen, I find www.piriform.com

Sorry assholes, I have no sympathy for sleaze. Yahoo now seems about as useful as Bing.

This is why Google wins, every time.

What about duckduckgo?

[Dark Angel]

That's what my father in law uses. I don't know if it's due to a different ranking mechanism or the lack of targeted results but I can never find what I'm after with it.

[Grogan]

I've heard of duckduckgo, but not tried it. I'm not really interested in trying different search engines, when Google finds what I am looking for before I even finish typing my search query.

[dobiegirl]

I've heard of duckduckgo, but not tried it. I'm not really interested in trying different search engines, when Google finds what I am looking for before I even finish typing my search query.

DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of many sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha and its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot.[2][25][26] It uses data from crowd-sourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes, which are grey boxes containing topic summaries and related topics shown above the results.[27] DuckDuckGo also offers the ability to show mostly shopping sites or mostly info (non-shopping) sites via search buttons on its homepage.[28]
DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses, does not log user information and uses cookies only when needed. Weinberg states "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell."[29]
Weinberg has refined the quality of his search engine results by deleting search results for companies he believes are content mills, like Demand Media's eHow, which publishes 4000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg has indicated is "low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index". DuckDuckGo also filters pages with substantial advertising.[30]
In August 2010 DuckDuckGo introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave, for its search engine traffic using Tor. This allows anonymity by routing traffic through a series of encrypted relays. Weinberg stated: "I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DDG, you can now be end to end anonymous with your searching. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end to end encrypted as well."[31]
In 2011, DuckDuckGo introduced voice search for users of the Google Chrome "Voice Search" extension.[32]
DuckDuckGo also features !Bang commands, which give users the ability to use DuckDuckGo and have their searches redirected to the relevant site. An example of this is the !wiki command which redirects the search to Wikipedia's English website.[33]
[edit]Reception

In a June 2011 article, Harry McCracken of Time Magazine commended DuckDuckGo, comparing it to his favorite hamburger restaurant, In-N-Out Burger, "It feels a lot like early Google, with a stripped-down home page. Just as In-N-Out doesn't have lattes or Asian salads or sundaes or scrambled eggs, DDG doesn't try to do news or blogs or books or images. There's no auto-completion or instant results. It just offers core Web search—mostly the "ten blue links" approach that's still really useful, no matter what its critics say...As for the quality, I'm not saying that Weinberg has figured out a way to return more relevant results than Google's mighty search team. But Duck Duck Go...is really good at bringing back useful sites. It all feels meaty and straightforward and filler-free..."[34]
Thom Holwerda, who reviewed the search engine for OSNews, praised its privacy features, its defeating of the filter bubble, and its shortcuts to site-specific searches. He stated "...what are some of the reasons you might want to try out DuckDuckGo? First of all, DuckDuckGo doesn't track you, so you get real privacy when you search the web. Google tracks pretty much everything you do so they can better target you with advertisements. I have no problems with targeted advertising...What does bother me, though, is the fact that I wouldn't be able to protect myself if the US government ever subpoena'd Google to gain access to that information....More importantly though (at least for me) - DuckDuckGo tries to pop something called the filter bubble."[35]