wot search engine? (no thanks google!)

[johnkabuto]

in light of this:


http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1694294,00.html ...please read.

(google's recent compliance with the wishes of the communist regime in china).


can anyone advise me of a search engine to use?

are there open projects (wikipedia style) around which stick to a moral code?

...do you think linux advocates (advocates of free speech/ freedom of information) should continue to support google?

[benplaut]

I don't think most people actually support google, just consider it the best of what is available.

I like Altavista (yahoo search, slimmed down considerably) and a few meta-engines, like dogpile.

i still stick with google because of google.com/ig , but have altavista in my firefox search bar, and the google search box removed ;)

google is complying with China's laws, but the issue on /. seems to be that epople think google should simply not be going into china at all.

[aysiu]

From the article you linked to:
After holding out longer than any other major internet company, Google will effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not approve of.

From Newsweek (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10925344/):
Every other search engine served similar subpoenas by the Bush administration has complied so far, according to court documents. The cooperating search engines weren’t identified.

So what search engine? Well, if you judge Google for giving in to China, consider they were the last one to give in. If you judge them for possibly giving in to the US government's subpoena, keep in mind they are one of the only ones resisting that subpoena.

If you don't use Google for those reasons, don't use anything then.

[prizrak]

Google (and any corporation) has to obey the laws of any country they want to do business in, its that simple. You can disagree with it if you want to but such is the nature of business and make no mistake Google is here to make money they are legally required to by US law.

[johnkabuto]

thanks.
i dont think i used the word 'support' correctly.

but Google seems to be widely endorsed by the open source community, yet it has now followed the likes of MSN and Yahoo into business in a very dark area (human rights abuses/ censorship) - see the article.

[aPello]

The world is never black and white. obviously an over used statement IMO, but extremley truthful. Google is here to make money. They lose quite a bit of business if they do not comply with Chinas laws. As the article stated that google said, they picked the lesser of two evils. Either google not allowed at all to be used in China, or that google be censored. I dont agree with the censorship, but IMO it would be worse if there wasnt google at all in china.

In this issue i think that china is at fault rather than google. Google simply made the best they could with the situation handed to them. As stated previously in this thread, any business must comply with laws of the country it is doing business in.

[endersshadow]

China is a huge market, and Google is here to consolidate all of the world's information as well as turn a profit. By neglecting going into China, Google fails at even attempting to meet both of those goals. The fact of the matter is that the Chinese people are censored, and Google resisted that censorship. In the end, by refusing to go into China, Google would not meet their goals.

Moreover, Google is extremely proprietary about their algorithms and server allocations. Nobody knows how many servers Google actually even owns. You can't take pictures inside the Googleplex, and they've never been leaders of OSS.

Google is, at its heart, a fantastic search engine and a company that brings together information like no other before it. It also makes a killing doing it, too. To try to think of Google as anything more than that (especially as bastions of OSS) is foolish and naive.

[briancurtin]

i will continue to use google, as it has proven to be the best search engine for me. i dont give a **** what they do with china, it doesnt affect me

[Puptentacle]

I've got a lot of reasons to dislike Google, but this isn't one of them.

China has to change China. Google has to go where it must to operate it's business. Don't like what Google is doing? Better stop drinking soda, eating at fast food restaurants, shopping for...well...nearly anything and go farm a hunk of land in Canada somewhere. A majority of our corporations deal with China, and a vast percentage of our consumer goods come from there.

Kudos to Google for holding out as long as possible.

Alternate search engines? http://alltheweb.com

[Zensunni]

It's funny to think that these huge companies are pawns, but they really are. They are forced, legally, to obey the stockholder and the only thing a stockholder wants is more money. That's why there's really no such thing as a moral company. Any moral deed is done just for show and their hunt for profit is literally inhuman. A lot of CEO's hate their jobs because they are forced to make these decisions.

It would be nice if companies had the legal power to make moral choices, though.

BTW, I tend to agree with everyone else. While there are a lot of dirty things being done, this isn't one of them. It's just a company compromising to give services to another nation.

[Derek Djons]

I don't blaim Google for respecting the law of countries. But it doesn't means I agree with the regime some countries have.

Google has the oppertunity to present it's product which in the future can be hopefully presented uncensored. Don't forget Google is still a company and they have to keep on pushing.

[johnkabuto]

thanks for all your thoughts! :)

...as many of you pointed out, google held out for a long time. so thats something postive in their favour.
....and as you say, they are a business, trying to do business.
point taken.

refering back to my question, are there any community driven search engines out there?

i looked at alltheweb.com, but it says its driven by yahoo.

cheers!
john

[BWF89]

You could always use www.a9.com. It's not community driven but you get the exact same serarch results you would in Google.

[xequence]

http://beta.previewseek.com/

It would be my hompage if it wasnt set to a site I wanted to sign up for when space opens up :) I posted about it a bit ago.

[endersshadow]

You could always use www.a9.com. It's not community driven but you get the exact same serarch results you would in Google.

Mainly because...it's powered by Google :)

[prizrak]

search engines require a lot of infrastructure so it's pretty hard to make a community driven search engine.

[carl13]

I don't see any reason to blame google. There is no reason to apply free speech ideals to a country that does not want it. Google has conformed to their govenment but so what. Life goes on and at least people have some google search abilities in China while retaining their own ideals.

[newbie2]

http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/21392/
:rolleyes: