Google Censorship - Time to Try Yahoo Search
Like a lot of people that use Firefox I tend to just use the default search box in the top right of Firefox to search the web. The default search engine is set to Google, and I have not really had any problems with that, until recently.
While I am not a huge fan or reader of John Chow, I do occasionally like to pop in on his site to see what he is being paid to write about. Of course doing a search in Google for John Chow is useless because Google has declared that John Chow’s blog should no longer be in the index.
Why does any of this matter? Well, I don’t like the idea of Google censoring search results. How many other searches are they hand editing and censoring because they don’t like how the webmaster monetizes their website? How long before they censor sites that question them, like Aaron Wall’s SEOBook blog?
As a user I have choices. I can choose to use Google or not use Google, so for the next couple of weeks I have switched my default search engine in Firefox to Yahoo Search. In the little searching I have already done today, I can say that I have found the information I was looking for, including John Chow’s blog.
What do others think of the way Google treats their search results? Do people find Yahoo’s search results relevant for the searches you perform?
Comments
Boris
Why not just make <a href="http://www.zuula.com">Zuula</a> your default Firefox search engine, and then shuffle around the tabs at Zuula so Yahoo is your default web and image search provider, and (perhaps) Technorati is your default blog search provider? (Zuula already has Yahoo as the default news search provider.)
Dan Anton
Great post, and I'm starting to feel the same way as you, although I haven't taken any steps to use other search engines...not sure why that is. I love Google but at the same time I think hand editing or censoring serps like you stated is a very serious red flag; I'm surprised this isn't bigger news on even T.V....people probably wouldn't believe Google hand filters results. It's disappointing
Rhett
TV can't talk about censorship or important things because Britney just went crazy, again. I have also recently thought about leaving this Google train behind.
LGR
I like a lot of Google products, but to be honest I have not been happy with their search for a while now. Sad when it was Google search that made them important.