[geeks] Google Irritation

[Phil Stracchino]

der Mouse wrote:
> Quite some time ago, I was looking for some music typesetting software
> called "smut".  I'm sure you all can imagine the false positives.  But
> I started trying to exclude them with searches like
> 
> 	smut music typesetting -sex -beaver
> 
> and I kept getting the false positives anyway, often even including in
> the sample few lines the very terms I specifically minused.  I wrote to
> them to report the bug, and what did they do?  Did they fix their
> searches?  No; it appears these were "sponsored links", and they
> believe it's a good idea to inflict such things on users who have
> specifically indicated they are not desired - presumably angry
> searchers bearing negative animus towards their advertisers are worth
> more to them than happy searchers with no awareness of those same
> advertisers.

There's a "Customize Google" extension for Firefox that helps a lot with
the ads and "sponsored links".  It also does other useful things like
anonymize Google cookies.



-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.