Search Engine Censorship - Google and Others

[C. Flower]

Google has been complaining about the growing number of governments that are demanding censorship of search engine results.
There has been surprisingly little discussion of this -

Senior Policy Analyst with Google Dorothy Chou said that since 2002 the number of governments censoring the internet has increased from four to 42. Google's Transparency Report suggests that more than 25 countries have blocked access to the search engine altogether.
Ms Chou said that Google published its report to look at how government policies and laws are shaping access to the internet.
The US, Germany and Brazil top the list of countries asking Google to remove material.
Ms Chou said that "in Spain, we see a trend where they asked us to remove 270 different search results that related to political figures or public figures around the world."
She said it ''is concerning to us because it's an issue of political speech. When it comes to political speech it's coming from countries that we wouldn't normally expect."

It is increasingly difficult to go beyond the headlines of the internet.

Google itself operates forms of censorship, in that search engine results increasingly second-guess what it thinks the searcher wants. This is resulting at times in search results with the nuggets one is searching for obscured behind pages and pages of identikit "results" - spam quotations of wikipedia pages. In the last week I've started to abandon ship and go elsewhere to search.

Any recommendations?

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0618/goo...-requests.html

[Count Bobulescu]

I don’t see many alternatives to Google out there. Tell us where you have been searching?

Wolfram Alpha is good but it is a niche player.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Here’s a rare 25 minute interview with Larry Page that ran on Charlie Rose on Monday. He admits defeat in Google’s relationship with China.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12476

[Andrew49]

A decent alternative to Google ... Omits objectionable (mostly adult it sez!) material), but if you turn Safe Search Off then it doesn't block. Click the More menu for settings.

DuckDuckGo

[Seán Ryan]

Most internet based search engines, including Google, are mostly devices that throw spam at you, which is censorship in a way (as you've already pointed out Cactus).

Proof of this is very obvious in that one used to be able to do a proper boolean search and even though the likes of Google only ever searched a tiny portion of the web, it was very effective for two reasons: Firstly you got exactly what you were looking for minus the spam and secondly, folks tended to stay within and post in the tiny area these engines searched. This was back in the days when Altavista was the undisputed king (and not owned by Yahoo) and Google was but an infant.

These days (I'm getting old and jaded) I rarely use search engines. I mostly know what I'm looking for and where to get it. There was a time that I could configure an email search a do a deep trawl for what I needed, getting results could take anywhere from days to weeks! It basically involved doing a deep crawl on the web, indexing and cataloguing as the search progressed.

I'm afraid the technology has long since passed me by, so I can only make the following recommendation: Use your own search engine software and send it out on a crawl for what you need, stay away from online search engines. Check this page out, especially the open source stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Again, it's been years, close to a decade, since I've even dabbled in this stuff, so I'm only saying to check it out, not that it'll provide for all your search needs.

[Count Bobulescu]

FWIW Market share for the US. Varies by country.

This section requires expansion with: Information about national search engines like StatCounter, Yandex, Naver and their market share in respective countries.. (October 2011)
Search engine Market share in May 2011
Google 82.80% Yahoo! 6.42% Baidu 4.89% Bing 3.91% Yandex 1.7% Ask 0.52% AOL 0.3%

Google's worldwide market share peaked at 86.3% in April 2010.[10] Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines are more popular in the US than in Europe.
According to Hitwise, market share in the U.S. for October 2011 was Google 65.38%, Bing-powered (Bing and Yahoo!) 28.62%, and the remaining 66 search engines 6%. However, an Experian Hit wise report released in August 2011 gave the "success rate" of searches sampled in July. Over 80 percent of Yahoo! and Bing searches resulted in the users visiting a web site, while Google's rate was just under 68 percent.[11][12]
In the People's Republic of China, Baidu held a 61.6% market share for web search in July 2009.[13] In Russian Federation, Yandex holds around 60% of the market share as of April 2012.[14]

[Count Bobulescu]

2 Googles: 1 for Europe and 1 for everyone else

European regulators say Google may be abusing dominance of search industry.

There soon could be two Googles: One built for Europeans, with links to rival search engines and labels alerting users whenever Google is featuring its own products. And another version for everyone else, with none of those consumer-friendly features. The variations would result from what amounts to a split decision in two high-profile antitrust investigations into the California-based search giant, one by U.S. regulators, the other by Europeans.