Tuesday 23 June 2009

Opening

So I guess in a time where everyone seems to have their own blog, it's probably about time I started one too.
Some people will likely disagree with that, but at least this way I have one knocking around I can use later on.

Blogs are useful little things. The used to be a way to bore people with your life, now they're more, and you can find a blog for just about anything if you have patience to search for them, for which Google is naturally good. I have an issue with them on that though - grab your copy of IE (if you dare!) Firefox, Konqueror, Opera - any browser will do. Turn off ad blocking, and any addons that affect the Google search. Search for something. Anything.
Look at the results carefully, and there's two glaring problems: Ads which are just wrong, and Spam Results.
Ads which are wrong - look on the right, if you searched for something like a piece of software, it'll likely show "Download ___ Free, no cost" and other such. Shouldn't Google be doing something about this? Hmm... it's one small area though. Look through the results, even the 'sponsored' ones sometimes, and there's more. The Spam Results.
Also included in which are the results which aren't really results, they're just another search engine muscling in trying to pretend to be a result, leading you to another search. Now, I can understand that search engines want your business over a different one getting it, but that almost seems like stealing people's business.

So far, I've found one solution for this, CustomizeGoogle extenstion for Firefox. A lot of other browsers offer ad-blocking, and frame or text blocking to hide things like this, but that extension is the only one I will use, because it does the job without even reminding you it's there.
It doesn't just affect Google search results either, but you can read more details about it and try it here at it's addon page.

That isn't, by far, the only extension I use, or the only reason I use Firefox over other browsers, but I've talked long enough. If people want more on this, I'll do another post on it.

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