Google Alert

[ExSoldier]

It's become a part of American verbal and computer lexicon: "DO A GOOGLE!" Well guess what? GOOGLE has a dark side. They are mining personal data and keeping control of it, ostensibly for marketing purposes but the owners are notoriously ANTI-GUN and give heavily to that "cause."

Still, it's a great search engine. Well you don't have to give it up...exactly. Instead of GOOGLE try SCROOGLE! Scroogle Scraper uses the same engine BUT they'll SCRAPE your personal info before completing the search. So check it out, and if you like it make it your permanent engine and PASS THE WORD!

http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html

[DefensiveCarry.com]

[packinnova]

It's become a part of American verbal and computer lexicon: "DO A GOOGLE!" Well guess what? GOOGLE has a dark side. They are mining personal data and keeping control of it, ostensibly for marketing purposes but the owners are notoriously ANTI-GUN and give heavily to that "cause."

Still, it's a great search engine. Well you don't have to give it up...exactly. Instead of GOOGLE try SCROOGLE! Scroogle Scraper uses the same engine BUT they'll SCRAPE your personal info before completing the search. So check it out, and if you like it make it your permanent engine and PASS THE WORD!

http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html

I've been worried about google for quite some time. It really peaked my interest again a few weeks back with the announcement that they were trying to partner with Salesforce. Good grief. Can you imagine the potential disasters from Googles' mining of salesforce data?

[simon]

AD-Aware is a free data-miner ,anti-spyware cleaner...seems to get rid of a bunch of stuff you did not know was there...http://www.lavasoft.de/news/product/info/....

[sisco]

Google saves every search you make. If you have a G-Mail account, they save every email. Forever.
Or so I've been told.

[rstickle]

I almost want to say that if this worries you, get off the internet right now! All those type of sites do that. I think Yahoo is even worst, and Ebay and Amazon also mine your information.

One thing that helps some is turning off cookies, or search their website and see if there is an "opt out", I think they are required to have one, but it won't be easy to find.

[TN_Mike]

This is exactly the reason that I do not use Google. They are very anti-gun.

I use Dogpile and love it. It does a better job than Google ever has anyway.

[Holdcard]

I use Firefox and the add on NoScript.

A lot of sites use the free stats offered by Google, I'm forever blocking the Google stats script. I'm not sure how much info they can grab that way but I'd rather give up as little as possible.

I'm also running into more and more sites that use marketing and scripts that are not part of the actual site. It's really getting out of hand.

Holdcard

[KMBRTAC45]

I do not use Google either, I've used Altavista for about 3 years.

[ExSoldier]

A handy list I use:
http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html
http://www.ask.com/
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.metacrawler.com/
http://clusty.com/
http://www.webcrawler.com/
http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://www.altavista.com/
http://vivisimo.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBHoaxIndex.html
http://www.truthorfiction.com/
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

This includes a link to the Hurricane Center (useful for anybody on the coast) and a link to both HOAXBUSTERS and TRUTH OR FICTION. I don't use SNOPES.

[darkvibe]

What has google done that makes them anti gun? No, i'm not being sarcastic... honest question. I've never read anything that makes me think that. I'd like to know.

[ExSoldier]

What has google done that makes them anti gun? No, i'm not being sarcastic... honest question. I've never read anything that makes me think that. I'd like to know.

The owners donate heavily to antigun groups. Also they often set up their search engine to direct folks to antigun sites first and they rarely give preferential treatment to progun sites. But the biggie has to be hundred thousand dollar donations to the million mom march and the Brady Bunch among others.

[sgtD]

Dogpile is a good search engine. I use it a lot.