Progressive Wednesday

How to Search Progressively, Part III

Editor’s note: A few weeks ago we started our four-part series on how to search the Internet more progressively. And yes, there are four better ways to search the Internet than just relying on Google, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo, or Ask.com. Click this sentence to read what we wrote the first week about the problems with searching the WWW, and ways you can chat with librarians online. Click this sentence to read Part II, where we discussed GoodSearch.com.

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Scroogle.org

Okay, there's oodles of controversy about Google and their cookies and plenty of their et cetera, and there's about a tenth of the controversy about Scroogle, a Google scraper, which essentially allows you to search using that mother of all search engines without the heebie-jeebies of cookies, search term records, or access logs. Plus, it functions sans ads.

To be honest, we don't really feel like getting into the controversy. The way we figure it, if you want to use Google and are concerned about the stuff that concerns people, but you still want the power of their engine, use the scraper.

Click this sentence for the Google scraper.

If you'd like to read more about Scroogle, we'd go here and here and here. To read the opposite side of the argument, go here.

If you want a Firefox toolbar for Scroogle, which we use when we're not using GoodSearch.com, you can go here or here or here. Take your pick (for the record, we use the Mycroft add-on).

Let’s say GoodSearch.com doesn’t help you find what you’re after, here's our argument in favor of Scroogle over Google:

1. If there's any potential problem with privacy, and there's a way to avoid it, why wouldn't you?
2. If you can avoid Google's off-topic ads when you do a search, why wouldn't you?

Google, like television, isn't a free service as some might have us believe: we pay for it with our time, and our mind, in the form of advertisements. So Scroogle until your heart's content.