How embarrassing! I knew it, but forgot it. But luckily was reminded yesterday that Yahoo doesn’t offer search any more.
In mid-2009 Yahoo gave up on search and contracted with Bing to supply teh service. I was reminded when I saw the confession at the bottom of a Yahoo search page. Further investigation reminded me that Microsoft now runs Yahoo search. Yahoo keeps 88% of the revenue on ads that appear on Yahoo sites, but Microsoft gets the data on computer users’ online search and buying habits. Microsoft lost its morality long ago so there’s no doubt that the data acquisition is as insidious as Google’s.
So immediately the Yahoo search box was removed from our site and replaced with a private search engine IxQuick, and also replaced the default search engine in my browsers. Fortunately there’s and add-on for Firefox and Seamonkey to do that.
You could also put a scraper on your browser like scroogle, which removes personal info from searches.
Users have been persuaded that if the search engine knows your history it will deliver better results, but that is unlikely. If you are searching for something teh terms you use and teh popularity of sites in aggregate are more important that you personal preferences, especially for more unusual searches. For example, if you usually browse entertainment sites, but then do a search on construction technology, you want results for construction technology, not results that are biaised by entertainment preferences. Google, Bing and others want your search history to sell you stuff which you are not even looking for (since that was not the purpose of your search).
Don’t get scroogled, just search. Go to another engine like ixquick.com, search.com, dogpile.com, webcrawler.com, duckduckgo.com or put a scraper on your browser.
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