Indymedia Help with Search
Despite the questionable practises of Google many still use it. Indymedia UK after finding it's own native search used up too much of the servers resources, switched to it for search box for the site, but then switched to using the Google scraper scroogle to protect users from privacy breaching Google cookie, where one trusts google with bulk record of your searchs.
But some users prefer the look and layout of actual google page over scroogle, or other features. A good option is for users to browse Google using Firefox web browser with the CustomizeGoogle extension. As well as anonymizing the Google cookie UID one can remove ads.
Also there are ways to set every browser to either block the Google cookie or discard after session, and you may wish to do this with other sites where cookie not need for functionality.
Disable your cookies for specific site such as Google.
Explorer 6.0 Tools - Internet Options - Privacy - Edit (near the bottom) - type in google.com - Block - OK - OK
Firefox 1.0 Tools - Options - Privacy - Stored cookies - highlight your google.com cookie - check Don't allow... box at bottom - Remove cookie - OK - OK
Opera 7.5* Tools - Cookies - highlight your google.com cookie - Delete - New - type in google.com - check Apply... - uncheck 3 Accept... - OK - Close
Netscape 7.1 Tools - Cookie Manager - Manage Stored Cookies - highlight your google.com cookie - check Don't allow... box at bottom - Remove cookie - Close
repeat for google.co.uk
Obviously this deals with only one aspect of Google and the like.
A commerical search engine that does not use cookies is http://clusty.com/ which comes up with pretty similar ordering for most searchs as Google, it uses Microsoft's webcrawler results as there are only really 3 web crawlers Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN that search deep and often over others.
Activista is a search engine for selected activist sites which comes up with different ordering from main search engines.
IMC UK, 14.03.2006 16:13
