A week with tor

[Aabidano]

I saw an article a few weeks back about news & search providers "customizing the user experience"; basically only showing them the news & ads that are most likely to make them come back for more.

It's the norm, I really don't think you're seeing a "newsprint" type of view anywhere, where you get to see everything and pick what's of interest to you.

Later I did a search looking for a book from work and found it cheap from a corporate PC appearing to be in IL. Went looking for it from a home PC and it was only with some extra work - as I knew it existed cheaper - that I was able to find it. Otherwise I'd have been out an extra $6.

That annoyed to me the extent that I loaded a tor client on my home PC and nuked the old identifying marks. Google, FB and others don't play nice with tor as they aren't profiting (as much) from a non-trackable user. Bing works fine oddly enough.

News articles offered at news sites & search results change noticably, as they don't have a predefined profile to tuck you into. Drudge shifted farther right for instance. Fox changed a lot too, from looking at them previously they're very heavily "optimized" too. It's amazing the amount of crap they run if you don't have script blocker(s) running.

[Kwonryu DragonFist]

Nice

[Boogahz]

hmm...maybe related to this?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20110623/tc_zd/266099
Google Reportedly Facing FTC Antitrust Investigation Over Search

[Aabidano]

In part, this bit

is whether Google uses those services to keep users on its own Web sites, instead of sending them elsewhere on the Web.

is a "well, durr?". What do they think Google is there for, to be nice to people?

Google's become less than useful, like Yahoo before they spiraled down out of the search limelight. I've been using Bing.

It's pretty much a given that most of what you see as far as news & search results is modified for various reasons. Funny that searches from home for somehting like "network management protocols" will point to a Cisco page, a search from work won't show that.

Bing's more consistant from location to location, probably because they don't have the revenue stream built up yet.