November 2014

What is happening as we "google" something is essentially that we are telling a huge corporation what is on our mind right now and we trust that this corporation then knows to lead us to exactly what we are looking for. As people become more and more aware that a corporation knowing every one of us so well is not a good thing, the concept of the meta search engine is seeing a renaissance. For the past year, I have almost exclusively been using alternative search engines. What started out as a self-experiment soon became such routine I almost forgot to write this blog post for my "Own your data" series. Maybe not quite able to compete with the smartest of full-text indexing algorithms, their power resides in the combination of several engine's results and in the obfuscation of the user's identity [...]