Free Republic

Earlier this year I wrote what, at the time, I thought was a tongue in cheek column titled, "Obama The Antichrist? Hmm." The commentary was in response to what I believed was an irrationally positive response to the Obama presidential run. There seemed to be a mystical quality surrounding Obama's campaign. People were fainting, journalists were saying their legs were tingling while listening to Obama's speeches, it seemed very strange to me. In fact, it seemed so strange, I tried to make light of the situation with my commentary. However, since I wrote the piece, I have learned some Obama...

While on a recent vacation, a reader sent me this message: If this makes sense, write an article on why it's stupid to use dictionaries in hardcore religion debates (I remember Dictionary.com was used in a "faith" argument I was in). I see people refute concepts of omnipotence and faith by using dictionaries. I'm sick of it, and I would like it if you would write about this issue. I received this message while at a public library in North Carolina, and somewhat ironically, saw as I exited a cover story for Atlantic Monthly that fit right in with this...

Yahoo search to 'battle spyware' SearchScan is a free tool embedded into search Yahoo is introducing new technology to its search engine which will warn users if they are about to click on a website that hosts viruses, spyware and spam. SearchScan uses security firm McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology to warn users about "potentially risky sites". The service, which is switched on by default, produces an on-screen alert. "Our goal is to protect users by allowing them to make a more informed decision about the sites they visit," said Yahoo's Priyank Garg. Rival firm Google introduced similar technology in 2006....

Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said. The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in comparison to what could be achieved on the "web of the future", which he said would allow any piece of information — such as a photo or a bank statement — to be linked to any other. Mr Berners-Lee said that in the same...

Barack Obama was the most sought-after Democratic presidential candidate in 2007, while Fred Thompson finished first among the Republican contenders -- at least, in terms of whose name was entered most often in the Ask.com search engine. No significance was attached to Ask.com's summary, released Wednesday. Obama finished first overall, with fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton second. Thompson came in third, well ahead of the other GOP contenders. Here's the complete list: 1. Barack Obama 2. Hillary Clinton 3. Fred Thompson 4. John Edwards 5. Mitt Romney 6. John McCain 7. Ron Paul 8. Rudy Giuliani 9. Mike Huckabee 10. Dennis...

Yahoo Inc.'s Search Assist program exited beta Tuesday and became available to the public, the company said. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) said the program integrates audio, video and photos directly into the search results and goes beyond basic search "suggestions" to provide real-time query suggestions as well as related topics and concepts. Also appearing are Shortcuts, which Yahoo said contain the most useful information found on the Web and contributed by other online users. The features are available now in the U.S., and Yahoo said they will launched in the near future in the United Kingdom.

Google's privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users. In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy." None of the 22 other surveyed companies - a group that included Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and AOL - sunk to that level, according to Privacy International. While a number of other Internet companies have...

Search engine giant Google has slammed Sweden's proposed wiretapping legislation as illiberal and incompatible with Western democracy. Speaking on a visit to Sweden on Tuesday, the company's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, warned that Google would rule out making any major investments in Sweden should the controversial bill become law. "We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden's borders if the proposal goes through," Fleischer told Internet World. The proposal, which would allow the National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets Radioanstalt -...

Web wars ensnarl ferries Wikipedia article altered repeatedly to criticize Lake Express By LARRY SANDLER lsandler@journalsentinel.com Posted: Aug. 27, 2006 As if high waves and a busted gear weren't enough, now someone is firing Wiki-pedoes at the Lake Express high-speed ferry. Advertisement Since March, a Wikipedia article about the Milwaukee-based ferry has been altered repeatedly to emphasize the vessel's cancellations, delays, mechanical problems and passengers' seasickness - and to link to a Web site that compared the Lake Express unfavorably to the competing S.S. Badger. Meanwhile, the Badger has the opposite issue: Wikipedia recently flagged a glowing article about the...

For all of the hand-wringing that has occurred, and is occurring regarding the use of surveillance schemes by the NSA to uncover terrorists communications, the loss of personal privacy has been a recurring theme in the press, as well as the left blogsphere. More than anything, I think, it boils down to a distrust of the Republican administration. Not unlike the right's distrust of the previous Democrat administration. Remember the FBI files? Unless you conduct all of your transactions in cash, use shielded and encrypted internet connections, and stay away from telephones, you have no privacy. I'm not even sure...

Fellow FReepers, I am looking for search engines other than Google, Yahoo, and MSM. Your suggestions are appreciated. Thank you, TJI

Web Site Files Complaint Against Google Mar 17 6:36 PM US/Eastern By MICHAEL LIEDTKE AP Business Writer SAN FRANCISCO Google Inc.'s mysterious methods for ranking Web sites came under attack Friday in a lawsuit accusing the online search engine leader of ruining scores of Internet businesses that have been wrongfully banished from its index. The civil complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose by KinderStart.com, seeks to be certified as a class action representing the owners of all Web sites blacklisted by Google's Internet-leading search engine since January 2001. KinderStart, a Norwalk-based Web site devoted to information about...

Google has now begun censoring web results in the USA. Previously they have admitted censoring sites in China. Like the Chinese censorship the sites being cut from the search results are anti-communist. The following letter is from the web site "The Peoples Cube Worldwide" which is a parody-of-Marxism site. Google Purges The People's Cube Worldwide By Red Square 3/10/2006, 10:13 pm Open letter #2 to Google from the People's Cube (posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006 Dear comrades at Google: At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from...

Open letter #2 to Google from the People's Cube (posted on Google.com Help Center at 8:30pm on March 10, 2006 "Out of sight, out of mind" - translated into Russian and then back into English, the idiom turns into "invisible lunatics." That also describes The People's Cube's search results in Google. Dear comrades at Google:At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results. MSN , Yahoo and other search engines still have it - but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database. One can still find links...

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp.'s top saleswoman for Web advertising, Joanne Bradford, spent her first few years on the job secretly wondering if the software giant was serious about cashing in on the Internet. When she joined Microsoft in 2001, the company lacked a search engine of its own and had no clear Web advertising strategy. Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. made multibillion-dollar businesses of search-related advertising while Microsoft waited. "I wasn't sure the first couple of years that we were here to stay," said Bradford, Microsoft's corporate vice president for global sales and marketing. "I thank Yahoo and Google...

Internet giant Google Inc. infringed copyright rules by posting thumbnail-size photos from other websites on its search results pages, a US judge said in a ruling issued. US District Judge Howard Matz's ruling, handed down in Los Angeles, stems from a lawsuit filed in 2004 by the pornography firm Perfect 10 Inc., which accused Google of breaching on its copyrights. The type of search with which Perfect 10 took issue is Google's "Image Search" function, which returns a page with tiny images -- known as thumbnails -- that fit the searcher's query. The image search function also allows searchers to...

While trying to find a nativity image for my last post before Christmas, I did an search for "baby jesus" on Google. This is the result. Notice that the top search result is for a sex toy that mocks Jesus. Other results on this search results page have more link traffic. A quick review of page's code shows no HTML meta information that should give it a favorable ranking. The page itself has a raw relevance ranking (search word divided by total words) of less than five percent. The only conclusion I can draw is that this page position ranking...

Well Google does it again.Look up Freeper on Google and your first hit is Urban DictionaryHere is what you find:You know what. I won't post that tripe here so please help to rectify this.Freep away FReepers.

IMAGINE WHAT would have happened if during the 1980s an American communications company had provided information that allowed the South African government to track down and imprison an anti-apartheid activist. That is pretty much the moral equivalent of what Yahoo has just done in China in the case of journalist Shi Tao. And the California-based Web giant deserves the same kind of public opprobrium that would have fallen on any Western firm that dared to publicly cooperate with the enforcers of apartheid. Shi, the victim of Yahoo's shameful behavior, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for "illegally sending state...

Webmasters can spend most of their waking hours doing everything they can to raise their Google PageRank. It is common knowledge that PageRank, which is largely based upon the number and quality of backlinks a webpage has, is an important factor in how well a particular webpage ranks within the Google search results. Since webmasters spend so much of their time worrying about PageRank, an important question is: how important is PageRank, really?

Just for grins I did an Altavista Search for +"I'm voting for Kerry", there were 1,850 hits. I did a search for +"I'm voting for Bush" and got 21,000. Don't know what it means but I expected closer numbers.

Proposal 1: For improved searching, use the new Google-based site Soople. I'm not in any way involved with them, but they have the ability to put in keywords and search by domain (you can do it in Google, but they just make it easier.) It's at www.soople.com. Far too often I've heard people complain that the search functions of FR are limited or weak. Well, this isn't. Someone posted an article and I was able to go to Soople and get the exact article, all three postings of it. It makes life MUCH easier. Proposal 2: Become familiar with the...

Some jokers who don't like the Democratic presidential candidate are trying to make his campaign Web site, johnkerry.com, the first answer to a search of the word "waffles" on Google, the No. 1 Internet search engine. They've nearly succeeded on the No. 2 search engine, Yahoo. By Sunday, eight days after the prank began, johnkerry.com was listed second among 703,000 results of a Yahoo search of the word "waffles." At the No. 3 search engine, MSN Search, johnkerry.com was also the second Web page result of a search Sunday for "waffles." On Google, johnkerry.com was not in the top 1,000...

March 14, 2004 In Searching We TrustBy DAVID HOCHMAN EN SILVERMAN is what you might call a Google obsessive. A producer and a former talent agent best known for bringing "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" to American television, Mr. Silverman Googles people he is lunching with. He Googles for breaking news, restaurant reviews and obscure song lyrics. He Googles prospective reality-show contestants to make sure they don't have naked pictures floating around the Web. And, like every self-respecting Hollywood player, he Googles himself. Competitively."Guys all over town are on the phone saying, `I bet I can get more Google...

If you're a traditionalist, you probably don't. "In the shtetl," where Eastern European Jews' language of preference developed, "there weren't such things," says Miriam Hoffman, professor of Yiddish and Yiddish literature at Columbia University. No computers, no Internet, no on-line features that perused databases.

Fellow Freepers, I posted such an item about a year or so ago and it is time to do it again. Let's post links to good research websites here as a reference source. It would be nice if such a link were put on Free Republic by Jim and categorized by state: Here goes: Click here for Refdesk.Click here for Murdoch's Demographics links (Texas A&M website)Click here for Texas Property Search website.Click here for Tennessee Property Search website.Click here for General Research Website.Click here for excellent multilingual dictionary website.Absolutely superb weather links website.Hillsboro County Sheriff's Office website (lookup criminal records)....

Is Google too powerful? What will Google do with Blogger? Is it time to set up Ofsearch, a regulator of search engines asks technology consultant Bill ThompsonEveryone's favourite search engine now owns the world's most popular blogging tool. With its purchase of Pyra Labs, Google now runs Blogger and with it the weblogs of hundreds of thousands of opinionated net users. The story of the buyout was, appropriately enough, broken on a weblog by journalist Dan Gillmor, shortly followed by an 'official' announcement on his personal blog from Prya Labs co-founder Evan Williams. Then the blogs and technology news...

<p>Web-search company LookSmart has ambitious plans to do for Web searching what SETI@Home did for the hunt for E.T.</p> <p>Last week, LookSmart released a screensaver that harnesses the spare computing power of volunteers whose machines are indexing the Web.</p> <p>Like SETI@Home, LookSmart's Grub screensaver runs in the background or when the computer is idle. But instead of searching for signs of intelligent aliens, Grub crawls the Net to build an index for Web searches.</p>

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O , the world's No. 1 software maker, on Wednesday said it is taking aim at privately held Google Inc., the Web-search company that's so popular its name is used as a verb. "We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing," Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said. Visse said the company was making some significant investments in developing a better search...

The dramatic collapse in the value of internet companies was highlighted once more by Overture's $140m acquisition of Alta Vista, one of the pioneers of web search and once one of the world's most coveted online companies. Alta Vista's struggling parent CMGI, the Massachusetts-based technology group, has sold one of its crown jewels for just a fraction of the $2.3bn it paid to Compaq in 1999, when it took an 83 per cent stake in Alta Vista. Overture, which calls itself "the world's leader in Pay-For-Performance search", allows advertisers to bid for well-placed spots among web search results on sites...

The Google “Gag” Order by Jared Jackson Google.com retaliates against the Christian Courier’s “The Progressively Aggressive ‘Gay’ Movement” article. No better example of aggressive behavior could be cited. Several months ago, we started a teaching campaign using the Google Ad words mechanism. Last week, all of our ads were removed because someone at Google became incensed with our opposition to homosexual conduct. Google Adwords is an advertising program promoted by the Google search engine enterprise (www.google.com). The Google Adwords program allows a client to target content on its web site directly to a select market. It accomplishes this by allowing...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --  Online search engines are built to find information in seconds. But most leading sites appear to be taking their time meeting a federal request for more transparency on how money influences their display of search results.</p>