Should we be using a different search engine?

Internet DNA Podcast

Google, Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Tor, Dog pile, Swiss Cows, I'm not making these up they are all search engines, and which one should we use? Not to forget social searching, video searching academic and medical searching and if you are Dan tank searching - not petrol or fish just to be clear. This week we have a look at whether we should be using a different search engine, what privacy has to play in this and how much Dan hates GDPR - again.

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

Hello, welcome to this week's episode, internet DNA. Happy. This week we're going to explore should I be using a different search engine as 75% of the world use Google and I would save in the UK. It's higher than that. I'm going to say then Google and I started to get interested in this because you know Google's the bad man of the moment. All the big five are obviously doing things with data that nobody likes. And Google's famous cause the guy said, you know, you wouldn't want to go over the creepy line and obviously probably don't want to go anywhere near the creepy. I'd never mind over it. I'm much more worried about Facebook than I am about Google in oddly many ways. It's the creepy line. Oh they were talking about the way that you use data and a guy said, Oh yeah, Google, we don't want to go over the creepy line. And I remember thinking, you don't want to go anywhere near the cubicle over the creepy, creepy. Yeah, he's not a line that you want to be using. Okay, so let's quickly go through these big five. I've said Google is the bad man of the moment. I can't say that Amazon's a path out of the moment because I run my life on Amazon. Apple not so bad because Apple, it's not shifting data. It's shifting products. Yeah, but still using their influence to do really awkward, stupid things. Like did you notice that the EU are saying, actually all mobiles have to use UVC? You can't miss having all these crazy dongles because your particular phone has to use a different charger for some unknown reason. I know they took your advice. Apple didn't. The EU did. Yeah. USB-C all the way. Apple said no, because it's not law yet, but if it goes to law then they will have to [inaudible]. Then we'll have our universal cable. Yeah. It's actually Nakia days sets up a company that only sells funky universal cables now and that could finally be a winning ticket. Yes. Although I'm sure there are millions of showing these companies already doing it, so I just want to go back to this. When I say the bad man, I'm slightly using it tongue in cheek because my husband has a bad man of the moment now. Oh one stage that was Tesco's and it got smarter to write all these terrible letters to Tesco saying how awful they were and now he loves Tesco's. Although I prefer Audi and another stage it was Microsoft that you moved to Apple Mac. It's uni leavers and a bad man. So that is the strange lines I use about a bad man really well and it's taken a large chunk of the market share he feels should just hype down on Apple as opposed to keep buying everybody up, which is a plaque comment. Going back to Google, the reason I started thinking about this was because there are other search engines out there, but the funny thing is we don't even talk about searching. We talk Googling. It's a bit like we don't use a pen, we use a bio or we don't use a vacuum in reuse or Hoover. So it makes it very difficult to use any other search engine. You're calling it Googling. Well, I think about that Google, which is, yes, I think it is dangerous that there's just effectively one search engine, but it would be a lot easier if the other search engines weren't so rubbish. Okay, let's take Bing now I can't bear being because I don't want the internal guts of Grotzia splattered all over my page every time. I'm trying to search for a word cause when I'm searching it's normally because I'm trying to use my brain. I want calm and clarity, but it is less intrusive in your data. Marginally does images really well. If you're worried about intrusive data, everyone goes to duck, duck, go where they respect your privacy and you don't have to worry about that sort of nonsense, but they all do some things quite well. But think about Google is, what about email? What about maps? What about YouTube? What I don't understand really though is I can go to dr. go, you search. It's fine. It doesn't look too bad. She'd be rude. It was just all black and red at me and I couldn't do that either. It was messing with my melons. But these places can still advertise to you if you search for car, they can give you car adverts. If you searched for girls' tights, they could give you girls types out of it. So why do you need so much information to offer someone a relevant advert? So Google don't need it to refer you the relevant adverts. They need it because they want to know everything that you do. So if you understand Google, they had a search engine and then they realized, Oh wait a minute. Sometimes people aren't on our search engine. People are on mobile, they're not on desktop saying, well, we'll build a mobile search now. Oh, sometimes they're not on there. Well, we will build a browser and then when they leave the search, we'll still know where they are. And then people got apps and they were like, Oh, we didn't know how well they're doing when they're on apps. So, Oh, we'll build a mobile operating system. And that hasn't hit the creepy line. Oh mean. That's why that line always makes me laugh. A, the collection of data is about as creepy as you can get and be the way they use it is about as creepy as you can get. And it's the whole idea that as long as you don't go over the creepy line, it's okay. It's like that's not the line that makes it okay. I added to the fact that in the beginning their strapline was do no evil. Yeah, but I don't think they're that company anymore. Are they? I mean not there is room for other search, but because my work is very Google-y to ad server is Google the tracking is Google, Google tag manager optimize all of their tools, all sit together in the data suite three 60 and you just realize that they give you all these free things because now they can track every website, every user, everywhere they go, let me stop you there. They give away all of these free things. Exactly. So they have to make their money somewhere. Now if you use being, they track you less, but they sold all of the things that gives you. I actually don't think Google is a bad man because I use a lot of free things. I use g-mail, I use maps. I don't like that personalization and I do find that very tricky to turn off. I'm very happy with Google to find where my location is and I'm very happy to use Google search but I don't like it giving me results that thinks that I might want, I want to have really random results to give me inspiration and ideas and you have to go to the right hand top gear icons and then you can troll through it all and turn off what you want. So there is a way to do it but obviously they make it difficult. It sounds like a very old search engine you want, I don't want it. Give me the results. It thinks it wants. I want it to give me generic results. You'd want it to give you, ah, okay. It's not that you want it to give you random results. You don't want to search for cucumbers and it tell you about obese. You want it to tell you what an average non identified person would get from a search for cucumbers? Exactly. Not a search for cucumbers slanted towards a web designer in Suffolk. Okay. Why? Because I know the grass is greener. It might be much better. Might be better if it knew, Oh, this is a web design and Suffolk, when they're searching for cucumber, Zen inspiration. I know actually looking for key cucumbers partake in, well, I think turning off privacy settings in Google search would help me. Yeah, I think you can do it as you go into incognito mode because when you do find a butcher near me, it might say, here's one in Birmingham. I think the idea that you need to get into is there are times when you want to be incognito and then there are times when actually it's really useful that they know where you are because you're trying to find something near you. If you want to be crazy, like my aunt about privacy, you can run double proxied VPN. You can run everything in incognito mode. You can use.dot go and you can be as paranoid as you like. It's a choice. And I take your point, which is, it's not obvious all the time where those choices are, but if it bothers you, you can do something about it. So like I always run a VPN on my mobile phone because one of the issues with mobile phones is that they generally like to connect to things like free wifi spots when you are having a coffee, those are the perfect places for hackers because basically Hill, you're on my network. You're transmitting things on encrypted across the network that I can snip. I mean if we're talking with, should we use other search engines? Yes. And then the answer is why? Because we need more competition in the market. For instance, I'll use opera when I'm doing what I call naked searches. I don't want Google's knowledge of me to interfere with results or use an opera and gut dot go. And then I know that I'm going to get results that are what you are telling me. I guess it's natural results as in not messed about. I mean, my problem with Google is nothing to do with the privacy. It's actually to do with the way they manipulate what you get to see in a different way, which is if Google don't like something, let's say they don't a presidential candidate, they can manipulate the results so that you see more positive results for the candidate they do like and less positive results and more negative results for the candidate they don't like. And we know that Facebook do this for example, and I bet Google do it as well. And then you get into a, it's not the fact that what you're searching for, you're not getting the results, but it's very subtly changing the results. And there's been some very interesting research done on this where they don't have to manipulate it much before people not only don't realize it's been manipulated, but thought to believe that it must be true and that you can make quite a big swing in people's opinions just by showing people certain stuff and not showing them other stuff, worrying that you have a single search engine because it gives them unlimited power in that sense. And how'd you get people to change to other search engines? I mean the reasons to change the cozier that plants trees. When you search quite like that, there's duck duck go. That doesn't take any of your personal information tore that. If you're really like your aunt to then you can go on that and no one can track your tool. But then that's where all the baddies live cause you can buy guns and dark net. So they're all about privacy. I love the fact that I came across the privacy Badger and he does and it reminded me of the coat batter in the film. It's all gone, Pete Tong, but as opposed to sniffing things out of making you do things, this privacy budget is sniffing things out and making sure that nobody knows that you're doing these things. I'm going to have a look at the privacy Badger. He sounds fantastic. Yeah, he's the electronic frontier foundation. Yeah. He's got quite a cheeky smile on it so who knows what he's getting out too. But it did lead me onto the fact that why am I thinking that I should change browser? Is it because I just think that I should get myself out of the norm. Well, I think there's two things here. People are worried about that privacy. I actually think that that's really easy to solve and it's got nothing to do with browsers or search engines. That's to do with your own personal, how you manage your data and people are becoming more and more aware that if it's giving to you for free, then you're the product, which I don't mind because I'm guessing it for free. Exactly, and there's a compromise there isn't there, which is they're giving me free stuff and they want stuff from me, but it's about making sure that that boundary is in the right place, but like a work life balance and sort of a free privacy balance. How much free stuff am I prepared to give away my data for? Or how much data am I willing to give away for free stuff and you can manage that. I think we've just had a conversation. We already, both of us manage our privacy. Our children don't seem to give a monkey whatsoever. And I think that the danger with Google or any of these companies that are basically the number one players in their space, if there's no competition, it gives them an opportunity to be the only voice in the room. And that I think is much more worrying. I don't think it's what drives people to change stuff cause I don't think most people care about it. But I think that's the much more worrying aspect of having only one search engine. Only one social media provider, only one place you can buy stuff gives too much power to those companies. Especially when they are opinion forming companies and they've all got to be slightly careful. I'm like Google has got to be careful that if you start to disbelieve its results you start to go wait a minute, all these results are manipulated in a way that I wouldn't expect that might push you to another browser. There's a balance. People feel safe using the Google browser because everybody uses Chrome. So everybody uses Chrome. Everybody searches on Google. So everybody searches on Google cause we're quite heard. Like what interests me as well, and this is where I, Google's quite good. It doesn't matter whether you're a good or a bad search. Google will give you the right results. Whereas some of the other search engines, because they haven't got the investment that they're not so easy to do that and you can mimic the other search and just by using Google verbatim, I really give me the results for what I'm saying, not just what you think I say, but I am a typical bad searcher. I will get results that are not nearly as deep as someone like you and I don't understand why I'm such a bad searcher. I will search for, do you think of the new Squarespace 7.1 I would type in square space, 7.1 review. I'm so keyword focused because I grew up with keywords that that's how I think almost when I'm searching, which is what are the keywords, so I'm trying to trigger when I'm doing this search and do you get a much, much better results? Says, wow, you just hit the nail on the head. It's thinking what the keywords are. And literally put in the keywords and yeah, and not adding fluff to Google that it can reinterpret as issue. Talking about a philosophical position here, it's starting to try and interpret you as in what are your intentions. I'm going to go through some of the other search engines that you could use and the interesting thing about these other search engines is that you can use bang searches, which means that if you put, for example on DuckDuckGo, if you put exclamation marks a, you'll only get results in Amazon or if you put exclamation Mike w you'll only get the same results or weakness which you think is quite clever. I've never done that before but sometimes I've wanted only results from a certain place. I mean I think a lot of people would find that if you actually look into Google, there are lots of switches on searches like at not, I don't want exclude searches that have that thing on, which is often really interesting that like if you are looking for tanks for example, cause I'm interested in tanks but I'm not interested in water tanks. I'm not interested in petrol tanks, fish tanks. I'm not interested in any of those. So then my search can be tanks, not fish, not water, not Petro, and then I'm not going to get a load of tanks that are irrelevant to my search. Now Google has learned that when I'm in the tags, I'm not looking for fish tanks, those sorts of things I'm looking for now. So the personalization is good. What you're saying is instead of maybe two different searches just to go on a course of how to use Google better and get ourselves even more bedded down into it. No, I'm saying you could do that with any search and do it with being if you like, if that's your idea of fun. It's used a lot more in the U S being than it is in the UK and I feel when I use it that the searches are just too US-centric. The thing that Google is very good at is understanding where you are and what your searches might be. But I still use duck duck go quite a lot. So we've talked about duck duck go, which is the main other one privacy out there. There's a few good ones as well. Obviously if you were in China, it's Bay do. If you were in Russia it's Janek, but I quite liked Swiss cow. Now this is a family friendly censored, so the whole search is completely censored. They said is like, I've got no results for you sir. Did they you sentences from anything that they may possibly think may possibly not be good? I quite like Blacko knows bam. They go through the results by hand. Human I should say, and so it's quality, not quantity and I said a cozier which plant trees. Then you could just search in Wiki. You could just search on a social media engine. You could just search and YouTube, which they are starting to grow for younger people as the way to search. Google and tech searches are almost going out of date as its users get older. YouTube is a part of Google, so they now intuited and so obviously one of the key things these days is your video channel. I just think if you remember how Google became Google, which was all the previous search engines, Yahoo and Netscape used to manipulate the results to list them by who had paid the most, because they come from a print world where if you wanted to be in a directory, you play for a premium listing or an enhanced listing to stand out more than the others. And that's kind of when search engines first started. That's how they kind of worked. And if you're a member, you could buy keywords and the ads used to go or use keyword, whatever it was in Yahoo, and that keyword would be directly linked to a search result. And what Google decided was actually know what we're going to do is provide the best results and then let people buy ad in and around those searches. So if I'm searching for a plumber, then I'm going to put ads in and around it for plumbing. So that's how they got the control of the market, which was by not manipulating the results. My worry now is that they've gone back to [inaudible] the results, but in a much more subtle way. That's a really good point of how it all started. The thing I found is Google just is good. I like the fact that it will give me all the articles and blogs and things as well. Whereas some of them don't give you that depth, which cuts out quite enough information. Yeah. Any way to get people to use a different search engine in reality is to create a search engine that is better than Google and that's going to be awkward. Yes. So in answer to my question, should I be using a different search engine? I don't think there are any credible alternatives out there at the moment for general searching. I think if you want to be searching privacy wise, and you could be doing that for a whole number of reasons, doesn't have, will have to be terribly criminal. It might be to do with your financial status. You don't want Google knowing that you're searching for loans because you know that they're going to sell that on to other people in one way or another. It will affect your credit rates. So for those sort of things you might decide, actually I'm going to use duck duck go because it's not going to feed out into the rest of the world in some horrible programmatic way. But unless there's a better search engine available for what you search and if you're looking for Lego bricks, the better search engine is brick link. There are search engines, there are better for very specific types of things. There are a lot of scientific and medical ones as well. And there's another one that I didn't say and that was dog pile. I thought that was quite interesting cause that searches three search engines and brings you results from three of them. Yeah, well there you go. And what I'm trying to say is it's not the only search engine you should have as a part of your search engine armory. [inaudible] what this touches on as well is that if you're using Chrome then it's irrelevant whether you're using Google or not using Google. So it's about using different browsers as well. Well this is talk. What means is yes, do not [inaudible] in Firefox. Yes. Do them in incognito. Yes. Do them when I'm signed out of Google and perhaps try some other search engines so that if I've got a few open, I'm bringing together the best results from a few different places and then I can pick and choose. That's the best way to look at it. There's a whole heap in and around privacy that if that's what's bothering you, I don't think it's a search engine to your problem. I think you need to look at other areas of how your data is shared. I would really like to be able to go somewhere and it's all the places that have your information and then I click a button and just go remove, move, move, move, move. Because the amount of things that I sign up to or say yes to cookies, I have no idea where my information is or have any idea on how to find and terminate those accounts, which that does worry me a bit. And now you're getting into why GDPR was so utterly stupid and what GDPR should have been was there is a central place where you can go and erase your data from anybody who collects it. So you can sign in, hi, I'm Abby. These are all the people that I've got your data and just say, I don't want them to have it. Don't want them to have it. I don't want them to have this bit of my data. Google, you can have my browsing history, Amazon, you can have my order purchase, but I don't want you to know my marital status because don't really care. It affect what I'm buying. A second brilliant business idea in one podcast, but what happened with GDPR is that we've got a basically a button, say yes to everything. Oh, you're just being trained to say, yes, I have my data, but is there a place that you can go and find out who has your data? No, but one place I do go with my children and show them is a place called, have I been pulling? Basically you put in your email address and it'll tell you whether it's been cracked and all the passwords that are being made available on that email address. So you have to go to have I been pawned and you just put in an email address. I'm going to do that now as I turn off my privacy settings. Google. Hey, we gotta go cause I've got to do that for I guess only the rest of my life. Okay, speak soon. Bye.

—

Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.