Mozilla declines to pay tax on revenue from Google

[dearpeter]

I just had an interesting run of Web discoveries. At NOLUV4Google.com (a campaign to boycot Google on, or beginning on, February 14 in response to Google’s cooperating with the Chinese government) I followed a link to Scroogle.org, which operates a Google scraper. Their software searches Google for you, so that Google doesn’t get to record your IP address and search term history, which they do do according to Scroogle.

At Scroogle, I found this interesting bit of business news. It seems to be very fresh and hasn’t drawn media attention yet. Here’s the link: scroogle.org/mozilla.html

And here is the awesome Google scraper. It’s too bad it doesn’t do the cache links and stuff too, but I’m gonna set it as my homepage for a while.
scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

PS - I just heard from my girlfriend that Wikipedia is banned in China. I guess it’s true. tinyurl.com/dsvgf I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before.

[KenTaiwan98]

scroogle is pretty fast,too. I was quite surprised.

[dearpeter]

Questions: Why was Google the first engine to use “maximum” cookies that expire in 2038? Why generate unique cookie ID numbers at all? Why is it that the only data retention policy Google appears to have, is to collect everything that can be collected about the searcher, and store it indefinitely? How does this help Google improve its engine? How can anyone at Google guarantee the future of all this data? Wouldn’t Google better serve the public interest by retaining only the data it needs, and only for as long as needed, and then purge it on a regular schedule?

• one of many interesting scary Google facts found at: google-watch.org/krane.html