Turning the tables on google
 

So the other day I was researching Vespa scooters online cuz my buddy just got an early '60s unit; after that everywhere I went online- here, homepage, everywhere- got completely dominated with Vespa ads.

OK I like Vespas but I did my searches and now I'm done with them. I don't want to see them in every ad. :mad:

What to do?

First, what sort of ad wouldn't I mind being bombarded with?







A few google searches for Victoria's Secret = problem solved! :thumbup:

Clever, clever! They are insidious, aren't they?

I have a love / hate relationship with Google. They help pay the bills, but I am slowly coming to the conclusion that they aren't living up to their goal of "not being evil."

Use 2 different browsers - works with every search website.

One with which you only search on Google / Bing / ... , then drag a result-link to another browser altogether to open it there.

For images, I have to click the image first as it links to Google, not the originating website.
Then on the resulting Google page, drag the link "Website for this image" to your clean browser.

As a sidenote, since naming my li'l up! GasDwarf, half the images when you search for "gasdwarf" (a relatively small, gaseous planet) link to ecomodder :rolleyes:

With the name Gasdwarf in the sidebar on a few 1000 messages, the Google bots apparently think ecomodder is a prime source of info on these :o

Someone name their car "Justin Beiber!" :D

For the record, I named my car hoping to bring bacon afficionados to the site. It cannot hurt, right? :D

It's possible to opt out of personalised Google ads.

But I just block as many ads as I can with the hosts file.

I have a HOSTS file from A detailed guide for using the MVPS HOSTS file and I have a difficult time using anyone else's computer, although I think that I have other utilities that also reduce the ads that I see.

I love the giant ones that cover the page that you just open and do not go away easily, or anything with sound.

I forgot this site had ads lol

Everyone once in a while when I show a friend something [on their computer] I see them and remember.

Clear your cookies every time you turn your computer off. You can set your computer to do this automatically.

People turn off computers? :D

Bacon makes everything better.

Except for the porkers and Ms Piggie--the OTHER white meat!

And you're asking this on an ecomodding site? Why on Earth wouldn't you turn off your computer (or anything else) when you're not using it?

As for the cookie cleaning idea, the problem is distinguishing useful cookies from the ad ones.

Honestly, most things that I do, I do on the computer, and I usually have Classical music playing at all times. I do believe that I have an actual radio somewhere, but I would rather not use a radio in addition to a computer, although I probably should put the computer to sleep and turn on the radio.

I do not think that actually has an "off" setting...

When I am not using my computer, I put it to sleep, or if it will be a while, in hibernate mode.

I think that I irritate my roommates by turning off unused lights. There is actually an increasing amount of tape over the porch light switch, so I loosened the bulb.

I also have box fans running at all times, but I tend to sweat even with them on, and I usually need to sleep on top of my bedding, which does not improve my sleep at all.

My wife's answer for not turning off her laptop: "...keeping it plugged in and ON keeps the battery topped up so it's always fully charged when I need to go somewhere with it." Ouch!

So she also parks her car at the gas station with the nozzle in the filling hole?
;)

My wife gets 23 mpg in our little I10, she leaves all the lights on everywhere, etc. Yet she's glad for me when I come home and say '3.4' as she knows that means I've equalized my best ever FE coming home from work...
(spent 5 minutes in a traffic jam and ended up getting that! It could have been so much better... Geez. Never mind)

Including e.g. sleep? I also must admit that I simply can't understand why people would use computers to play music.

For the same reason everyone doesn't commute in a Rolls Royce: sometimes a product that's lower in quality is way ahead on cost, convenience and utility.

The best ____ is the ____ you actually use.

He did say (in the same post you quoted):

I don't see the problem... a computer that is in sleep mode uses very little; a hibernated computer uses nothing. It's not "OFF" but in hibernate, it's using the same amount of power as "OFF".

Not to mention that the total energy consumption of turning computers off/on repeatedly vs. leaving them on (and sleeping or hibernating) is not at all as cut and dried as one might think. Computers are busy little buggers when they're booting.

Bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips
 

Everything is better with bacon!! Have a sandwich, throw some bacon on it, have thanksgiving turkey, throw some bacon on it, eat some ice-cream, throw some bacon on it. OK, I haven't done the ice-cream, but you get the idea...

P.S. "Epic meal time" loves bacon :)

Not all that busy, for all that long - at least if you use Linux and have bothered to optimize the boot at all.

You also may have other stuff that's not the computer sucking power as long as it's on. In my case, there's a router and cable modem. By the "warm to the touch" test, the modem seems to draw about as much power as the idle notebook.

When I was in Afghanistan (not the best time for my brain), I thought that since beef jerky was low-fat, bacon jerky would be perfect!

I found a few places that sold it and after one humorous negative review of the first place I bought from the second, but it was not just bacon jerky, they were flavored, and it turned out that the jerky was actually covered in the flavoring. I felt overwhelmed.

They had different packages and I went for the sampler that excluded "muddy pigs" or something--chocolate-covered bacon.

I imagine that people have put bacon in ice cream, just like I once put cheese on a pancake.

Once...

Back in Germany, I was always frustrated that the chow hall cooked green beans with bacon. I was eating vegetables for a reason!

Then there was the vegetarian Soldier that I knew...

Eventually I realized that lean bacon is called "ham" unless you are Canadian.

A "default" install of Win7 will boot faster than "default" installation of Linux and run faster from then on given 4GB (in 32bit mode). Even with "additional" load such as anti-virus and malware protection.

You can get improved results with messing about with "swapiness" in Linux to make it work better once booted. Google it for instructions on how to tweak this (irony :D)

If your Win 7 machine is slow to start click on the start menu, type "msconfig" in the search box and select msconfig.exe from the menu. Click on the "startup" tab and work through stuff that is running when you start your PC.

Same also applies to XP too.

Windows 8 - are you mad ?

I'm glad you said it! I was thinking it, but was afraid of:

I often have too many webpages and other research projects open to turn off my laptop. I should probably figure out a good way to save the webpages in a "special" bookmarks folder or something, that way when I turn the laptop back on, I can go through the bookmarks as necessary and delete them when I'm done. I also like to use the power from my class as that is solar. :)

I like how this thread went *at least for a moment* from Victoria's Secret to bacon. :D

Google ads vs ecomodders; spam, spam, spam, spam, bacon and spam...? ;)

I was going to email this question to my brothers, but they feel no obligation to Reply so I'll put it here. It was apparent in the early days of Internet that the FBI wanted a back door for corruption. In the last week, the plots and counter-plots in SigInt have spilled over into the popular press. Some companies, Yahoo and Twitter for example, resist more but they are all compromised.

I'm looking at two search engines—Duckduckgo and Startpage. Their 'About' pages are here:

https://duckduckgo.com/about

https://us2.startpage.com/eng/what-m...e-special.html

While Startpage states —they do use the Google API

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
In case anyone doesn't get why this is important, here's this:

Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere

--------

So, does anyone know of a search engine better than these? Or have a preference between them?

I think with noscript+cookie manager+adblock (or similar) is a good combo. You still have a unique combo for an advertiser to use, but the infrastructure to track the fraction of a percent of users that selectively allow scripts/ads/cookies isn't worth it for advertisers.

I don't think that's likely as a general rule. I have a i5 at work running 7 and it takes as long as my atom based netbook running archlinux.

Also take a look at the TOR project: https://www.torproject.org/

Don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but I use Mozilla Firefox exclusively as my browser, and use DckDuckGo and Start Page for searches and OpenStreetMap for maps. I do also use google and facebook but I regularly delete flash cookies and have Firefox set to delete ordinary cookies every time I close it.

NachtRitter -- I was going to stick to touting baby steps; but, yeah, that's a big one.

Also Bitcoin and Litecoin.

I'm also watching Bitmessage. It's based on Satoshi Yakamoto's algorithm; but it's only up to v0.32. It needs more external auditing.

California98Civic -- I have Opera locked down like you can Firefox. My worst sin is Youtube. It know me better than I know myself—instead of the number of views, one link said 'Recommended for you'.

I just say 'know' to Flash, it's too much of an attack vector. There's still too much to see without it.

Facebook? I laughed when everyone bolted from Myspace. Wouldn't touch it.

Freebeard, I am glad that I am not the only Opera user on here. As I mentioned in another thread, one of my friends saw it, asked what it was, and immediately said "Use Firefox! It's better!"

I think I disagree about this. I would prefer a search engine that is customizable, so that if I for instance search for the term "heavy metal", I would not have to wade through endless pages of garbage about movies and "music" without seeing a single reference to uranium, vanadium, or even lead.

DuckDuckGo was selected as the "preferred" search engine in Linux Mint earlier this year (and maybe earlier than that and since too, I only played with it earlier this year).

It was selected because they would share ad revenue with the Mint team.

But to do this, i.e. to add up all the 0.001 cents into a single cheque to write every month they would have to store something about the user who clicked - at the very least what operating system they run.

This is where the grey area starts - what is unique about the user and what is not ?

The OS info is a start - e.g. if it includes version info and a security vuln appears then you have your targets identified, at least the unpatched ones.

But a blanket "we don't store anything" is just woo.

jamesqf -- There's nothing stopping you from using multiple search engines; but the search term is customizable, for example "+uranium +vanadium +lead -Felder".

Arragonis -- That's the type of criticism I'm looking for.

But why should I have to do that work, when a search engine could "learn" to do it for me? And of course this example presupposes that I already know enough about heavy metals to a) name some of them; and b) know terms to use to exclude crap.

This seems true at all levels. Take for instance Google News. It's supposed to be somewhat customizable, so I could in theory get news that isn't stuffed with sports & activities of "celebrities"; tech news that isn't 90% games, and so on. But the customization doesn't work, which means I waste time, and often miss really interesting things, because I can't define a working personalized crap filter.

PS: I do use 3 search engines. An older version of Opera, because it has the best user interface, a new version of Opera, because some pages don't render in the old version, and Firefox because some things (like Google Docs) don't work correctly in either Opera.

One of the recent versions of Opera had the added feature of crashing when I clicked on the icon. I reinstalled it several times, without effect, and finally installed an old version.

Now I have 32-bit and 64-bit. I would use the latter if I could transfer my stuff.

On Windows, Opera all day everyday. On macintosh, I have to go with Chrome. But also on macintosh, more than three tabs and regardless of processor size, their are twitches and freezes and endless pinwheels.

I still like google to search, but I think it's sad the limited character input size.