Google is obviously the dominant search engine; but its position can be abused.

It seems to censor websites in all areas of the world, not just China. We all know Youtube is under heavy censorship now, but that seems to be extending to its search engine to better police the internet.

For instance, do a search for "Blogy Descarga Directa" on Yahoo and Google.

On Yahoo, you will find the website no problem. It also comes up when you search "blogy" or other simple key terms.

On Google, it's non-existent after it was removed about a week ago. Even a direct search for the web address yields nothing. Fair enough, this site links to series that shouldn't be downloaded but I don't think it's a search engines place to censor sites.

It seems I may well be using a few different search engines as well as Google from now on - just to make sure I'm getting a fuller set of results!
[Reply]

I've also noticed that lately the results from Google are not always returning what I wanted and have instead been doing another search with Yahoo and finding the sites instantly in the results.

I haven't heard if Google are censoring, or filtering out sites based on content, but it does seem to be getting harder to actually find what you need in the results quickly.

In the past Google's results have never been consistent anyway because of how the browser works. With site's that don't constantly update their content falling down the results listings quickly, compared to sites that constantly update to keep at the top. Also constantly working on a site using search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques.

I will have a look into this as I do some SEO work for clients and so I do actually need to know if Google are now starting to censor site content, as this could mean a lot to some companies if it effects their site access from search engine results.
[Reply]

coze pointed out that other dubious sites still remain intact and the one I mentioned above might have been compromised - virus checkers are complaining about it. I have scripts disabled in Firefox with noscript so didn't notice.

Usually though, Google just places a warning about the site doing possible harm to your computer, rather than remove the site.

The fact that other sites remain perhaps means this is just a rare occurrence and I've been too quick to judge.
[Reply]

I'm at work, and i could not access
the "Blogy Descarga Directa"

"Descarga Directa" what is it? It's a Portuguese or Brazian sentence
means "direct download"

in yahoo i found a blog with that name, and other sites, but not in google,


i also find anoying the versions of google to other languages.

there is the google.pt (nice to search in Portuguese)
but if i go to google.com it detects i'm in Portugal and it shows me the same as .pt

i'm no able to have the same as UK, only if change my local settings. I wounder if the search engine works the same (english words) or is just the language that changes....
[Reply]