Google Operating System’s Ionut Alex (who does not work for Google) gets all ‘Matt Cutts’ on some Google myths which have been making their way around the web for years.
Here’s a snippet:
Vote for this post : 0Google is spyware.
“Spyware is software that reports on your activities or gathers personal information about you and sends it via the Internet to third parties without your knowledge or consent.”
If you use software like Google Toolbar or Google Desktop, some features may send personal information to Google, but most of them are either turned off by default or require your explicit approval. Google also uses cookies to save your preferences and records queries, clicks, usage patterns to deliver better results. The problem is not that they record it, it’s what they do with it. And Google tries to protect it from third parties (like US Government).
or Buzz it at Yahoo :
Comments
7 responses so far ↓
Tien on Dec 28, 2006 at 3:06 pm
9 of the 10 things here should be completely obvious to the most noob of noobs, and one of them is just straight up incorrect, and that is #1:
“Cached Links
Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the “Cached” link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.
When the cached page is displayed, it will have a header at the top which serves as a reminder that this is not necessarily the most recent version of the page. Terms that match your query are highlighted on the cached version to make it easier for you to see why your page is relevant.”
Albert on Dec 29, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Google is the most trusted company and they never sell any personal information.They are gathering information just for market research.They never violate laws.
dumbfounder on Dec 31, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Albert, it isn’t about what they sell, it is about what they know that you don’t know they know. And about what other entities (the government) might be able to access them under certain circumstances. If you have the Google toolbar that shows PageRank for pages you surf to, then Google knows the url of EVERY web page you visit. It has to send this info back to Google in order to retrieve the PageRank. A lot of people simply don’t realize this, whether it is opt-in or opt-out.
cgpandey on Jan 2, 2007 at 6:07 am
Sorry, but i do think that google is spyware. It crawled in our college website and took out our pics with our phone numbers and address. and now what more than that when we search our college name in image search it shows are pics at top with complete detail. what do you wanna say about this. is it not spaaming?
dwizzle on Jan 2, 2007 at 12:26 pm
The article wasn’t that good, and it makes no sense for someone to link here and not to the source. If you didn’t know most of those yes, you probably are as my friend said a n00blet
Skitzzo on Jan 2, 2007 at 2:14 pm
http://digg.com/tech_news/Top_10_Google_Myths
cgpandey on Jan 18, 2007 at 2:34 am
google is just like spyware, i can prove it read this article :-http://how-to-answers.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-to-get-better-search-results.html after reading this article you can conclude that yes we can find everything in google including those things which people don’t wanna show us.
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