Free Republic

Aren’t you glad Shodan is in the hands of good guys like John Matherly?Ask John Matherly if he’s a hacker, and he’ll struggle for a moment with the term. On one hand, he’s a hacker, in the sense that he’s an innovative programmer, arms deep in the information-security industry. On the other, he’s hypersensitive to how his baby—a project called Shodan—is portrayed in the press. In the past year, it’s surged in notoriety and not just in technology publications, such as Ars Technica and Wired. Shodan’s been the subject of multiple Washington Post investigative features, profiled on Dutch television and...

"When people don't see stuff on Google, they think no one can find it. That's not true." That's according to John Matherly, creator of Shodan, the scariest search engine on the Internet. Unlike Google, which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. (Shodan's site was slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.) Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and...

Pioneering search engine AltaVista is due to be shut down on 8 July. AltaVista was one of the first search engines to index significant amounts of web content, and proved hugely popular before Google debuted. … AltaVista was launched in 1995 when search engines generally did a poor job of logging information on the web’s rapidly growing population of sites. The search engine was popular because it had indexed about 20 million webpages, far more than any rival at the time. It developed its own “crawler” technology that did the job of finding web pages and logging what was on...

While helping our colleague Dave Bean as he worked to get his essay on Google and the NSA ready for publication, I found myself wondering if any of this latest news on the government’s forcing their nose into everybody-in-the-world’s business would have any lasting effect. Sadly, I figured not–if there was any change, it’d only be temporary. I’ve spent too many years on this planet to expect too much in the way of permanent change for the better. DuckDuckGo’s main page. Click to enlarge.Sadly, I’m of the generation that learned of the advent of global warming way back in the...

Stop using popular search engines and try others. Make them pay attention to your privacy concerns.

...federal government may be secretly accessing Americans’ online videos, emails, photos and search histories – with the help of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, PalTalk, AOL and Skype – but “the world’s most private search engine” is staunchly defending its users’ privacy and civil liberties" Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/this-company-doesnt-share-your-online-info/#kQJBDsMrSW583e2P.99

Enlarge Image A risky mix? Data mining of search engine terms can reveal clues to what drug combinations cause side effects. Credit: ParentingPatch/Creative Commons Analyzing queries made to Google, Bing, and other search engines can reveal the potentially dangerous consequences of mixing prescriptions before they are known to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to a new study. Such data mining could even expose medical risks that slip through clinical trials undetected. Pharmaceuticals often have side effects that go unnoticed until they're already available to the public. This is especially true of side effects that emerge when two...

Launched in 2008, Bleacher Report meteorically rose to become one of the nation's most popular websites, and one of the three most-visited sports sites. Its dramatic success came via valuing site growth and pageviews over any semblance of journalistic "quality" or even readability.The site quickly earned a rep for expertly employing the Google search engine to inundate the web with horrible, lowest-common-denominator crap.The site's deft use of search engine optimization (SEO) — the tweaking of content and coding to increase online visibility — propelled its unpaid, amateur writers' fare to the top of Google's search engine results, placing it on...

Why was George Zimmerman not arrested the night of the shooting? Why weren’t the 911 tapes initially released? Why did Mr. Zimmerman have a firearm in his possession while acting in the role of a neighborhood watch member? If Zimmerman was told not to continue to follow Trayvon, can that be considered in this investigation? Why was George Zimmerman labeled as “squeaky clean” when in fact he has a prior arrest history? The Sanford Police Department has conducted a complete and fair investigation of this incident.

There is just a week to go until Google controversially changes its privacy policy to allow it to gather, store and use personal information about its users. But there is one way to stymie the web giant's attempts to build a permanent profile of you that could include personal information including age, gender, locality and even sexuality. From March 1, you won't be able to opt out of the new policy, which has been criticised by privacy campaigners who have filed a complaint to U.S. regulators. But before that date you can delete your browsing history and, which will limit...

The time was that yahoo answered most basic searches sort of well. And then along came google, and for a while they looked like the gold standard. But lately the SEO games and massive quantity of stuff online has made simple queries painful. Anyone have a better set of search engines for the DIY or how to crowd?

For Google, it's personal. The Internet search giant is no longer going to roll out the same search results to everyone. Starting Tuesday, Google will pluck only the results most relevant to you --and not just from billions of Web pages but from the personal stuff that you and your connections privately share. The idea, says Google Fellow Amit Singhal, is that Google now searches your world, not just the Web, and serves up results that combine both for your eyes only. "Your world was missing from search until now," he said. "We are bringing your world into search."

Congressional staffers control the content on Members’ websites. They control Members’ Facebook and Twitter accounts. They can even manage Internet search results by buying ads and using search engine optimization techniques. But Hill staffers can’t control what people wonder about their bosses. The latest trend in helpful Web search technologies is quietly causing headaches for Members of Congress and those who manage their reputations. Search engines such as Google now offer suggested search terms that appear in a drop-down menu as users begin typing. Those search terms, formulated partly based on what other users are searching, often serve up all...

In a bombshell accusation, the government watchdog group Judicial Watch announced today that the Obama administration used taxpayer money to help orchestrate an internet search engine manipulation campaign specifically promoting Obamacare. Judicial Watch obtained 2,328 pages of records pursuant to a March 23, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The FOIA information included correspondence between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Ogilvy Group, the public relations fire hired by the White House to push Obamacare on the American people. Judicial Watch listed the following as major points of interest from the FOIA request (all bullets quoted):...

OK when I type in a term to search on in Yahoo/Google/Dog Pile doesn't matter what one I use and hit search/enter I get a TOTALLY different result. It is getting pretty irritating.

I started friday night having problems with all search engines...

For the first time, as of today, private citizen and putative GOP Presidential Candiate Sarah Palin has eclipsed the sitting President of the United States, Barack Obama, in google hits. Entering the names "Sarah Palin" and "Barack Obama" generates the following results: "Sarah Palin": 78,100,000 LINK"Barack Obama": 65,700,000 LINKThis is a stunning development that is unprecedented. Google hits are indicative of public interest in a person and what they have to say. No one should command more public attention that a sitting President of the United States. Yet a private citizen, who holds no office and has not even DECLARED,...

From Scroogle (enter a search term, hit enter, and this is the message you'll see....) We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002. This interface was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every...

Today, Google gets over 9.5 billion searches per month in the United States. Although search engines like Microsoft’s Bing compete for a share of the market, they present no real threat to Google’s dominance. In reality, it is not other search engines that should have Google concerned. The search juggernaut faces a much greater threat from a Cupertino, California company that has not even developed its own search engine: Apple.Less than two decades ago, before Google was a verb, the only central location to access information was the library. Reading the newspaper or calling Moviefone was the only way to...

No, itÂ’s not SpidermanÂ’s latest web slinging tool but something thatÂ’s more real world. Like the World Wide Web.The Invisible Web refers to the part of the WWW thatÂ’s not indexed by the search engines. Most of us think that that search powerhouses like Google and Bing are like the Great OracleÂ…they see everything. Unfortunately, they canÂ’t because they arenÂ’t divine at all; they are just web spiders who index pages by following one hyperlink after the other.But there are some places where a spider cannot enter. Take library databases which need a password for access. Or even pages that...