Little things that add up really. Three or so years ago I started finding that Google increasingly couldn't come up with the goods for various articles I knew were somewhere out there, then came this: Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles.

Google got a lot of credibility for saving those archives back in 2001, but it seems they have lost interest. Indeed right from the start they made little or no attempt to get rid of spammers on that network, to the point where many folks took to filtering out messages coming from the Google Groups interface.

A couple of years ago I also had problems trying to stop Google indexing bits of my website, using their webmaster interface and was greeted with "Request denied, we can still see it" or "Request denied, you will probably want to put this back anyway" (which I interpreted as "We don't believe you").

And I don't know how they were doing it, but Google was trying to search the small website I have on my laptop - it's for personal use and not intended for the outside world.

A few links from other folks:
I don’t like Google anymore
Is Chrome soon the only browser supported by Google tools?
I Don’t Want to Be Counted, I Just Want Links, and a useful extension for Safari users there
Google Was Caught Scraping Data From A Kenyan Startup And Telling Lies About The Startup To Its Customers - grovelling apologies from Google about that one, but we haven't forgotten that they collected wireless data "by mistake".

Oh, another thing. I signed up for Google+ a few months ago and was finding that Google wouldn't let me search Google Groups unless I was logged into them.

Sorry if this got a bit technical, but there we go

I am currently trying out Bing.com and Ask.com and my favourite so far is DuckDuckGo, because of their Privacy policy.

There's also the intriguingly named Dogpile search engine, but I haven't really given that a whirl.

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October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
-Mark Twain-

Interesting.
What is good to now that even though Google pretty much dominates the market at present, at least we still do have other alternatives. Safety in numbers and all that.