Property of Google

This blog is the property of Google. Is it wrong for me to undermine Google whilst using their property to do so? No. Google is a soft, warm and trendy company, with fire-fighter poles for liaising, and igloos for thought sharing. They won’t mind at all. They’ll laugh and call me a cad, a bounder or a loveable tyrant. They love me. They list me as number one for so many search terms that it’s laughable. It’s not as though I haven’t criticised them before. I love it. I love the way that they promote their own blogs. They make the random thoughts of a collection of chatterboxes - from all over the world - number one.

Google is the Bertie Wooster of our times. In the finest scam of all, Bertie has stolen Jeeves’ brain. I know. For the last few months I’ve doggedly been asking Jeeves questions, but he finds it hard to keep up. ‘Ask Jeeves’ was born in 1996 and predates Google for sure, but older never means better. In 1998, Bertie fell out of a prostitute’s womb, stole Jeeves’ dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopaedias, and ran off into the night laughing. Bertie called himself Google and knew that it would be fun from the start.

Most remarkably, Bertie worked out how to present the knowledge in those books with such efficiency that he became Top Dog in the search engine turf wars. Poor Jeeves survives off crumbs in the gutters. Jeeves may have forgotten his last name, but bless him and his fine suits, he is firmly sticking to the ancient British principles of privacy. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and if he wants to run around in it naked, it’s nobody’s business but his own. ‘Ask’ has a privacy eraser to delete your search history from their servers. Good old Jeeves. Okay, he’s from California and not the Great Island of Britain, but with a name like Jeeves, there is no doubting his philosophical origins.

Unfortunately, if it’s not on the first page of Ask, I’m on Google before I’ve blinked. Fuck the privacy, I want those facts now.

Today, I made a discovery. It could solve all of my paranoid, delusional 'don't monitor me' issues and maintain my thirst for knowledge: Scroogle. What does Scroogle do? Well, it allows you to search Google whilst protecting your privacy. If that's not enough, it also drops the ads. It’s ace. By the way, I don’t really care about the privacy. I don’t look at kiddie porn. It’s just the principle of it all.

How to make Scroogle part of your internet toolbar:

In Internet Explorer 7:
Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-uk/default.mspx
In the Yellow box, type this in Step 3: http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=TEST
And this in Step 4: Scroogle.
Click on the little arrow next to your Internet Explorer search box, choose ‘Change Search Defaults’.
Highlight Scroogle and press Set Default. Press OK.
Now use this search box to find out 'where I saw the mouse' or something else less important.

"We are moving to a Google that knows more about you." CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking to financial analysts, February 9, 2005. That Google now exists.

Hate Internet Explorer? Well you could always just go to Scroogle directly. On the main page they have instructions for installing Scoogle in Opera. Opera allows you to access websites with out of date SSL certificates too. I needed to know that once.

Use Firefox? Well here are the: Scroogle Plugins

Please note, Scroogle is not pretty. It’s what’s inside that counts.

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