This kind of stuff is just terrible. :emo: no wonder so many people hate java.
Anyone still use Ask?! :o
Another article by the guy in the one sproingie posted talks about how they don’t separate ads from real searches, so the first page or so is just advertisements. I certainly hope not.
Pro-top, always install the latest java version from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java because those are the purest 
You should have a look at this:
No one ever did.
Of course people used Ask. Back when Google was a terrible search engine with no influence in the ad market it was one of the best for a while. Now that Google is a terrible search engine that is omnipresent in the ad market, “competitors” end up doing things almost as shady as what Google does.
Speaking of plugins and search engines. I remember updating Flash once and being bestowed with a Google toolbar despite unchecking the box for it.
Watch yourself…Google can find you… 
But seriously, it’s a really good search engine, what are you talking about…?
Search engines of all brands have gotten worse because they are allowed to do more nefarious things. It is an illusion that they are constantly improving their secret algorithms. The internet has just gotten bigger.
You can find what you’re looking for because someone already thought of it and human web crawlers already did most of the work of indexing and judging the quality of web pages. Google actually goes out of its way to show you worse results for the purpose of making their side projects and partners more profitable but the average user does not notice because a crowd sourced website like Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Youtube, or Yahoo Answers gives you a near word for word match when you type something in. If you take away those types of sites, the rest of Google’s results are just ads. (That is, they privilege sites that have Google ads or work with Google and their algorithm is easily gamed by retail companies, so that most of the links are garbage unless you can find a good blog post buried in there.)
Curious, I dont know anyone who ever used it, to my knowledge. I remember using Altavista predominantly, Fireball, Lycos and Yahoo.
I dont think I agree without any obvious evidence that you actually not find what you are looking for just because google MIGHT prioritize websites with google ads (which is the whole internet anyway)
Also google finds whatever crappy blog or website I create by using the right keywords. Always. You may say “well thats because the webhoster/bloghoster send a crawl request to google”, but then so what? It works really well - so all in all, the only bad thing about google is the fact that it is all-powerful, omnipresent, monopolistic and one single company should never have as much influence. That I would agree with, but technically its working well.
I used Yahoo search for some weeks, a year ago, exclusively. It’s actually the number one in japan and its pretty good - I would say by far the best search engine after google. Imo having almost identical results; just that google has so much more featues.
Another patch due 19th February!
I was about to post something about Google and search engines. That comment felt like a punch in the face.
We’re back on track!