How to Google without Google

By Davey Winder
Thursday, 28 August 2008 14:59

Home IT

Ever thought it would be nice to be able to search Google without getting bogged down by all those results from Google owned sites such as Blogger, YouTube and increasingly Knol? The good news is that you can now Google without Google...

Google might be the search engine everyone has heard of, and everyone turns to in those 'WTF is that?' moments online. But it has slowly become a pain in the ass if you want to find something fast.

What do I mean by this? What I mean is that the results that matter, the ones that you really want, are often not the ones that rise to the top of the hits list.

That honour is all too often reserved for Google owned sites such as Blogger and YouTube. Actually, you can add that other Google owned site, Knol, into the mix of late as well.

Some have speculated that this kind of search engine and content provider duality could prove problematical for Google.

Although Google itself maintains that all sites are treated equally and the ones that rise to the top do so on merit, that is not the way it is likely to be perceived by the general public and the content providing competition alike.

But what can you do about it?

Well you could use the configuration options built into Google to filter out all references to Google owned properties from your results. You could, but it would take rather a long time if you wanted to do a thorough job.

Alternatively you could use Google minus Google.

This was created in response to that New York Times article mentioned above, and as the name suggests what it does is present the user with a standard Google search but with all the Google owned properties already filtered out from the results.

Who created Google minus Google, and how many Google owned domains does it filter out? Find out on page 2...

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