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If this Holy Man is correct, I have a confession to make as Nanmadol closes in on Taiwan. I support same-sex marriage and have contributed to this supernatural disaster. I have visited New York before but in my defense, I haven’t spent much time there. Probably others are more to blame than me for that.

DuckDuckGo: bang searching and SSL

New to DuckDuckGo, I’m discovering some of its impressive features. One I find useful is the bang searching feature. Using a bang (!) in one’s search, you can access other search services by forwarding your search to them. For example, if one wants to use Google services like Search, Image Search, or Youtube, one can use !g, !i, and !yt, respectively. I also noticed that !g takes you to Google’s Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) engine. It’s good to see Google and DDG offering options for users to help protect themselves against packet analyzers. Such tools should be standard in a free society.

how to fix the United States’ financial woes

Sell freedom of speech rights to China. In exchange for assets, allow China to censor American citizens as they see fit.

DuckDuckGo, a nail in my Google Search coffin

I started hearing about DuckDuckGo a few months ago but until today, I never made time to see what it’s about. I followed this explanation of bubbling which details search engines returning biased results, driven by user behavior. The variety of different results connected to political issues for example, is disturbing.

I thought I’d do a search for “free software” as I’ve always been a bit annoyed by the often pathetic results that rank high. The first image below was returned by Google. The first few results assume “free” to mean gratis and immediately you’re directed to mostly proprietary software offerings. The second image is from DuckDuckGo. Click them to enlarge.

I was already sold at that point, but this may have been the nail in my Google Search coffin. It’s still early, but I’ve made DDG the default engine on my browser search and address bars. I’m not sure I’m going back to Google search.