Google SafeSearch Changes Hit the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and More

Google SafeSearch Changes Hit the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and More

www.webpronews.com

Back in December, we told you that Google had made a change to its SafeSearch feature in the U.S. that made it impossible for users to entirely disable SafeSearch when searching for Images on the site.

Now, that modified SafeSearch is making its way to other countries.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Well... Boom Biddy Bye Bye Google !!

What in hell were they thinking?
Google has become the new Net Nanny!!
Now they dictate what we are allowed to see!!
What comes next?
I am so tired of these constant changes that are insulting the so called I-Net freedom!!
Not even speaking of privacy here as privacy in net is long long over already!!



www.webpronews.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Snaffers


Google has all sorts of problems with being a Net Nanny without safe search issues. They are being help liable in some countries and once that precedent is set they will have to restrict what goes on in their name - as if they are liable for the results of what they "publish".

The laws are being worked out.

Hmmm, Yes, I wanted to look up some adult oriented material to peruse on google a few days ago, turned off 'safe search' and I couldn't find what I wanted to find until I switched search engines.

Don't know if it's related, but I found that weird.

Hi search users.

STOP USING G00GLE !!

They track what you do, then you receive spams and scams !

DO USE the world's most PRIVATE search engine. . .
. . .does NOT collect or share ANY personal information!

us2.ixquick.com...

startpage.com...

Blue skies.

reply to post by C-JEAN


The search engine I switched to was duckduckgo

They don't gather info apparently.

Done, switched my search engine.

Thanks for the heads up

I don't know why people are surprised. Google needs to make money, just like Facebook and Apple etc. All our habits will come back to haunt us one day!

Personally, take advice above and use duckduckgo or ixquick. Bin Google for the nasty snooping company that it is.

Regards

I second duck duck go...... and of course the "Tor Browser Project".

duckduckgo.com...

reply to post by Snaffers


in switched
i dont need a net nanny or a net stalker

down with overly powerful google pandering,

xploder

Will try DDG see how I get on.

What about my gmail account. You gonna tell me to dump that too ?

Yep!!
Switched to Bing.whatever to have a look at all these fine pictures...
All those boobies and cruel gore pics and so on!!
But hey... wait a minute... how can this be????
Search result numbers are different!
At sites where i got 30K results of this or that (Google) i only got 5k or less now.
This is a continuing trend that goes for all engines that were mentioned in this thread.
Pretty normal me thinks.
Also pretty interesting cuz i never have done the math before!
And YEAH!! I do give a damn!!!!
I want to be sure that i can have and see all i can get when i search for "Kermit The Frog"
And Yes... i'm not to frightened to see what he is doing to Miss Piggy!!
I also can stand his oversize green one!!
So WTF????

Uhhhh... wait.
It is their engine?
Well that's true...
"Do what you want with your fine algorithms"
"I'll do what i want when i put up a search for another fine free engine"

reply to post by bigyin


How?
I will stay with my gmail.
To much is bound with it.
Heard about google phones... that must be a pain in the bum to have one right now

I like a bit of 'net-fear-mongering' just like anyone else.

But, google enables you to turn it off


It also provides instruction on how to disable it on your phone as well


Now, if their aim was to introduce a system that stopped you from seeing certain results (aka China) then it would be more productive for them to just not talk about it instead of trying to hide it in ''safe-search''. (which in itself is a bit of a flag)

Telling users about safesearch then using it for alterior motives seems counter productive.

I typed in Anti-Government and seemed to get the same results from other websites.

Facebook is 10x more an issue to personal safety/privacy, google well isnt.

Lets be honest, billions of people use google, for billions of websites. While im sure they do use it for advertising and mainstream things, i dont think a little red light is flickering in the CIA's office when you type in '' Bin Laden never existed ''

can you imagine the amount of false-positives?

In saying that, there probably is a mechanism to search and alert if you type in... '' how to make ricin '' or '' top 10 child porn sites ''

relax... google is no more a threat than your mobile phone!

Google is handy but I am fed up of their intrusiveness and data collection so I'll change to one of the mentioned alternatives. Thanks for the heads up.

Originally posted by C-JEAN
Hi search users.

STOP USING G00GLE !!

They track what you do, then you receive spams and scams !

DO USE the world's most PRIVATE search engine. . .
. . .does NOT collect or share ANY personal information!

us2.ixquick.com...

startpage.com...

Blue skies.

Yeah? blue skies really? Maybe if i searched for blue skies i'd get results. But if i search for "porn" at us2.ixquick.com I get "About 14,599,325 results " howveer it only shows 4 results and they are just advertisments for different cars.

If go to startpage.com which is powered by ixquick and type in the word "porn" no results come up. After taking off the family filter at startpage "Your search - porn - did not match any documents.".

However I took off the family filter at ixquick and it finally gave me the porn result i was looking for.

I am in Michigan US, and am unrestricted completely. I turn it off, and its still the same.

I'm from the U.S.A & noticed this change in Dec too. I hated it. well I had been using Bing for a long while and then that just gave me more reason to work on changing entirely to Bing. Bing is much better than Google. Custom wallpaper. Plus you get points just for searching and other simple tasks to buy gift cards or other things. Bing doesn't censor your results!

I normally don't turn off the moderately safe filter on Google, but on some occasions I do. I too noticed the change, but got the desired results through Yahoo. Ixquick is not the private search you think it is, someone in some post here gave some information on that a while ago, I should find that post. The internet is dying from a death by 1,000 cuts.

Originally posted by Agit8dChop

Now, if their aim was to introduce a system that stopped you from seeing certain results (aka China) then it would be more productive for them to just not talk about it instead of trying to hide it in ''safe-search''. (which in itself is a bit of a flag)

I'm pretty sure the whole point of the article is that Google is making it impossible to turn safesearch off completely, thus blocking certain things from ever showing up regardless of your settings. So yeah, it's not quite like China's system yet, but it's getting close.

EDIT: I strongly suggest you read the article.

But here’s the gist of it, in plain English: A search for ‘boobs” in the U.S. (and other English-speaking countries) now yields SFW results, as Google Image Search is now defaulted to “MODERATE” level. Users are not allowed to fully turn off SafeSearch. In order to see those NSFW results, users have to be more specific with their searches.

It's about as close as the west can legally get (for now) to mimicking China's system.


EDIT AGAIN: Okay, obviously it's Google, not any government, that is doing this, so maybe it's not that bad really. Just switch to another search engine while they're still liberated.