Most Ethical Search Engine

With Y!, G, and M$ and the china problem...

[vincevincevince]

Which search engine do you think is the most ethical or morally correct?

I pledge to use the most ethical search engine for at least a month!

[mooret]

Your going down the wrong path if you want ethics. The major search engines are about making money and nothing else. If your in business and want to make money you leave your ethics behind.

[vincevincevince]

I believe there is a place for ethics in every part of life. Anyway, I'm talking about pledging my personal private search engine use to the most ethical search engine for at least a month, not making a major business decision :)

[ByronM]

You can make money and be ethical..

[Dijkgraaf]

But you can make even more money if you bend your ethics a bit, as long as you don't get caught.

[ByronM]

to each there own.. not everything is about money. If google didn't go public and made 1 1/100th what it does now by being ethical it would be just as popular and everyone working there would be plenty wealthy.

not sure what drives people to need to move from 100 million dollar salaries to billion dollar salaries.

[briggidere]

i'd let my ethics get close to bursting before i would think, hold on what am i doing now.
I don't see myself as a bad person, just one of the ones who likes money and doesn't really care about how they get it, as long as it is not actually hurting someone. i don't deal drugs to kids or anything like that, but i will take the lolly from them in their pram. ;-) (not really...)

as far as from millions to billions goes, the rich get richer and that is just a fact of life nowadays. if i was in their shoes i'd have done exactly the same.

open floodgates...

[Kahless]

When I think ethics, the first thing I think of is search engines that are unethical by weighting search results. For example Google News weights results based on corporate media.

[vincevincevince]

The interesting thing about ethics is that people are divided in how important it is to have it themselves, but very few feel that ethics are not important in those they work and trade with.

Let me illustrate this with a rather crude example:

Scenario 1:

If one has been paid a large deposit on some work then one is faced with an ethical (or perhaps a moral) question. Whether one should just pocket the money and not do the work, or whether one should do the work. If there are lots more prospective clients, this client lives thousands of miles away, and one is not too keen on the work anyway - it's perhaps not certain that one will decide to keep the other end of the bargain. One's own ethics here may be disposable, or at best bought at a price.

Scenario 2:

If one seeks to employ a person and the arrangement involves paying a deposit up-front, one demands a high standard of ethical decision making by that person. Even a small chance that the person would disappear with the deposit is totally unacceptable.

[oddsod]

It's difficult to judge SEs on ethics. And, ethics vary from culture to culture.

Is hand editing of politically sensitive issues ethical or non-ethical? What about using personal data without permission as long as it's to improve results for the user?

Based on my personal view of what's ethical I'd go with MSN... less invasive/intrusive* than Google, less obfuscation* of commercial results than Yahoo. But then there must be lots of smaller SEs that are a lot more "ethical".

*Want to flame me? Do it by sticky please

[ByronM]

The problem with society today is no ethics...

Enron, MCI, Karl Rove, too many congressman to list. It's all money, no humanity - ethics out the door.

Money can't buy you everything.

[LifeinAsia]

not sure what drives people to need to move from 100 million dollar salaries to billion dollar salaries.

900 million dollars of toys, mistresses, and ex-wives.

[simon2263]

Interesting that in two pages of replies, no-one has recommended an ethical search engine!

Perhaps we should start our own not-for-profit, not-for-censorhsip, not-for-snooping search engine collective!

[moishe]

if your going to base your decision on ads, money and such AND want to use an engine that has actually got a decent sized index, Gigablast certainly would have to be in consideration...

[ByronM]

use mozdex, gigablast or others

[Dave_A]

Hi I run a search engine and I am stunned when most people think we are without ethics?
We allow websites to be found don't we?
Just because we don't inform everyone about how our algorythms work or how they score websites, does that make us lose our ethics?
Why shouldn't we earn money? we drive visitors to your websites for you and then you guys earn money from them, so what is wrong with that?

Without search engines most of the visitors you get wouldn't be able to find you all..
Do you want us to drive all visitors directly to one website, possibly the one that pays us the most?
Heck that isn't such a bad idea? Bugger let's re route all searches to the one website.. Click it's done..

Grin..

[vincevincevince]

Dave_A:

I am stunned when most people think we are without ethics

It's not normal business operations about which people are critical. It's things like mixing paid results with natural results, or censoring results for certain countries.

[ByronM]

You can also make money without being proprietary. The nothing to hide attitude is attractive especially when your making money off derrivitive works or indexing other peoples content.

Without that fairness your basically saying to the webmasters/publishers you will do whatever you want (And make money from it) without respecting them.

Ethics though in this discussion is also geared toward protecting privacy, standing up for fredom of speech and not censoring your indexes.

[Dave_A]

I agree with your ideas, I have in the past been asked to alter the way results are displayed, one company even asked me to edit the database to increase the chances of their website being found.
They did say that they would be willing to make a donation towards my summer home!
Well I thought about it for a while and then I did edit the database to alter the way they were displayed within results.
I deleted them!
Even that seems to be bad, I always wanted to let everyone have a fair go at being found and just deleting them didn't seem fair.
My search engine doesn't carry any business adverts, sponsored links or results.
What you see is what you get!
If a website doesn't score well then it's not for me to give details about how my search engine comes to the results it displays.
I suppose that I will always treat people in the same way that I would like to be treated.
I understand that everyone wishes to be at the top of the results but someone has to draw a line.
One thing I did decide on was that no porn would be indexed, i don't feel the need to talk about "What I consider to be porn?"
We could talk for weeks about what is or isn't pornography. Basically if someone may find it offensive then I will err to the side of caution and not index it.
I am not a censor? It is my server and I have a choice about what it displays or finds.
It is like my house? I decide who does and doesn't come in!

[truezeta]

Don't know how I would judge if a search engine is ethical or not. Maybe the option to censor searches so I won't be bombarded with certain type of sites. I guess it would depend on what a person's "ethics" are. It would vary for each individual.

Glad to know that whatever ethics some people have would be thrown out the window for money.

The LOVE of money is the root of all kinds of evil. No wonder why this world is going to the pits.