Google minus Google

Written by IT News on 9:49 AM

After the wave of concern by several media companies that Google was favouring its own services and Web sites in search results, as the new service Knol, Timo Palo Heimo, a Finnish digital planner for an advertising agency, had an interesting idea - the people who Option to use Google search, without results from Google's own sites. He went on, and create a service that does this and called it Google minus Google.

A while back, Google has a service called Knol, aimed at contributing to an encyclopedia written by experts (as opposed to Wikipedia, which can be edited by anybody). Not long after it was launched, people began to notice that in the search various names similar goods or services on Google, it is clear from Knol sides appeared higher than the original sites associated with that name.

This raised some questions with advertising and media companies, in which Google was allegedly a partner and not as competitors. Co-Chief Executive at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Wenda Harris Millard, said then that "if in fact a Google property takes money away from Google partners, is a real problem." Google denied these accusations by Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for the company, pointed out that "when you see Knol pages rank high, they are there because they deserve their position."

This did not stop Timo Palo Heimo, though, as he still believe that search results from Google's free services in possession would be interesting - and he was not wrong when his minus Google Google service had more than 3000 visitors in the the first day and generates a lot of feedback in his blog. The service drew the attention of some Finnish companies IT News, wrote about it, and thereby contributing to their success.

The growing success of the proposals made Timo Palo Heimo even release a second version of the service. This uses the Google Custom Search (CSE) and includes a series of more than 2500 in possession of Google domain names from the search results. Mr Heimo Palo stated that the second version was much more difficult to create, compared to the first, because "CSE not allowed wild card usage in the Top Level Domain (such as Google .*), but it may be included in the normal query."