Day 3: Website I can’t live without

That’s a hard question, as there is no particular website I can’t live without – i.e. most have substitutes in one form or another.  However I don’t think I could live without the web.  Possibly google search along with google scholar and google images are the sites I use ALL the time.  I’ve book-marked duckduckgo after reading an article about the lack of privacy that google affords, but must admit to having only used it once or twice since bookmarking it ….  habits die hard. And now I’m trying to find the article, and discover I didn’t diigo it – diigo is slowly becoming a habit, but not as quickly as it needs to.

So here are a few of the articles I’ve just googled about duckduckgo (haha, isn’t that ironical!)
PCWorld – who explain how it works and why it takes longer
SearchEngineland – who rightly point out that people probably don’t care much about privacy
and EtherRag – who discriminate between privacy from advertisers and from the NSA.

On the other hand there are websites that I think that I’m overly active on – like Facebook that I could be a lot more discriminate about – I like the newsfeeds from all my friends and ex-collegues and ex- & current classmates around the world.  But as a (future) librarian I HATE the non-searchability and non-curateability of it all (if those are words, which my online spelling check says they aren’t – but a spelling check is one of those love to hate tools, especially when writing in multiple languages).

Back to google – I think lack of privacy may the price we pay for “free” search.  And since enough of us are making that trade-off – consciously or unconsciously, it’s got a big enough platform for it to work. And that’s the alpha and omega of it all.  And since we don’t live in north Korea, and do have capitalism and do have the internet, someone’s going to make a buck off it.  C’est la vie, says the cynic in me.