for browsers Fruitful pickings
Steven Mathieson explains that there is a range of search engine options with byte for journalists
Apart from its bright orange wall and the Peyton and Byrne coffee shop, Central St Giles could be the glossy headquarters of one of London’s richer investment banks. In a ninth floor meeting room back in March, a group of NUJ freelances enjoyed fruit kebabs, washed down with kiwi and spinach smoothies. Nearby, staff used the in-house gym while looking down on Parliament and Whitehall. Welcome to one of Google’s three offices in central London. Google does not have a “permanent establishment” in the UK as far as
HM Revenue and Customs is concerned, with advertising sales booked in Ireland. In January, the company agreed to pay £130 million in back taxes from 2005. This was estimated by shadow chancellor John McDonnell as
being equivalent to a 3% tax rate. In one of the less likely agreements in public life, he was joined in criticism of the deal by Rupert Murdoch. Google’s Central St Giles office is non-permanent in another sense: what
is now the world’s most valuable public company is building a £1 billion complex in King’s Cross. The NUJ organised the March session to let freelances know about Google’s range of services for the media, marketed as Google News Lab. It was worth attending – there are some things that Google does very well – but in other areas you can find better alternatives. The following, provided by both not-for-profit organisations and
companies (some of which may aim to minimise their taxes), all have an edge on the Google equivalents. Some cost money, although most are free for small-scale use or provide free trials. Online services are among journalists’ most important tools. Whatever
you think of it as a company, Google provides the online equivalent of a multi-purpose Swiss Army knife. It’s worth knowing what it can do, but it’s also worth knowing where you can find sharper alternatives.
Search Google has built its business on analysing data from web searches. If you are logged in to a Google account or if you allow cookies (digital tags) to be retained by your web browser, Google is using you for long-term research and probably showing you adverts based on your browsing history. Rival search engines including Bing and Yahoo
do much the same, but there is one that doesn’t: DuckDuckGo. This US search engine shows adverts based purely on your current search and doesn’t track you. It provides the same results to everyone so users are not in a ‘filter bubble’ where they get directed to material Google judges they will like – not ideal for journalists searching for ideas. DuckDuckGo is a good general-use search engine and
has some nice features including ‘instant answers’ at the top of the results page. Unlike Google, it doesn’t try to use your location, which means you get globalised answers, although you can choose to focus on results from the UK (or many other countries) through a ‘region’ option that appears at the site’s top right.
https://duckduckgo.com/
Web browsing The Chrome web browser is written by Google and defaults to its services – it encourages you to log in to a Google account when you first use it, and if you type in the search bar you’re searching Google. You can change which search engine it uses, but not as easily as in rival browser Firefox, produced by the Mozilla Foundation, a US non-profit organisation. Firefox provides a wider range of search options than Chrome including DuckDuckGo, Twitter, the BBC – and Google. Firefox has two search boxes (left for web addresses,
right for searches), whereas Chrome treats everything as a search unless you type in a web address. Chrome has a more pared-down design than Firefox, although the latter makes more use of icons. Both have a wide choice of bolt-on software that adds functions, called as add-ons in Firefox and extensions in Chrome. Firefox is better for privacy,
both through its options and because you don’t need to log in to Google to use all of its functions.
http://getfirefox.com/
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