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This CustomizeGoogle feature saves you from the hassle of paging through Google web search results. Whenever you navigate to the end of the page, you dont have to hit the next button. CustomizeGoogle automatically fetches next set of results and appends them to the bottom of the page.

This CustomizeGoogle feature saves you from the hassle of paging through Google web search results. Whenever you navigate to the end of the page, you dont have to hit the next button. CustomizeGoogle automatically fetches next set of results and appends them to the bottom of the page.

the main issue is the way they are making money out of it (e.g. they profit from farming your browsing habits).

If it bothers you that much then install CustomizeGoogle and block their click tracking and cookies. That's a free solution that will prevent them from building up much of a profile on you. If you want to spend a little bit of money you can use an Anonymous web proxy to go a step further and keep them from associating your IP address to your search queries.

Point being, there are ways around Google's invasive data mining for those who are willing to invest a small amount of effort.

Sticking with the theme of Firefox extensions there is also customize google, it does more than search too. http://www.customizegoogle.com/

This has been out of dev for a while. Someone else has taken over the project and since released it as optimizegoogle

Sticking with the theme of Firefox extensions there is also customize google, it does more than search too. http://www.customizegoogle.com/

If you are a Noscript user, be SURE to un-whitelist google.com otherwise the "remove click tracking" won't work.

The Customize Google plugin will also do this.

I wanted the same thing and found this firefox extension

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

It lets you enter filters (with wildcards) for the search results.

Now I want this filter list update automatically (like adblock), Oh well.

PS Are there any such applications in existence today?

TrackMeNot

Yep. TrackMeNot's been available for a little while.

And here's Bruce Schneier's reason not to use it.

You could also try CustomizeGoogle or the Scroogle scraper...

That is all that google news search provides a headline with about a paragraph that explains that headline. Murdoch is simply fabricating a lie to hide his true intentions, it really is what News Corp is all about presenting illusions and deceits as the truth. What he hates is google news search along with everybody else's news search provides a choice of which news site to read a particular news story.

Think News Corp sucks and Fox News is nothing but B$=PR marketing as news engine, then when given the choice you will choose an alternate site, especially when you are given not one but often hundreds of choices ie. http://news.google.com.au/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=au&hl=en&q=rupert+murdoch 4,056 choices and the Christian Science Monitor happens to be the first choice. Now that is what Murdoch hates, he want to control the news, to define what is and is not news and in his own deceitful style define what is and is not the truth. A sick enterprise that wants to sell fear and hate because that charged environment draws more viewers, doesn't matter if it all lies as long as it sells.

The problem is the lies on the Fox network can all to readily be debunked by easy access to hundreds even thousands of other news sites that present reality rather than marketing fantasy and, this compounds the problem. Not only do you have many news sites to choose from but people are actively avoiding Fox ie. thumbing it down in stumbleupon parlance or even filtering it out in customise google http://www.customizegoogle.com/. In fact quickly looking through the search results none of their sites appears in the search results, does that mean News Corp is wining ;D.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/ will filter out ExpertSexChange (and other useless sites) from your Google results.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

This Firefox extension has a lot of good uses; one of them is the "filter" option where you can list websites that you want to filter out of your search results.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

This Firefox extension has a lot of good uses; one of them is the "filter" option where you can list websites that you want to filter out of your search results.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/ Removes click tracking, google analytics cookies, and a lot more.

try http://www.customizegoogle.com/

The reality is that internet 'searches' would not look much different from what they currently are when you use http://www.customizegoogle.com/ to filter out unwanted results. The only real problem is you would definitely have to register so no anonymous searching and your current IP address will be completely irrelevant. When it comes to blocking sites, when enough negative results come up for a site, a google staff member can do a quick review and make a simple judgement call as to how relevant the page is to searches that produce it, before sending it off into oblivion (whilst the algorithms are refined).

The catch for google, which is why they are resistant to the idea, is big advertisers are likely to find their pages blocked all over the place for example ebay and amazon. If I want to buy something from ebay or amazon, I'll go there myself, I don't want them flooding out my search results.

Personally I prefer completely localised control over search query refinements, blocked, demoted etc. with a local application making use of a local database to send an automated, detailed and refined query to the search engine site to deliver me more accurate results, after all it is very much a personal thing, as to which sites you are really after based upon your search query.

So search as a distinct separate applications making calls to a web browser to submit a query and display the results way in preference to a remote app divulging all my likes and dislikes to a privacy invasive sales person who goes way beyond jamming their foot in the door, to the point of trying be in your face every time you turn on any electronic web connected device.

I use a Firefox Add-on called http://www.customizegoogle.com/ which blocks some of the methods Google use to profile users. It can also block Google ads (which I never click on anyway). I wonder if Google hasn't realized their vulnerability in not controlling the browser space. I'm guessing there's no room for CustomizeGoogle in their vision of the future?

Use Firefox with the NoScript add-on. http://noscript.net/ It blocks/unblocks javascript exactly the way you want it. And makes surfing safer in general.
Another interesting add-on is CustomizeGoogle. http://www.customizegoogle.com/ It can block cookies being sent to Google Analytics and it can anonymize the Google UID.

All of my Gmail connections have been secured for a couple of years now, thanks to the CustomizeGoogle Firefox add-on. It has a "always use https" option, which was the main reason I have it. I'll still be using it due to other features like click-tracking removal, though.

Useful interim tool for Firefox: http://www.customizegoogle.com/ . You can force SSL not only on Gmail but with Apps and Documents. It is your friend. Not useful if you are not accessing the Googleverse from your own computer which has it installed.

You would think so, but check again.

It will post your password to an HTTPS action, but then it reverts back to clear text. Also try firing up wireshark sometime and notice that every single keypress (last time I checked) in the compose mail field sends out an xmlhttprequest. Web 2.0 is awesome.

There is a firefox plugin http://www.customizegoogle.com/ that will force https if you want, but even if you type https into the bar, gmail will attempt to downgrade your session back to http.

You can filter out the biggest offenders with the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension. It has some other nice functions as well: anonymization, no text ads, crosslinks to other engines, ...

I wonder why Google is so soft on SEO. Can't be so hard to filter out spam results that appear in too many searches (mister-wong.*!) Maybe Google profits more (ad revenue) if they don't weed out those sites, and they get away with it because of their near-monopoly.

Ah, yet another class of ads to locate, rate, and filter. Now Adblock and CustomizeGoogle need to be updated.

We probably should look into rating the advertisers with AdRater. Outright ad blocking seems overkill for this class of ad, but rating doesn't interfere with user searches.

The revolt against excessive advertising is growing. Sao Paulo, Brazil eliminated outdoor advertising last year. All of it.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

I use the Firefox CustomizeGoogle plugin to filter linkfarms (e.g. *.info/*) and cloakers (e.g. experts exchange, O'Reilly Safari). I've no affiliation, just posting because this sounds like what you want.

A truly relevant shared agent would filter out all ads and click-through trap sites, and totally mess up the dynamic of the ad-supported Internet.

That's a feature, not a bug. We're working on the problem. So are others.

"Adblock" is just the beginning. There's Customize Google, which will remove Google text ads. It's a Firefox extension. Also removes Google ad tracking.

We have SiteTruth, which is a form of "intelligent agent" that rates sites for legitimacy, digging in various data sources and reading through the site for business addresses to find out who's behind the site. (No clear business location on a commercial site yields a bad rating.) We mostly use Yahoo search, but we also have a front end for Google which leaves the ads in, then rates both the organic search results and the ads for legitimacy.

As a general rule, advertised sites rate lower than organic search results. We see that with our system, and systems that rate by other criteria (user ratings, hostile code scanning, etc.) see similar results. This makes sense; if you're getting good positioning in organic search results, why run ads in the search engine? There's a clear "bottom-feeder effect" in search engine ads.

You want the Customize Google Firefox extension. First thing I do is blacklist *.info, Experts Exchange, and other sites that return useless "results".

I use the CustomizeGoogle Forefox plugin to filter out all about.com and answer.com results. Makes life just a little bit simper.

The CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox allows you to blacklist sites from search results.

Firefox plugin that does this and much more: CustomizeGoogle

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

Just use the Customize Google firefox plugin. It will automatically do that for you.

...by not displaying the ads at all! No false clicks from me. Are you guys doing your part too?

CustomizeGoogle is a special-purpose ad blocker for Google search results. You can turn off "sponsored results", for example. If Google goes over to the dark side, tools like CustomizeGoogle can be used to filter out the ads and dreck.

So there's a backup plan in place if they go evil.

Perhaps if some of the more morally inclined google staff would attempt to get their honesty and integrity spread through the rest of the organisation especially the marketing team and management we end user might be better off. Fixed the customize google tool I just use to block google analytics now but I unloaded google search from the firefox search bar as well as deleting every other bit of google software.

Bookmark the secure address and use that (who wouldn't over open wireless??). You could also use http://www.customizegoogle.com/ with Firefox if you're using Gmail to force it to go to the secure URL.

That's easy enough to fix with a Firefox plugin: http://www.customizegoogle.com/

There is also the CustomizeGoogle Extension for Firefox/Flock, which also does other interesting things, such as scrubbing out unwanted ads and links from Google pages

That wouldn't be a bad idea, come to think of it. I only discovered that you could use Gmail with end-to-end encryption by just typing 'https' on a lark one day, and being pleasantly surprised that it worked. It does make me wonder if there are any other sites that would work via HTTPS, but just don't do it by default.

Not that it's exactly what you're looking for, but the CustomizeGoogle FF extension is pretty neat.

if you want https automatically, use the highly-recommended customizegoogle add-in.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

If you use Firefox and Gmail's web UI, use this extension to make sure your Gmail session is encrypted:

CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience -- Firefox Extension ... and check the box labeled "Secure (switch to https)" in the Gmail section.

If you are using POP3 access to Gmail, you are already using SSL.

If I understand packet sniffing correctly (I'm no programmer), that just shows the source and destination but the contents are encrypted. Please let me know if I'm incorrect.

Or just install the CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox. It has an option to automatically switch gmail, calendar, apps, etc to ssl. Plus it can remove the ads, block cookies to google-analyitics.com, randomize the search tracking cookie, and many other things.

Spending more time on a page means, either you just got up to get a cup of coffee or you are in fact reading the whole page, and not just a couple of lines and going to another site. In terms of advertising, it is not that bad if you only see the add for a moment, as long as the same add is repeated, of course in that split second flash of a brand or product is blurred with hundreds of other addwords, you getting no advertising benefit unless of course you count the repeated phrase 'adds served by google'. So google adds are all about marketing google not the customers paying for the adds.

Nielsen is taking the correct perspective, just compare a video serving site like dailymotion to google, you might spending 45 minutes on the video site with the background adds held in your focus compared to 10 to 15 seconds on a search site (especially when you original query is typed into the search bar and not on the search web site).

You are right about search just being a utlity, and tool that you just use and forget and pretty much the same for the add content that is being served up, but that is nielsen's point, and as as a portal google is very much way, way behind most net companies. So yeah google will really hate this and try to convince everybody it just ain't true, real fingers in the ears la-la-la stuff. As a portal google has a lot of work to do.

Try this Firefox plug-in. Never look at eBay's stupid ads again:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q= customizegoogle&status=4
http://www.customizegoogle.com/

Now. remind me again why I use this tool http://www.customizegoogle.com/ and have filtered out ebay from all my search results.

Firefox and the Customize Google extension make a good team: http://www.customizegoogle.com/

Features:

        * Remove click tracking
        * Anonymize your Google userid
        * Block Google Analytics cookies

        * Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https
        * Remove ads

You can install the Firefox plug-in "Customizegoogle" and block all those evil adds that sit on the right side and aren't even noticeable.

Firefox extension: http://www.customizegoogle.com/ lets you filter out URLs from the results (plus dozens of other useful things).

You can filter out Wikipedia mirrors (using that extension) with the list here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirror_filter

If you want to control google run this http://www.customizegoogle.com/ on top of firefox in preference to the google toolbar.

You could get it "free" if you wish.

Sounds like most people would enjoy this firefox extension: http://www.customizegoogle.com/