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http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/features/story.jsp?story=462989 Google is one of the more conspicuous examples of a service that works well for Linux-users, one cannot envision that persisting were it supplanted by or bought by Microsoft. Several other search engines are degraded by the habit of selling lies - raising the position of a page in the search orrder in return for money paid on click-throughs, or even placing it in the search results when there is nothing of relevance at all in it, simply to drag me away form my interests and try to sell something to me. It doesn't sound a stable business strategy to me. Google has been suffering from link farms and other methods that raise sites of little interest or use above those which are genuinely high in page-relevance and that I want to see. The first can be attacked most simply I would think by having a system of automatically following links that are high in the list but are not followed manually and dumping the pages, thus registering a click-through, earning the search engine a fee, and reducing the average click/purchase ratio still further and using machine cycles on the far end thus reducin the value of the practice and its attractiveness. I would like to see software that could do that, it might be built into a browser, or into a proxy or be a separate daemon. The second probably needs a large collaborative reputation management system, which we need anyway, but would experience a bandwidth rise for no profit with the same system. As a marginal justification, such a system of look-ahead has been presented in various browsers and proxies before, as a way of speeding up browsing for the user. It would be necessary to pass on the user-agent string exactly of the browser in use, or perhaps of IE6, to provide the intended user-experience at the target end. -- From the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.