Other Search Engines & Pay Per Click ServicesDiscussions about other search engines, Ask, Pay Per Click Services such as ValueClick, Miva, adBrite, adEngage, etc..
I believe there is a place for ethics in every part of life. Anyway, I'm talking about pledging my personal private search engine use to the most ethical search engine for at least a month, not making a major business decision
It's difficult to judge SEs on ethics. And, ethics vary from culture to culture.
Is hand editing of politically sensitive issues ethical or non-ethical? What about using personal data without permission as long as it's to improve results for the user?
Based on my personal view of what's ethical I'd go with MSN... less invasive/intrusive* than Google, less obfuscation* of commercial results than Yahoo. But then there must be lots of smaller SEs that are a lot more "ethical".
When I think ethics, the first thing I think of is search engines that are unethical by weighting search results. For example Google News weights results based on corporate media.
It would be very difficult for someone to say which search engines are ethical. I would probably even go so far as to say all of them would claim that they are ethical.
Really the bottom line for search engines is money. Ask.com is pretty good about keeping the adult content seperate but so is Google. There are honestly so many it would be hard to say for sure.
All I know is I am going to give this new one winzy.com a shot. Sounds like a fun way to do searches.