Category Archives: search engines

Power of the internet and e-patients.net

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As you might know, I am a member of the Society for Participatory Medicine (S4PM). They publish a blog called e-patients.net where empowered patients share their stories and exchange ideas on how to take control of their own healthcare.

Last week, I came across this awesome story of how these parents had to learn about DNA, gene mutation and medicine to understand what was going in their son’s body. It is quite technical and extremely interesting. If you have not read it yet, please do read it.

I shared this link with the members only listserv of the S4PM. This listserv is available for everyone to read here. E-patient Dave saw this post and published a blogpost on e-patients.net under the section – found on the net. Today, he shared that a mother contacted him to share that they saw this post and are contacting the doctor mentioned in the post. I really hope this helps their child. This is the reason for sharing such information on blogs. Even if it helps one person, it is completely worth it! Special thank you to Dave for posting this into the e-patients.net blog.

If you are not a member of S4PM, you should become a member to participate in the awesome discussion with the members of S4PM. It takes only $30/year to become a member.

Why DuckDuckGo is my new search engine

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This is not old news. Google has been concerned about Facebook’s rise and has been wanting to come up with a social product of its own. So they create Google+ and we all joined enthusiastically. They have impressive growth in numbers and I also supported G+   until I remembered what happened more than 15 years ago.

So Microsoft did not get internet back in the 1990s while Netscape was dominating the browser market. Then Microsoft decides to use its dominance in the desktop space to thrust IE on its users. Not many liked this move but here we are in the future knowing that Microsoft killed Netscape.

I realized that our support for G+ is similar to supporting IE when Microsoft is trying to kill Netscape through unfair means instead of building a good product. As soon as Netscape was dead, Microsoft IE also stopped its innovation until Firefox came along. Do we want the same thing by supporting G+?

I also realized that many like me were interested in supporting a competitor to Facebook thanks to Facebook’s heavy handed dealing with our privacy on the site. So it was Facebook that was making us support its competition.

Now Google comes up with “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) which apparently is great for us. I have been worried with all the junk that shows up in our search results on Google. Now Google wants to pollute the search with G+ results? No thanks.

Google learns from Facebook and decides that it knows what is best for us. I liked how Sarah Lacy talked about it here. So Google is now emulating Facebook too?

From now on, it is going to be DuckDuckGo.com as the search engine for me. I hope they continue with their privacy first philosophy.