I’m talking, of course, about this…
… bit of lame-and-obvious marketing that appears in the top right corner of my home page — the Google search page.
Now, it used to be that I could click on the close box on this ad and it would set a cookie that prevented it from re-appearing until the next time I reset my local browser state (or it may just time out; I don’t know). In any case, that meant that I’d only see it once every few weeks or so which was unpleasant but bearable.
In the last few days, either Google has changed the code, Safari has changed in some incompatible way, or my local configuration has been corrupted somehow, but whatever the cause, the result is that I now see the add every time I open the page.
To be blunt, I can’t take it.
I guess I’ll go set my home page to Bing for a while. Somebody let me know when Google figures out that alienating their consumers isn’t smart.
I guess the preference is stored in your account, so you need to login to get rid of it. Anyways, Bing is very nice and I never looked back at google after switching to it.
Interestingly, I too use Safari and have been regularly using Google (mostly from the search box in Safari) and do not see this ad.
Re: Bing. I tried it the other day and found it to be quite good. I now use Bing as the default on one machine and Google on another just to see which does better for my searches. So far they are different but no clear winner yet.
I had already tried logging in to see if it would fix it. It did not.
Even if it had, this wasn’t required before, because I wasn’t [*] getting the “don’t show it to me constantly” behaviour even though I normally don’t log in.
[* Update: changed “was” to “wasn’t” to make the sentence match reality. ]
There’s a new search engine: http://duckduckgo.com/ It is still in development, sort of, but has good reviews.