Unbelievable, one does not realise until on dial-up (it will saturate the connection for hours without ever asking permission - an average user would think their machine was broken). Self-recreating scheduled tasks, registry run entries, locked files, folder permission tricks... the whole bit... just short of disguising itself as an audio driver a la rootkit style. GoogleUpdate will cripple your machine and fight you every step of the way if you try to stop it. Several registry edits were required and I could not delete the files in Vista (wtf admin can't delete files due to permissions? Who is this super-admin that has control of my files then? Vista is so screwed) I ended up rebooting to XP and renaming all the GoogleUpdate files.
A google search (excuse the irony) turns up many such discussions of this unacceptable behaviour. I don't understand why Google persists. I thought the motto was "Don't be Evil"?
This is why I use Iron not Chrome (but I have several versions of Chrome installed for testing among the plethora of browsers I have installed for testing...) perhaps I need a browser sandbox machine at this point.
Something like this could kill google. I would report the file to Symantec (another evil itself) but I can't be bothered. Someone will, have no doubt, as GoogleUpdate has ALL the hallmarks of a trojan or virus.
This is enough to make we want to use Bing. (Good lord) Soooo the beginning of the end of Google. It came sooner than I expected.
I was using Dogpile mostly before Google came along... Damn, I can't even remember the primary single engine I used. Fools. Google is throwing that away? I can't even remember the last search engine I used before them... dummies.
Yup, I think I'm done searching with Google. Can't be trusted... the signs have been there... "sponsored" links that point to malware etc.
Damn... Dogpile spends half its load time getting stuff from some edgesuite.net domain... I guess Dogpile is out. They are all gaming us.
I forsee a XenoCorp Search Engine. I'm getting fed up with the crap. (I'll fix the dyna first)
And as far as I know they still refuse to pay us the over $300 (or anything at all for that matter) they owe us for ads from the last four+ years (which you notice are not on the forums pages anymore - probably will yank from front page now too...)
Further, we need an XC browser eventually too. One that acknowledges that a self signed encrypted page is more secure than one that is not encrypted at all (all the major browsers have this backwards - Veritas payola... know it. MITM? My Ass. Why no glaring red error messages for unencrypted sites? I could MITM those even easier... fools.)