[SGVLUG] Looking for a better "snopes" site

Emerson, Tom Tom.Emerson at wbconsultant.com
Mon Aug 29 15:04:48 PDT 2005


Every now and then I get something from someone that is (to me) a well known internet "urban legend", chain-mail, or otherwise not worth promoting/repeating anymore.  My usual response is to return a link to the particular myth write-up on snopes, however I'm becoming less and less "enamored" of the snopes site due to the multitude of pop-ups associated with their site.  Furthermore, the snopes search engine seems a bit out-of-whack: the message I got today was the "top-to-bottom" photo of an iceberg; without thinking that closely, I tried searching for "glacier picture", only to find it was highliting terms such as "glossary" and "closure", while "glacier" itself was "not found"  [turns out, "by default", the search engine uses a "sounds alike" algortithm for search terms.  When "glacier" itself turned up nothing, I finally re-read the "message" and realized I should have been searching for an "iceberg" -- ultimately this was a bit odd in that the final anaylisys of the photo points out that the "upside down" portion was indeed a photo of a glacier...]

In any case, having tried half a dozen searches, I noticed the toolbar filling up with instances of the browser -- some ads were obvious, but others genuinely tried to "trick" me into thinking they were legitimately-created system messages (for which an "OK" to dismiss the box would likely result in the installation of hotbar, gator, or something equally insidious)

Does anyone have a recommendation for a snopes-like site [explaining sources of urban/internet legends] that doesn't have a high "annoyance" factor?  (pop-ups, pop-unders, potentially-malware-infested links, etc.)


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