The migration went smooth, but by default the Linux Mint Firefox Google search functionality is useless, but luckily it wasn’t too much effort to fix.

First step is to change the home page by choosing “preferences” from the “edit” toolbar and changing the URL on the general tab. This still doesn’t help your results though if you search for something in the search box in the top right corner of the browser. To fix this head to this site, and look down the page until you find the link for your countries Google search. Click the link and it will be added to the search providers in the search box.

To remove the Linux Mint search provider and make your selected plugin default click on the search provider icon on the left hand side of the search box and select “manage search engines”. Select the default and click the remove button, then highlight your chosen provider and simply move to the top of the list with the “move up” button.

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Good news though, I found  some stolen content today and it seems the times have finally changed with Google finally allowing web submitted content take down requests. This move has been a long time overdue in my opinion as a majority of these stolen content sites are making their money through Google’s adsense program. With the old fax and email system it was normally easier just to firewall off the network the offending site was hosted on to stop them scraping your content and move on with life.

Here are some tips on what to do if you suspect someone is stealing your content for their own gains without any attribution:

Identify possible stolen content

A lot of the time you can identify potential content theft from your webstats, if you see an image that is getting called a lot more than the post it appears in chances are its being hotlinked to from elsewhere, looking at the referring URL’s is also a good way to spot possible thieves. Enter your web site URL at Copy Scape and see if it can identify any duplicate content for you.

Get the content taken down

Lookup the IP address of the site using the nslookup command on the offending site e.g

nslookup offendingsite.com

This should return something similar to:

Server:        61.88.88.88
Address:    61.88.88.88#53

Now perform a whois on the IP address returned to find out what network the sites is hosted on. This can be done either on the Linux command line using the whois tool or by using a web based tool. This will give you some information on the network similar to:

#
# Query terms are ambiguous.  The query is assumed to be:
#     “n 74.82.173.217″
#
# Use “?” to get help.
#

#
# The following results may also be obtained via:
# http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=74.82.173.217?showDetails=true&showARIN=true
#

American Registry for Internet Numbers NET74 (NET-74-0-0-0-0) 74.0.0.0 – 74.255.255.255
Take 2 Hosting, Inc. T2H-NET4-2 (NET-74-82-160-0-1) 74.82.160.0 – 74.82.191.255

#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html
#
Here we can see Take 2 Hosting is responsible for this IP range, so you can then Google the company name find out how to contact them and report the offending content. If your lucky sometimes the companies whois record will even include an email address for reporting abuse originating from their network making this step easier. You can also do a whois on the domain of the site itself to find the registration details, 9 / 10 times though those is the content theft line of work will use a domain registrar with a private whois service that obscures the registrant’s contact details.

Report infringement to Google

Reporting the offending content to Google is a crucial  step, first because they can remove their site from the search listings to limit the sites traffic and as most content thieves make their money from adsense they can ban their adsense account. To report offending content head to this form and request it removal.

Steps to revert your Google Results

Download and install the Grease Monkey addon for Firefox here.

After Firefox restarts, go Tools -> Greasemonkey -> enabled, if you go back again you should see this option now has a tick next to it indicating the plugin is active.

Go to the userscripts site and click on the install button for the “Google Classic” script. this will display a Firefox prompt click the “Install” button here.

Now visit Google.com and your results pages should look like the familiar interface you are used to.