502
Google paid a whopping $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere
(www.theverge.com)
And it fucking blows now. You don't get shit but ads.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
502 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
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They’re somehow WORSE than duckduckgo nowadays like how? You were the search leader, people used DDG for privacy reasons but they passed you??? Did you forget why you’re a company? It’s because you were the best fucking search engine ever and you decided to sell that title for ads or some shit. Incredible how Google fell off the fucking side of a mountain they themselves built!
Yes, but have you considered, line must go up?
For me it went from "great" to "usable" over the course of a decade or so, and then from "usable" to "worthless" over the course of six months. It's a remarkably awful trajectory.
And DuckDuckGo lacks basic stuff such as keyword exclusion. (It's my main search engine for the last few years after Startpage got bought, but lacking keyword exclusion sucks!)
you can -something , but it isn't full exclusion. It's generally been good enough for me. I agree the full fat version would be nice.
So far I haven't had any luck with -something "soft" exclusions either.
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It's pretty wild how Google search has degraded. The push for SEO has really ruined useful results.
Is ddg actually good now? I remember it feeling nearly useless waay back when it was first hitting the scene. Might have to give it a shot again
I'm not a power user, but I've used DDG exclusively for a while now and I often forget that I'm using it. I'd say it's a pretty seamless transition nowadays.
You actually get the results you are looking for without the sponsored links. Sometimes you end up searching for reddit results but that's every search engine.
Not kagi. I haven’t specified Reddit once since switching to kagi. It really is that much better than DDG and Google.
Yeah it's so bad, the auto predictions dont even make sense any more.
the auto predictions always give me more words than i need, so i have to type normally, like it wasn't there, or select, hope it doesn't load, and delete the extra words
And when i go to click on an auto prediction it changes it at the last damn second too. That drives me mad
This is my beef with basically all modern interfaces. Stuff changes and moves with just enough of a delay to cause me to miss click. Autocomplete changing recommendations on phones, UI elements shifting on web pages, etc.
I thought i was getting old. I mean, i am, but this just enough delay miss-clicks make me feel even older
This has been something so frustrating that nobody seems to talk about. They really need to provide autofill that only adds the one next word, rather than two or three. Because otherwise, the autofill becomes useless.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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I dunno on one side we have Google trying to wreck the entire internet and have their ads in your face 95 percent of the time.
On the other side is Microsoft who won't leave you the hell alone when pushing they're shit tiers programs and steal defaults on a weekly basis.
To me the only solution is ruling both companies monopolys and fining them to hell and breaking them up. Both are out of control and ruining computing and the Internet.
Google could be broken up into
- search
- chrome / gsuite
- YouTube
- gcloud
- ads
- android. And I'm sure more
MS
- windows / office
- azure
- xbox
- bing
..I'm too tired to keep going lol
If those had to all survive independently and couldn't leech off profits of the parent organization we could have true competition. Instead you just need one super-profitable arm of a company than loss-lead your way into other verticals and out-compete everyone else because you don't have to turn a profit, at least while the competition is still clinging on.
Ads are a core component of how search makes money. They're also a core component of how YouTube makes money.
A lot of those are still too big - Google ads basically just compete with facebooks. The two control the marketplace between ad buyers and sellers - too much power
YouTube itself is far too powerful too - it's one of the biggest platforms on top of the default video hosting service, giving them far too much control via the algorithm
Microsoft's Xbox isn't a big deal, but the sheer number of publishers again gives them control over a marketplace
What we need is to force them to rent out the network at cost, the way we do with cell phone providers. Force them to host buy/sell offers at cost, and serve ads with a limited amount of profit
Plus, they're too big even then - companies with that much money or control over discourse are a threat to democracy, full stop
It's a very messy situation we find ourselves in, but it's only going to get worse the longer we let it fester
Xbox specifically could be broken up into studios, publishers, and consoles.
And in the meantime, become a farmer! /s (you'd still have John Deere problems...)
They should have invested in their potential, their search engines. It's getting shittier almost daily.
Makes you wonder if they just stopped paying they'd have 23 billion more and I wonder what they'd lose in market share. If it is less than 23 bil it makes sense to just not pay.
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Bing seems a lot worse now than before the pandemic as well
It's become easier than ever to spam out websites and spam content. It's a plague on the web and I'm not sure what the cure is.
*To stifle competition FTFY
Relying on people's apathy is a business model with eras of success. Most people have never changed a setting other than dark mode, and even then that's probably your average superuser.
Crazy that it's cheaper to do that than it is to build a product that can find recipe blogs that aren't also novels.
Hopefully the antitrust trial will end up telling Google they cannot pay anybody for preference of their browser. That would be the best outcome.
The MO of current "market leaders" is not to compete but gatekeep.
I'd gladly switch back to Google if they paid me a million dollars.
how is that not anti-competitive behaviour?
Antitrust was just a nice idea. It's kinda dead. Will remain dead unless we can purge corruption from politics. For some reason, most politicians seem averse to this idea.
Luckily the party driven and heavily influential political roles are filled with diverse representatives from every walk of life and aren't largely built around the same support circles and ideals that have already been entrenched for generations. With millions of citizens, its normal for the same handful of families to remain in power, with the exception of some rich celebrities who can win the popularity polls.
Everything is fine.
As long as the rich can get more money. That's what is most important.
You forgot to put “for some reason” in italics for extra sarcasm
It isn't the default search engine on my browser. I'm using Kagi at the moment.
What the hell is a kagi
Paid, ad-free, privacy focused search engine
When you installed the browser and typed something other than a web address in the big white bar on the top, where did it go?
SearxNG for me
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Even if it’s easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot.
Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.
It was made public after a debate earlier in the week between the two sides and Judge Amit Mehta over whether the figure should be redacted.
(Apple’s outsize percentage of the total is why that particular deal has been such a focus of the first weeks of the trial.)
Until now, these numbers have been closely held secrets, leaving competitors and analysts to speculate about exactly what it’s worth to Google to be the near-universal default choice.
He also said that he sees Yelp and Amazon as competitors and that, in such a hot market, Google has to do everything it can to stay relevant and compete.
The original article contains 519 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Approximately 16% of their revenue or 29% of their profit. I'd take that tradeoff any day.
That's called innovation in capitalism.
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