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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
552 points (99.1% 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!)
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It's pretty wild how Google search has degraded. The push for SEO has really ruined useful results.
Kagi is even better than DDG. Google is absolutely horrendous.
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.
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I only use Google if DDG can't find what I'm looking for. Usually Google doesn't either if DDG can't so lately I've been giving up after the DDG results. I can't stand Google anymore. The first page of results is just ads and the next page is all irrelevant nonsense.
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.
And they want to force us to whitelist youtube from adblockers.
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.
Ads are what Google makes money with. That's their core business. I would argue most of what they offer is just a different way of either delivering you ads or farming your data for...ads.
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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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*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.
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This validates my stubborn commitment to DuckDuckGo, ty
Which defaults to Bing, to whom ddg sends all your queries. I use ddg.
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.
I happily pay $10 a month for Kagi and it’s freaking great.
I’m never going back to Google.
You pay for a search engine? You have a subscription to a search engine? I'm I understanding that right?
It is a search engine right? My brain is struggling with this.
Is there something about search engines, as opposed to other online services, that makes you expect them to be free?
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Personally i find $10 a month to be too expensive, but don't we all pay for search engines in a way? With Google you don't pay directly but with your information and by getting influenced in your behaviour (e.g. to buy something from someone who in return pays google for advertisement).
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This feels like google when google was new. I’ve been using the summarizer more and reading the articles I send it to understand how it works. It definitely has its use cases
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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.
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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
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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!
That's called innovation in capitalism.
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