Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing::US v. Google kicked off this week in the District of Columbia as the Justice Department and Google squared off over the dominant search engine.
Google is almost useless as a search engine and i haven’t used it for over a year.
It’s getting more comments to get pages of word soup result, sites that just contain a huge dump of scraped Reddit comments.
I tried to search a torrent from rutracker in duckduckgo. Got no results, then tried Google with search term site:rutracker.org and the first result was what I was looking for.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But this trial kicks off two years after a district judge found Apple could maintain its locked-down iOS ecosystem and two months after Microsoft won a ruling letting it buy Activision Blizzard, continuing a rapid consolidation of the games industry.
They also painted the allegations as disingenuous complaints from fellow tech companies who couldn’t compete fairly: in Apple’s case, the Fortnite publisher Epic, and in Microsoft’s, the rival console maker Sony.
In opening arguments, Schmidtlein showed instructions for switching from Google to another search engine, comparing it to the days of slotting in software floppy disks or downloading programs over dial-up internet.
Rangel was one of the few non-Google employees to make an appearance on the witness stand in the first week, arguing in a presentation that search engine defaults produce a “sizable and robust bias” toward the preselected option.
The first week of testimony hasn’t fully explored this yet, but one of its prime examples is lax privacy standards — if Google had to seriously compete instead of buying its way into your search bar, Dintzer said, it might have to do a better job of safeguarding your data.
The Justice Department is expected to make its case over the rest of September and early October, and we’ll likely hear from a bevy of current and former Google employees, including CEO Sundar Pichai.
The original article contains 2,120 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I really hate saying this because it pisses me off, but I primarily use DuckDuckGo, which is based on Bing, and I sometimes have to switch over to Google because the search isn’t as effective. Especially if I want to put something in quotes, which DuckDuckGo doesn’t even seem to recognize. Their image search is not as good either.
I don’t want to use Google at all. I hate that it’s still necessary sometimes for a decent search.
And yes, I realize that a lot of Google searches suck too. But I still shouldn’t have to ever go there. Especially not for something as simple as that.
bugsmith@programming.dev 1 year ago
I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don’t really like it, and I certainly don’t trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn’t Google, Amazon or Microsoft.
It’s really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety…) thrown in, as Google’s results are just better.
DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options of I want to reduce it, but I don’t have to do that with Google.
Kagl has caught my attention lately. I’m going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I’m not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the the true cost of running a search company). Obviously privacy is out the window as it’s paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I’m not really getting that anywhere else either, I’m more hoping that it will just provide good search results.
Skollwolf88@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Just use startPage its basically privacy focused google
patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I don’t blindly stand behind any of these companies, but I believe DuckDuckGo is privately held, so it doesn’t have shareholders clamoring for the greediest and most deceptive business practices like Alphabet and Microsoft. I know Brave is controversial, but lately their search engine has been working well as backup for DDG, so I can avoid Google all together.
Aopen@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Also when looking for “breaking” news. Google has more users and can “pump up” important news in results faster than Bing which is displays outdated info due to userbase disadvantage.
Polar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Not in Canada, where everyone is blocking news because they don’t want to pay out journalists.