251–260 of 337 posts
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I meant Google in general. It’s yet another tiny step in a terrible direction. At this point I would love to legislate most of Google out of existence, personally.
Google does lots of great things for people, so it looks to me like you're overreacting. Finding the right balance is important in regulation.
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Do we have any recourse against this monopoly, other than voicing our concerns repeatedly while they ignore us? Can we launch a class action lawsuit against Google if they harm people by limiting consumer choice, and force us to be tracked everywhere using reCAPTCHA v3 and various other methods? Keep in mind that not sending your data to Google is not a real option, there are several government services, health care…
The consumers of Google are advertisers and they have other choices. Users also can easily go to another search engine. Why sue Google because users decide not to go anywhere else?
Ease-of-switching puts the onus on the user to recognize corporate violations of anti-trust law rather than upon the company violating anti-trust regulation.
It doesn't really make sense to presume users would or should change their behavior if a provider violates anti-trust law.
Whether this claim is true nor not, Google is able to pull such a move due to its monopoly. Most of us are against monopolies but don’t care about Google’s central position on our precious Internet. We should act up though. One day, it could be too late. I’ve been using DDG for around a year now after numerous failed attempts in the past. I, too, had been frustrated with some search results, but I don’t miss Google a…
Why on earth is this comment downvoted?
Remember that AOL, Yahoo, and MySpace “monopolized” the internet not that long ago. There were hysterical articles in the mid 2000s speculating on whether or not these companies had a “cyber monopoly”. I doubt you think those companies are still the dominant players on the internet...
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As a counterpoint, consider that just because good people work there does not mean that the company isn't evil. I'm sure there are NSA employees who are nice folks, but that doesn't mean that the organization is good. Even the originator of 'embrace, extend, extinguish' had good people working for them. That doesn't mean that early 2000s Microsoft wasn't a fairly evil organization. To Natella's credit, they have radi…
> As a counterpoint, consider that just because good people work there does not mean that the company isn't evil. This isn't a comic book or a Marvel movie. Companies are just that, companies. They're incentivized to make money. Google is as evil as BP, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Ford or Tesla. Instead of doing comic book analogies which don't apply to real world, perhaps start thinking in terms of incentives that dri…
Apple does some stuff I hate, and Ford really likes selling gas-guzzling F150s, but neither company tends to be overtly malicious in their decisions. Whereas Oracle actively chooses to continue with their hostile sales model; most of their users hate having to deal with the company (the customers are normally upper management that doesn't have to use the software).
I chose to use the word 'evil' mainly due to Google's former slogan. I really think that despite the best intentions of many of the employees Google is starting to slide towards the evil end of the scale.
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Yes: minimize or stop using them. There are alternate search options. The web has very little lock-in (on the user side) compared to say desktop and mobile... make use of that. While there's a chance the EU might do something about the behavior, I think it's safe to say that here in the US the odds of anything pro-consumer happening anytime soon are effectively nil.
So basically after a few decades of using the Internet, we're now at a place where we are willing to stop using some of the most famous services we're accustomed to. Strangely, those are mostly owned by Google and Facebook.
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Again, any link even for the conspiracy theory / discussion, as farfetched it seems.
It's actually true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel Whether it is significant or not is another matter entirely.
Still, I'm skeptical. The link doesn't really say In-Q-Tel influenced Google directly, I especially don't see evidence for influence during Google's early years.
It appears Keyhole (a company G acquired in 2005, who's software became Google Earth) was funded in part by intelligence money. Google went public in 2004, so they were already beholden to public shareholders by the time of that acquisition.
Besides, Keyhole just made good mapping software. DARPA funds lots of robotics labs, but I wouldn't say Berkeley and CMU are any more a part of the US intelligence apparatus than I am as a tax payer. Some work they do has utility to the gov, so the gov funded it. That doesn't make their efforts direct intelligence work.
Query: Good search tools in addition to ddg.gg I really hate no URL results. I search and obtain URLs all the time. Google is ruined for me.
They were always technical searches. In all cases the first result was perfect, but the highlighting of the searched keywords in the result never worked too well so far)
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Same problem dating sites ran into.
That is a very interesting insight. To take your insight and to rephrase it a bit: any two sided marketplace that trades on the time that you are engaged with it is not served by giving you what you need right away.
- Monthly: Incentives variable, but generally low quality results (for slot machine psychology.)
- For each match/hookup/"real" relationship: Incentives results that produce relationships that last exactly long enough to be considered a match/hookup/"real" relationship.
- One-time upfront: Incentivize finding the best available candidate ASAP in order to save server costs.
- Monthly, cost propositional to success rate: Optimizing for some specific length of relationship that someone calculated to be optimal.
There are most likely other funding possibilities, and I've most likely misunderstood some rule of economics. Note that none of these optimize specifically for happiness in relationships, only for longevity.
This is a purely anti-user move. No user gains anything by it, this actually helps phishing sites. Oh, and it happens to help Google's AMP effort, which can now pretend to be the original site even more effectively. Time to get everyone to use Duck Duck Go, and to get rid of those Google CAPTCHAs which are an even bigger data harvesting operation than search.