21–30 of 549 posts
I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.
Nah, two or more search engines all being the product of US big techs won't solve the problem. EU should have its own search engine. They should subsidize this effort and have Google pay for it.
Absolutely love this quote from the article: > Paraphrasing Monty Python: “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall. I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search busine…
If the answer is privacy, that’s a niche already occupied by DDG.
What other ways could a web search engine differentiate itself to be worth customers using more than one?
The problem with monopolies is when the company decides to e.g. price gouge or gets lazy by not innovating. Companies can only really get away with this and survive when they have a monopoly.
Monopolies also kill competing products and deter other companies from even attempting to enter the market - so you might love the product of a monopoly right now but if the monopoly had never existed an even better product could be available today.
I think people generally love Google's products but it would be good to see more competition. The upfront investment you would need to create a competing search engine is prohibitively high so most companies aren't going to attempt to make their own.
93% of a search engine market. Ok. But a search engine is only a smart part of the whole, where and how we get the information. If you slice your market in convenient ways, you can make any company a monopoly.