After a decade and flipping from Apple services & DDG-only to Google over time: I'm really annoyed by DDG's histrionics about Google, from the silly domain fight they imagined, to having blinkered arguments about how they just need a free spot in the Android setup wizard and their market share would be 20%, and they should be the one blessed search engine who doesn't have to pay.
You don't use DDG because it's better than Google. You use it because it's not Google. So of course they remind people of that constantly. And... Google can take it.
I do think it's fair to complain that duck.com redirects to google.com if you're DDG. It's also fair for Google to do it anyway! Both sides are playing their part and that's okay. (Google did sell it to DDG, though, so good on them.)
I used to work at Mozilla, and it's crazy how easily a large company can crush you by... just existing. Google can funnel people to Google Search from Android, Chrome, Gmail, etc. Google is the defacto default, and DDG has to fight desperately for anyone to care.
In this case, “!g” means search on google.com. So you get redirected to Google for that search. You can search on Startpage with !s, Wikipedia with !w, IMDB with !imdb, Amazon with !a, Google Images with !gi and so on. There are thousands of bang commands.
I've noticed that if I don't find something on ddg and go to google I usually don't find what I'm looking for there either.
And gmail, and YouTube, and gsuite, and google meet, and blogger, and in the past bundled in other installers as a drive-by installation (Flash for instance), and ... the list probably goes on.
Clearly monopolistic abuse.
Google having a decade of my search history just makes for really relevant results, even if I don’t like the company’s practices.
By redefining privacy as "we don't know you" instead of "we keep your stuff secure" their doing a clausewitz style offensive.
There's limitations to this technique and that's what they keep hitting. They're not going vertical on their beachhead, so yeah, this is what happens.
Eh, whatever, it's not like I work there so best of luck to them.
When companies offer you privacy they usually mean privacy from others, not from the company itself.
This is the hard reality of what these companies mean when they use the word privacy.
This is a business purposing claim and that's it.
When a hotel offers privacy for instance, they aren't saying they'll wear a blindfold to check you in - their data retention policy is identical - they're talking about privacy from others.
When a plane offers privacy in first class, they're not saying they'll shred your fight record after landing, it's privacy from others.
When uber is offering privacy, they're not saying you can anonymously book and crypto pay the amount, no, it's privacy from others - they know the same amount about you as any other user
I have a friend here in LA that does privacy centric medical services (hiv, drug rehab). The target demo is celebrities who are shying away from paparazzis and gossip columnists. He still has the customer list however
You mean they know the difference between privacy and security?
Granted this isn't the definition of "privacy" that corporations will use, but that's hardly an accident.
People don’t take kindly to gigantic corporations punching down on tiny little companies whose sole existence is to highlight the big corp’s lack of privacy. It’s not a good look.
Using an 'auction' model is a very easy way for Google to undermine the credibility of the anti-trust legislation.
Any upstart that would theoretically 10x better wouldn't ever be able to get any material market share.
Imagine if there were only 4 car dealerships allowed in America and everyone had to 'bid' on the distribution. There would be no Tesla.
It's tantamount to a wireless spectrum option - enormous costs involved.
I use Qwant primarily and DDG on mobile. But that's a personal choice and it works for me. I think with Chromebooks given away at schools to kids, Google will become synonymous with internet. Heck, I think Chromebooks will be synonymous with computers to them. It's what it is.
On the other hand, Google seems to be now playing the old Microsoft game of keeping competitors alive so as to keep the regulators at bay.
What do you suppose them to do? To somehow magically grab the surveillance capitalism profit with just a search engine?
Without that profit, they'll have to play some silly moves.
For anyone who has even just superficial understanding of the market mechanism behind google, you'll see that there is no space of another search engine, as long as Google still needs a search engine.
It worked when Microsoft had to implement browser choice. No reason why the spots should need to be auctioned this time.