Life Without Google: Australia Is Now Facing the Unthinkable

This should have a date in the title. It's from February 11th.

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I would be glad if we disabled posts from Medium content on HN. Mostly shallow anyway.

If Duckduckgo wants to stay principled, it should stand next to Google and defend the open internet.

They shouldn't claim to be principled and then take a cheap shot at Google by bowing down to Murdoch.

Yes, I get that they're a business and good on them for taking more market share but I'm not calling out Microsoft because they're not claiming to be the good guys.

Why can't google just say "to see this result you need to pay Murdoch" instead of the link ? I think that would change the company's mind rather quickly.

I think that the risk for Google is finally starting to come over the horizon. DDG, Bing, Brave? are now almost just good enough and google has not successfully diversified their revenue from search ads. The law of diminishing returns, search is only ever going to be so good. GMail isn't that great anymore. Gsuite is convenient not great. They're really open to disruption now.

I'm definately no Microsoft fanboy, quite the opposite actually. But I think they could disrupt google over the next 5 years if they lay their ducks in order.

IPFS mirror

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZQmFZsj57Gw9eHJRGgPVm1ZbSKrWir1fcoxeU...

If you're wondering how this happened it's because Ruper Murdoch (Fox news) is from Australia and controls the majority of media in Australia.

The current party in power gives him everything he asks for and more. Including subsidies for spectrum licences. In return they get very favorable coverage in the media. The second biggest party in Australia also tries to pander to him but aren't as good at it.

Murdoch sucks at technology. He bought MySpace at its peak and ran it into the ground. So all he has is old media. Old media is getting crushed by the lack of advertising revenue. The only way forward is to get Google and Facebook banned.

It's a meme to hate on the big tech companies ("Delete Facebook") but they are a million times better than a media landscape of only Sky news and associated right wing papers and radio (essentially Fox news in Australia).

You can do it Australia, destroy the myth of Google infallibility

Cynically, it could be win-win, as it could give a big advantage to people smart enough to circumvent the ban, and remove an equalizing tool for people who aren't. Sort of like how drug laws empower cartels, and gun laws arm mainly criminals, a lack of google would mean only the extra-clever would have access to that set of tools, and they could use them to find each other and organize. :)

> Software-engineering student Patrick Smith exemplifies Australia’s Google dependency. The 24-year-old from Canberra said he sometimes racks up 400 Google searches a day to help with his studies, catch up on news and look up recipes.

Look up recipes, eh? I wonder how the software development field would cope with Google being disabled.

I think we would be fine, my experience is the first 2-6 pages of any google search usually is paid advertising in some form.

A lot of information I search for has had no SEO performed on it so it gets buried in the results on the first pass.

article makes the point that Search is better in quality than most competitors but honestly I could live with Bing. Mail, Drive or Android, that would be a headache.

I also think the advantage of Google over competitors is somewhat overhyped, in particular when it comes to English search results. In foreign languages Google is in my experience way better, but in English I feel like it more comes down to learn how to Google, which is something most people don't seem to recognize is a skill.

Hardly ‘unthinkable’. More like a minor inconvenience. Yes, Google can produce search results that other engines do not, but DDG, Neeva, and even bing are fine for most things.