Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Google illegally maintains monopoly over internet search, judge rules (apnews.com)

submitted 3 months ago by gytrash@feddit.uk to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

108 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies..."

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[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn't remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 months ago

If one company is stifling competition, then competitors don't have the resources required to innovate.

When you look at competitors offerings, you're seeing the best they can do in a google-dominated market.

Real competition benefits users.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Google forces exclusive deals and its popularity means people optimize for it. Other search engines don't have a chance when people expect Google.

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The biggest one these days is Reddit but there are also cases historically

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 months ago

Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn't seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.