The US v. Google antitrust case may be frustratingly shrouded in secrecy, but occasionally we get some fun nuggets. The quote above comes from an internal email sent by Google’s Jim Kolotouros, VP of Android Platform Partnerships. “Chrome exists to serve Google search,” he writes. “If it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”
Move to Firefox (or any non-Chromium browser really) and use a different search engine that’s not run by a giant corporation. I use DuckDuckGo.
Doesn’t DuckDuckGo just use Bing and suppress search results?
It supposedly uses Bing and several other search results while suppressing content mills. I’m open to using anything though, DDG just happens to be the more privacy oriented one I went with.
Didn’t they suppress Russian related search results?
Good thing too, no need for “info” from that troll factory calling itself a country.
Your understanding of the troll factories is quite off. According to the ex-employees and the publicly available social media accounts data, the average troll paid by the Russian government is someone who poses as a person living in the West and even uses some Western talking points, making them hard to distinguish from a real person. They also get people in the West out to protest for BLM and guns rights, for and against immigration, and other causes with the goal of facilitating discord, which then creates headlines in the Western media, not Russia Today as you’d expect.
And yet those russian sources keep getting pushed by those same trolls… Strange…
Any examples?
Have you been on the internet?
So, you’re okay with being under the control of a company only showing you what they want.
What I want is no Russian trolls or misinformation, so yes.
So, you are okay with your search provider deciding what is misinformation and what is not.
Seems like a slippery slope to me.
As long as they’re objectively deciding then yes. There really isn’t a decision to be made; information is either misinformation or not misinformation. There is no grey area for subjectivity. There is no room for opinion or interpretation. As long as they maintain a track record of being objective then it’s good.
Considering how far gone people hopped up on misinformation have become over the past decade, you’re looking in the wrong direction about where the slippery slope is.
There are simple, objective standards to suss out good information from bad. We have seen that people are simply not good about filtering it out for themselves and will fall for misinformation purposefully if it serves their prejudices. Why not have an independent body verifying if information is worthwhile or not?
All the people who bring up this nonsense are usually the types who are mad stuff like “COVID is a liberal hoax” is being suppressed.
When they are objective and transparent about it, then yes.
Nope!
Yes, so use SearX which uses all the search engines, including google, duckduckgo and Bing, but shares 0 of your data with them.
Yeah but you either have to use some rando’s instance or host your own. That’s not exactly safe or easy to use.
It’s a nice project though.
You can always change instance every few searches in case there is logging
Who tf is going to do that when you can just use an alternative?
I do it. There is no alternative.
Yes.
Switch to brave browser & brave search completely.It’s independent.
I’d rather put a microphone in the toilet and listen to you take a dump.
That’s a big negative.
Brave is chromium
Or just pay Kagi. If you’re not paying they’re gonna have to get their money somewhere, and search is expensive.
if it’s not open source I don’t trust it
I started getting targeted ads on DDG this morning. They were targeting my search terms, and Microsoft had bought the targets. Getting Edge ads in DDG is a hard stop for me.
Sadly the default one of google 🫠
Perhaps I’ll switch to Firefox when they actually start getting things together and start implementing the things people ask for instead of actively removing functionality deemed “too complicated”