“Your honor, this is a monopolist flexing.”

In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing::US v. Google kicked off this week in the District of Columbia as the Justice Department and Google squared off over the dominant search engine.

  • bugsmithEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don’t really like it, and I certainly don’t trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn’t Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

    It’s really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety…) thrown in, as Google’s results are just better.

    DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options if I want to reduce it, but I don’t have to do that with Google.

    Kagi has caught my attention lately. I’m going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I’m not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the true cost of running a search company). Obviously, privacy is out the window as it’s paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I’m not really getting that anywhere else either, I’m more hoping that it will just provide good search results.

      • bugsmithEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        I do, via the !s bang. I was thrown off of using Startpage exclusively after the System1 acquisition. Since then, I’ve also experienced more downtime with Startpage than I find acceptable. It is nice getting the Google results via another interface though.

      • Thom GrayEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Unless we want Google to complete the “Death Star” and totally control the Internet, I think using services based on their products still perpetuates Alphabet dominance of the web. I use Firefox based browsers and search engines like DDG and Brave that don’t depend on Google’s code base to exist.

    • Thom GrayEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I don’t blindly stand behind any of these companies, but I believe DuckDuckGo is privately held, so it doesn’t have shareholders clamoring for the greediest and most deceptive business practices like Alphabet and Microsoft. I know Brave is controversial, but lately their search engine has been working well as backup for DDG, so I can avoid Google all together.