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I have used Google, DDG, Bing and Ecosia (which is basically Bing) at this point and ingl, none of them really stands out for its results. If anything, I think DDG and Bing beat Google.
Google might be the first company to create a monopoly out money and apathy. The apathy of users who don't care about their search engine enough to even change the default.
Honeslty all search engines have gone to shit since the internet got polluted with AI-generated nonsense. Its a very hard problem to solve.
I think we should be precise. The badness began before generative AI. Generative AI makes things worse because now you are less sure when you're looking at total junk, but the junk ratio itself doesn't depend on that.
Well, its worse because its a firehose that can spit out nonsense at a rate nearly infinitely greater than a finite set of content marketing employees
You're not wrong. The mass proliferation of listacles with the same 5 advertised products stamped behind a novella of filler to appease SEO algorithms has been increasingly problematic for at least 10 years now. The issue has only been compounded with the flood of "AI" generated content and deceptive ads. I almost prefer when every website had sidebars full of blatant advertisements. Sure they were ever present, but they weren't trying to literally trick you into buying something.
What you talking about as apathy, that's not what's happening. Google has 90% or more of the search market because it's the default, because it pays to be the default, even when it's worse than alternatives. The only people who are actually apathetic are the ones who know that alternative exist, are relatively easy to switch to, are superior, and still don't. That's not the majority of users.
Have you tried Kagi?
this could be bad for mozilla / firefox.
if Google can't continue to try to increase / sustain their market share, they may stop paying mozilla to be thw default.
If they do and Firefox dies, they're getting ANOTHER Antitrust trial (hopefully).
On what grounds would that trial exist?
They're the only rendering engine? Oh because they stopped paying Mozilla? Due to a court order?
It's a complicated situation.
Because with the Chromium engine becoming the only engine, they can decide which features they want to support and which they don't, thus, combined with their ad business, they will have no opposition to Manifest v3 and can even do Manifest v3.1 or Manifest v4 which leaves adblockers completely powerless against Google Ads.
And can essentially deprecate all browser addons forever.
Right but you said "hopefully" and "can".
They haven't actually done that yet.
I do think the Manifest v2 situation is interesting, but keep in mind the Chromium/Blink engine is fully open source.
It's a trickier sell to say they have complete control when anyone is free to fork it.
default what?
Google pays Firefox a lot of cash to be the default search engine on their browser.
So now we need to make sure we keep supporting Firefox. I have a feeling that most people who can choose, do in fact coose firefox, and the majority of chrome users do so because it's on their business or student computers.
How does one support Firefox in a post Google paying them world?
I know the Mozilla foundation takes donations but it doesn't seem like those go to Firefox development. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Some of it does. But currently a lot of it doesn't because they can rely on the google funding. You can also donate volunteering time to Mozilla projects you want to support like Firefox or Thunderbird
A lot goes on the CEO's $7,000,000 salary.
Yeah. The CEO class needs to be eliminated from the upper stratus of society. If you think monetary donations to Mozilla aren't worth it as a result, I get it, and I'm right there with you. I don't donate money. But also... In the browser space if money is what you want to donate, it might be the best route.
I'm not sure, but non profits have made millions in the past, and they were supposed to pass the money on to someone else, such as the corrupt Susan G. Komen, but did not. So yeah, Mozilla could be supported by donations alone.
I thought the money was to protect their monopoly status.
That's saying the quiet part loud
It's important though because if that's the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.
Do you really think Google will give up on their pole position because of this verdict?
Default search engine on their browser?
Maybe like a one million dollar fine? That's a lot of money, you know.
Google search opens up to more corps so everyone can get in on the enshittification
Does anyone have a (link to a) good summary of the ruling and rationale?
I find the idea that "Google is the only real choice" kind of odd. There are other perfectly functional and user-friendly search engines. It's not like other monopolies, say, Youtube, where there's no realistic alternative. (I'm not denying that search is a monopoly too.)
Practices like getting Reddit to only work with Google instead of Bing are probably a big part of it.
Google pays a lot to stay the default browser.
The other search engines mostly use overlapping indexes.
Said search engines are also not anywhere near competition to Google.
Quite frankly, I can only think of 4. DDG, Ecosia, Bing, and Kagi.
Most people don't know about Ecosia or Kagi. Most people hardly even know about DDG.
I wouldn't consider YouTube as much of a monopoly because despite it being mostly the only one, from what I understand they haven't paid out to stay the only one, and don't really leverage market dominance against others (they probably do but I just don't hear about it often.) The main reason alternatives don't exist is simply because of the mass amount of data the YT needs
Kill Chrome/Chromium and Firefox by proxy. Revert back to pure html websites, live a free life.