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from the Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle dept.
Mnuchin on Google and tech monopolies: 'You have to look at the power they have'
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Monday joined the growing chorus of government officials concerned about tech monopolies. When asked if Google is a monopoly, Mnuchin said, "These are issues that the Justice Department needs to look at seriously — not for any one company — but obviously as these technology companies have a greater and greater impact on the economy, I think that you have to look at the power they have," Mnuchin told CNBC's "Squawk Box." Mnuchin acknowledged that antitrust matters don't fall under his jurisdiction, but said someone ought to be looking.
His comments come on the heels of a "60 Minutes" segment on Google's unparalleled market share in online search. The Sunday night spot included an interview with Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder of Yelp, which he said "would have no shot" if it were being built today.
Also at Bloomberg.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 22 2018, @06:59AM (6 children)
And yes I know very well that DDG is just a front end for Google.
Perhaps it's like Reynold's Wrap: the Reynold's Aluminum Company supplies foil to other brand names, but that foil is never as thick as the Real Thing(TM).
I've never found a search engine that worked as well as Google does. Perhaps Google isn't supplying its entire index to competing search companies.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by b0ru on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:34AM (2 children)
Except that google _isn't_ good, anymore, IMHO. Not since all of this useless machine learning nonsense, at least. Their search results are gradually getting much worse and less relevant. Searching for literal strings and the like returns completely unrelated terms and _not_ the literal string at all, for example. I think the utility of them as a search engine has long since gone, and the alternatives are much better. They're an ad company, now. Nothing more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @08:27AM (1 child)
Google isn't a good search engine anymore, but that doesn't prevent them from being the best. All that takes is for the rest of them to be even worse.
Sometimes I even wonder how much money Microsoft spends to deliberately keep bing worse than Google, because it seems Google has become so bad that it should be easy to beat them even by accident.
(Not for you or I, of course, getting into the web search business requires a huge amount of servers and storage, but a search engine like Bing already has the servers and storage).
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 22 2018, @08:47AM
I speculate that Microsoft focussed on image search because they knew they couldn't win with web search.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:42AM
Perhaps? Lol, why WOULD they provide their data to the competition?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @05:56PM
no it's not, but startpage is. i try to use duckduckgo but the results suck pretty bad. startpage (when it's not having problems) returns google results without the spying.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Friday May 25 2018, @03:21AM
Doing a few searches on both would reveal pretty quickly that DDG and Google don't return the same results. And my experience is that Google doesn't return any useful results that I can't find with the Duck. But it does return page after page of irrelevant and useless results unrelated to what I was searching for.