David Shepardson and Bryan Pietsch for Reuters:
Attorneys general from 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have opened an antitrust probe into big tech companies that focuses on Alphabet’s Google, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton formally announced on Monday.
Paxton leads the probe, he said, which will focus on Google’s advertising business. California and Alabama are not part of the investigation.
States on Monday formally requested documents from Google on its advertising business, Paxton said… Google specifically has faced accusations that its web search service, which has become so dominant that it is now a verb, leads consumers to its own products at the cost of competitors. There have also been complaints of potentially anti-competitive behavior in how it runs the advertising side of its business.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, this is the search engine market share for August 2019 (source: StatCounter):
• Google: 92.37%
• Bing: 2.63%
• Yahoo: 1.8%
• Baidu: 1.1%
• DuckDuckGo: 0.55%
With this unprecedented power, platforms have the ability to redirect into their pockets the advertising dollars that once went to newspapers and magazines. No one company should have the power to pick and choose which content reaches consumers and which doesn’t. — MacDailyNews, November 9, 2017
If you haven’t already, give DuckDuckGo a try! https://duckduckgo.com
I’ve tried to break free from Google, I really have. But DDG just isn’t as good yet.
Keep trying. DDG gets better the more people use it.
I find the Google results as full of fluff as any search now.
Remember when .gov and .org websites showed up in search engines? Yeah those days are gone.
Anytime you query a brand name product and the actual manufacturer website of that product is buried far down the list, I know Google is playing its sheep for fools. A wise man wants to see official information before the pile of reseller sites, gamed rating sites, Utube videos, and thinly veiled company-sponsored review sites, many of which are shady operations suggesting Chinese junk knockoffs of the real product you’re looking for. And then there is the travel search mayhem. Search for any city expecting to find the homepage for that city, and instead you’ll be inundated with a ton of travel business crap with fake Yelp reviews and links to a gazillion hotel aggregator outfits.
Gotta remember to pay those bribes or this kind of stuff happens. (Currently binging The Sopranos)
Good!
Next…
hi