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Google, Which Owns Duck.com, Confuses Users Searching For Its Rival DuckDuckGo and Redirects Them Back To Google (twitter.com)
Commenting on the record $5 billion fine on Google by the European Commission, privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo said this week it welcomes the decision as it has "felt [Google's] effects first hand for many years and has led directly to us having less market share on Android vs iOS and in general mobile vs desktop." The company said: Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries. The Google search widget is featured prominently on most Android builds and is impossible to change the search provider. For a long time it was also impossible to even remove this widget without installing a launcher that effectively changed the whole way the OS works. Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension. Google also owns http://duck.com and points it directly at Google search, which consistently confuses DuckDuckGo users. "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is google," wrote security researcher Mikko Hypponen, summing up the story.
Update: Google makes amends.
Update: Google makes amends.
The other stuff sure. Amen.
But I, for one, would not for any reason think that I would find "Duck Duck Go" at duck.com ....
Yeah yeah I know: Google dropped that motto a while back, but this sounds like something Microsoft would do.
Thatâ(TM)s the definition of anti-competitive behavior. Competitiveness means succeeding on your own merits, not because you control a completely unrelated business segment.
They wouldn't be so easily confused if the DuckDuckGo landing page didn't look nearly identical to Google's landing page. Contrast to Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Startpage, Qwant, Yandex (#1 in Russia), Naver (#1 in South Korea). The only other major search engine which makes the same mistake of copying Google too closely is Baidu (#1 in China).
The current question is "What do you think of the EU decision to fine Google $5 billion?" - I would think that after reading TFA, this would change some people's minds and explain one of the reasons why the (in my opinion) the fine was justified.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I explained this one years ago here
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Obviously they don't care to undo my changes from when they bought On2/Duck.
I Googled for DuckDuckGo and was told by Google to check my privilege and go back to using Google, or else they index me as an oppressive member of patriarchy.
Sounds like anti-competitive meddling to me. This is exactly why we elected Trump, to reduce regulations and allow business to succeed rather than have government hinder them.
Sounds like anti-competitive meddling to me. This is exactly why we elected Trump, to reduce regulations and allow business to succeed rather than have government hinder them.
Oh, how right, now let's live under a russian controlled mafia council instead and be hindered only by daily street corner executions on 5th avenue, while converting the national parks to toxic waste dumps.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
No. Its what happens when one competitor wins the competition.
No, it's what happens when a company with market control breaks the law.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
MS was penalized for anti-competitive behavior after it won the desktop market
They won the desktop market by competing, and good on them for it. What they were actually penalized for was being anti-competitive in an entirely different market when they tried to leverage that win to bolster their position in the browser market.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Can someone please buy the DNS googlegooglego.com, and redirect it to duckduckgo.com?
I've been using DuckDuckGo for my main search engine. It almost completely replaces Google.
The one area where Google excels is finding things like reviews of tech on people's blogs. Even with the term 'blog', DuckDuckGo returns a lot of the typical mediocre reviews from the popular tech sites.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
But they won the Office application market by tying it to the desktop OS. And they won the desktop OS market (for Windows, that is) by cutting deals to throw it in for free along with MS-DOS, for which they already had questionable deals to require a payment on every machine they sell. That's not so different than Google's 'if you sell android on any device, you can only sell the real android on all your devices'.
But as far as search is concerned, Google had won search long before Android came along. And part of the reason for Android was to prevent Microsoft from being the OS alternative to Apple - and bundling Bing to hurt Google. So we may have ended up in a bad place, but how we got there is a long and winding road, littered with lots of bad behavior. And 'bad' is relative, since Android already provides as much or more flexibility than Windows does in terms of letting you replace the built-in default software. And OEM's are even allowed to install competing options on new devices - which Microsoft still doesn't allow...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...