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Google's CEO Says Tests of Censored Chinese Search Engine Have Been Very Promising (theverge.com)
At Wired's 25th anniversary summit, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company's internal tests developing a censored search engine in China have been very promising. Pichai is strengthening his commitment on the controversial search engine, codenamed Project Dragonfly, saying the potential to expose the world to more information is guiding Google's push into China. "We are compelled by our mission [to] provide information to everyone, and [China is] 20 percent of the world's population." Wired reports: Pichai was careful to emphasize that this was a decision that weighs heavy on the company. "People don't understand fully, but you're always balancing a set of values," in every new country, he said. Those values include providing access to information, freedom of expression, and user privacy. "But we also follow the rule of law in every country," he said. This is a reversal of a decision from about eight years, when Google pulled its search engine, which was also censored, from the Chinese market. Pichai said the time had come to reevaluate that choice. "It's a wonderful, innovative market. We wanted to learn what it would look like if we were in China, so that's what we built internally," Pichai said. "Given how important the market is and how many users there are," he added, "we feel obliged to think hard about this problem and take a longer-term view." In response to the company's decision to back out of a project with the Department of Defense, nicknamed Project Maven, to build AI and facial recognition technology, and the employee concerns surrounding it, Pichai said: "Throughout Google's history, we've given our employees a lot of voice and say. But we don't run the company by holding referendums. It's an important input. We take it seriously." On the issue of Maven, however, "it's more also the debate within the AI Community around how you perceive our work in the area."
After all, they can't let those pesky voters see just anything now, can they. They might not vote for the Dems.
Presumably DDG pays Google for the use of their search API anyway.
No, they actually don't.
DDG's business model is to sell ads on its platform, so you have to trust that they won't use those to spy on you or infect your machine with malware. Unfortunately they seem to be using the Bing and Amazon ad networks.
They use bing, and curate the ads served. Something fundamentally different, remember when companies had their own ad hosts and only allowed specific ads? Yeah...those were the days before giant ad networks spewing malware. Oh, the other way is via affiliate links aka you click on a product they get a cut. They also don't follow you around the internet like a crazy ex that just can't seem to let go.
Om, nomnomnom...