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Google recently announced its shitty new search feature - Google Search Plus Your World. It provides results from google+, Google’s new social network experiment after the failure of wave.

They are late at joining the ‘social network game’ so they’re pushing hard on it, trying to integrate Google plus in any other Google service even when it destroys used features as it happened with social sharing in Google reader.

Monopoly

Google is 10 years late in the social networking game so they’re trying to use their monopoly in search to pull this new service (but they’re also spamming it in any other Google service). The problem that Google doesn’t seem to understand is that doing so they’re ruining their main business - web search.

We can’t deny that Google provides great search results, they’re the best and its monopoly is well-deserved because they provide better and more relevant results than anyone else but people don’t take much time to switch to a better alternative, we’ve seen that with the iPhone. Just 5 years ago the phone industry was controlled by companies like Palm and RIM, now they have -in aggregate- less than 10% of the phone market.

I’m not saying that Google is on the road of the decline, but they’ve done a huge step forward in that direction. Maybe they won’t lose a huge customer basis, but if they keep going this way the will surely lose the most important ones: (tech-)writers, bloggers, journalists,…

Duckduckgo

In the last few months more and more people, including shawn blanc and ben brooks switched to a search engine called duckduckgo.

This_switch_ was caused also by this new search feature - Google Search Plus Your World, but that’s not the main reason.

It’s Google’s new privacy settings 1.

Google will be able, from March, 1st, to share all your data including your search history to their customers, Their real customer - theadvertisers.

As ilifehacker said:

If if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

There’s a bigger problem than advertisers: All your personal data are stored on Google’s servers and the government can ask for them at any time for a valid Any reason.

That’s The privacy policy of duckduckgo:

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell.

So clear, so simple.

Give it a try.

Update: Also David sparks on Mac Sparky switched to duckduckgo a month ago, here are few comments about the switch:

It’s been about a month since I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo for my search engine. This far in, I’ve found the search results to be slightly slower (not enough to matter) and sometimes different from Google’s. In some case different means worse. In other cases, different means better. It feels like a wash to me.
Overall, I’m glad to have made the switch and don’t see myself going back. I like the clean way DuckDuckGo presents results and did I mention DuckDuckGo’s privacy policy?


  1. Another strong point in favor of duckduckgo is ‘the information bubble’. Google has all your data saved on their server and they use it to provide “better results”, well done you would say, actually no. They’re using that data to provide results that they think you would like. If you randomly pick 10 people and you made them search the same thing you won’t find anyone with the exact same result. Showing things that we like is a pro, but the con is that we don’t have an impartial view of reality. 

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Valentino Urbano


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Valentino Urbano

iOS Developer, Swift, Writer, Husband

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