DOJ finally posted that “embarrassing” court doc Google wanted to hide::Google exec said users get hooked on search engine like “cigarettes or drugs.”
Roszak’s notes also said that because users got hooked on Google’s search engine, Google was able to “mostly ignore the demand side” of “fundamental laws of economics” and “only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales.”
This is textbook phase one of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”. Users don’t have much of a choice, so make it as shitty as you are able without them leaving? Check. Phase two (which Google is no doubt also doing) is to do give the same treatment to the advertisers.
The pressure to maximize profits ensures that all private entities performing this sort of connection role on the internet will eventually become enshittified. There’s no escape (under capitalism).
Hooked on a search engine? What a f****** nut job. You want to hook me on a search engine? How about give me the results I ask for without ads, without manipulation, without spam, then don’t take that information of what I searched for and apply it to me until the end of days and sell it to everyone and their brother.
And honestly I can’t see anyone in the company watching that presentation and not coming up with the same overall feelings.
results I ask for without ads, without manipulation, without spam, then don’t take that information of what I searched for and apply it to me until the end of days and sell it to everyone and their brother
LOL.
My selfhosted searxng is close.
Willing to pay cash? Check out kagi.
I’m a cheapskate but I’m getting closer every month.
So long as I can de-shittify existing search engines with extensions and ad blockers, I’d have a hard time justifying that expense.
…but I also do not have faith that that “so long as” will remain something I can rely on, so kagi is definitely on my radar just from the few posts I’ve seen about it here.
Yeah the people who pay rave that it’s better, but there’s a well known effect that you generally think the thing with a higher sticker price is higher quality.
Investing into something - with money or otherwise - will develop a bias as well. I vaguely recall reading a study for a sociology class I took ages ago about auto-manufacturers trying to fine-tune their ad targeting. They gathered and were crunching data on which types of people paid the most attention to their ads, and one of the unexpected findings was that is was the people who had already purchased the vehicle being advertised. Apparently there’s this subconscious thing we do where we keep looking for value in decisions we’ve already made, so folks would see the ads, tie it to their own car, and think “yeah, that’s the good stuff!” lol.
Our brains are weird.
So, what are you gonna do? Switch search engines? Most of the population don’t even think there’s a choice.
Currently self-hosting Searx-ng. Goes out through a VPN. It’s a meta search, so I my highest rankings are results that come back from multiple vendors. Pretty much eliminates sponsored results.
I haven’t gotten around to putting it into my reverse proxy, so when I am out I just use duck duck go. Their results aren’t as good, but they work.
Hooked. Like social media sites? Wouldn’t know anything about that!
Google would quite literally know nothing about it. Look how many they’ve created and tanked 🤣
Apparently they can’t even get hooked on their own products!
One?
Lolnaw…
- Buzz
- Wave
- Google+ (1,2 & 3)
- Allo
- You could include the myriad chat apps, but those could be argued to be more about direct communication at their core
And those are just the Google branded ones. They’ve had a dozen other smaller acquisitions of services they tried to infuse cash into and keep going that failed as well.
You ever sucked some dick for search results?
I got some cheeseburgers
Man’s gotta eat
Way of the road
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The document in question contains meeting notes that Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, “created for a course on communications,” Bloomberg reported.
Sealing Roszak’s testimony made it harder for the public to understand the context of the document, Mehta worried.
Part of the DOJ’s case argues that because Google has a monopoly over search, it’s less incentivized to innovate products that protect consumers from harm like invasive data collection.
A Google spokesman told Bloomberg that Roszak’s statements “don’t reflect the company’s opinion” and “were drafted for a public speaking class in which the instructions were to say something hyperbolic and attention-grabbing.”
According to Bloomberg, Google lawyer Edward Bennett told the court that Roszak’s notes suggest that the senior executive’s plan for his presentation was essentially “cosplaying Gordon Gekko”—a movie villain who symbolizes corporate greed from 1987’s Wall Street.
The debate over how much of Roszak’s notes could be shared with the public ended with an agreement between the DOJ and Google on all trial exhibits.
The original article contains 537 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Ah how three mighty have fallen.
I remember the days when Google was optimizing their page to save 1/10th of a second of load time, when they publicly stated their goal was to get people off of Google as quickly as possible and on to whatever they were looking for. That was back in the ‘don’t be evil’ days. Those days appear to be long gone.
