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EU Android Google IT Technology

Bing Loses Out To DuckDuckGo in Google's New Android Search Engine Ballot (theverge.com) 37

Google announced last week the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place. From a report: EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android's home screen search box. A dedicated app for that provider will also be installed on their device.
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Bing Loses Out To DuckDuckGo in Google's New Android Search Engine Ballot

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  • by mosel-saar-ruwer ( 732341 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:35PM (#59617320)
    Google == (((Sergey Brin & Larry Page)))

    DuckDuckGo == (((Gabriel Weinberg)))

    DDG is simply the Mossad's Plan B for the not-so-idiotic goyim who realize that J00gle is Plan A [but who are still too stoopid to realize that DDG is Plan B].

    Bing, though - a goyim like Bill Gates?

    The Mossad created the FSF in order to destroy that particular goyische thorn in their side.
  • by bartle ( 447377 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:35PM (#59617324) Homepage
    Compare their search results. It's pretty clear that behind the scenes, DuckDuckGo is querying Bing's search engine and returning their results. I'm guessing the draw is not the quality of the results but whether the user is being tracked.
    • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:54PM (#59617388) Homepage
      And having used them for a white (I know, horrors) Bing isn't that bad. I say this as a lifelong Microsoft hater. I have the official membership badge and hat. But not only is Bing not that bad, it also has a really good video search for porn, and it lacks the "curated" search results. By which I mean censored, because Google can and does penalize sources that don't agree with it to page 137 of results, and elevate sources that agree with it, to the point of them coming up very high on the first page on search results that match the politics of Google. It's a wonderful relief not being subject to that.
      • by Kryptonut ( 1006779 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:23PM (#59617470)

        But not only is Bing not that bad, it also has a really good video search for porn

        SOLD!

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @06:14PM (#59617618) Homepage

        Why 'hate' M$, they are a shite abusive company and should not be trusted, hate does not come into it. Just avoid them as much as possible, they are unreliable, not to be trusted, privacy invasive and getting worse. Although Google has managed to overtake them in the evil stakes, that does not make M$ any better.

        Right for now, well, promote https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com] where you go. Let's try to push it past Google "do all the evil you can legally get away with" (corrupt democracy to favour your corporation, not a problem regardless of consequences).

      • by Joe Jordan ( 453607 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @08:05PM (#59617932) Journal
        Ehh just checked, and DDG is definitely returning unique search results.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @04:12AM (#59618600) Homepage Journal

        Actually Bing is much more heavily censored than Google is. Try entering search terms in Chinese characters and you will find that they extended the censorship they use in China to the entire world. Google is blocked in China because they don't censor for the CCP, where as Bing is fully accessible.

        Bing nerfed it's image search too after being criticised for showing child pornography a few years ago. Now it's next to useless. By the way, the best image search is Yandex. As well as being less censored it does facial recognition.

        The other big problem with Bing is that it's losing the war on SEO. The first page of results is always full of spam.

      • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @09:35AM (#59619122)
        If you make a Microsoft Rewards account, you accumulate points for using Bing that can be converted (at an admittedly low rate) into Amazon credit. For someone like me who doesn't really care that Microsoft knows I'm searching for FF14 and WoW stuff, that's a great deal. And if you do care, you can just not take advantage of it and be no worse off than using Google.

        Granted, if you really want to protect your privacy, you need to use a privacy-respecting search engine, which is why I usually swap over to DDG for things I don't want MS to know I'm searching for, but those searches are usually a minority. Most of the time I'm searching for game stuff or material related to whatever problem I'm trying to solve at the moment.
    • by sunami88 ( 1074925 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:27PM (#59617482)

      It's pretty clear that behind the scenes, DuckDuckGo is querying Bing's search engine and returning their results

      Correct, in a sense. From the first paragraph on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

      [...]generating those results from over 400 individual sources, including crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex.

      So it's not just Bing, but Bing is indeed one source.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13, 2020 @06:55PM (#59617738)

      DuckDuckGo is garbage for finding anything. StartPage is better but there is still nothing that beats Google, unfortunately.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:38PM (#59617332)

    Both of them.

  • by DigitAl56K ( 805623 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:38PM (#59617334)

    ... the solution to an anti-trust suit born out of Google tying it's engine and browser to its OS, is to instead have other companies directly bid what they think the market value for those users are instead, thus handing Google their worth anyway?

    Interesting play, EU.

  • by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:56PM (#59617398)

    So Microsoft won only in the UK, which is going out of the EU, which probably means this rule won't even apply.

    • by Computershack ( 1143409 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:44PM (#59617526)
      Whilst we leave on 31st of January under the Withdrawal Act all current and new EU laws and regulations up to the end of the transition period on 31st Dec 2020 are written into UK law on that date. And then we can start to go through them, amend the amendable, bin the shite.
  • by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @04:57PM (#59617402)

    The “choice screen” is being introduced by Google following an antitrust ruling from the European Union last March. Google was fined a record $5 billion by EU regulators, who said the company had to stop “illegally tying” its search engine and browser to its mobile OS.

    The search engines shown to new users will vary for each EU country, with the selection decided based on a “fourth-price” auction system. Each provider tells Google how much it’s willing to pay the company every time a user selects their product as the default. The three highest bidders are then shown to users, with the chosen provider paying Google the amount offered by the fourth-highest bid. This process is repeated every four months.

    What a terrible ruling if competing search providers have to pay Google to appear as an option.

    • by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:25PM (#59617476) Journal

      The “choice screen” is being introduced by Google following an antitrust ruling from the European Union last March. Google was fined a record $5 billion by EU regulators, who said the company had to stop “illegally tying” its search engine and browser to its mobile OS.

      The search engines shown to new users will vary for each EU country, with the selection decided based on a “fourth-price” auction system. Each provider tells Google how much it’s willing to pay the company every time a user selects their product as the default. The three highest bidders are then shown to users, with the chosen provider paying Google the amount offered by the fourth-highest bid. This process is repeated every four months.

      What a terrible ruling if competing search providers have to pay Google to appear as an option.

      I disagree. Note that I work for Google, but that has nothing to do with why I disagree. I disagree because the ruling was about bundling, and the requirement is that Google unbundle, i.e. behave the same way they would if Android/Chrome were made by a company that doesn't have a search engine.

      So, look at what Mozilla does: Mozilla solicits bids from search engine vendors and whoever pays them the most gets to be the default. Opera, etc. does the same. I'll bet Apple does the same with Safari, though I don't know for sure. This is just a slightly more sophisticated version of that.

  • The summary is crap (Score:5, Informative)

    by alexo ( 9335 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:17PM (#59617456) Journal

    The summary completely neglects to mention the most important aspect: this was an auction, and the search engines that "won" were the ones that offered the highest payment per user to Google. It has absolutely nothing to do with the quality or the popularity of the search engine.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13, 2020 @09:07PM (#59618098)

      Payment per user? So if they have 10 users they can afford to pay quite a bit per....

      • by Rhipf ( 525263 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @12:28PM (#59619882)

        They don't actually pay what they bid though. My understanding is that the companies bid on what they think the per person rate should be. The highest bidder gets to be the top search engine but...

        they only have to pay whatever the 4th place bidder bid (e.g. the top bidder bid $10 per user and the 4th place bidder bid $1 per the top bidder gets to have their search engine be the default at $1 per user).

    • by grep -v '.*' * ( 780312 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:20AM (#59618428)

      the search engines that "won" were the ones that offered the highest payment per user to Google. It has absolutely nothing to do with the quality or the popularity of the search engine.

      Au contraire, it has EVERYTHING to do with the quality of the search engine. If you don't have money, you can't afford the bandwidth, storage, or processing power to do general internet searches. And if you don't have, can't process, or send out requested data then it doesn't really matter HOW GOOD your search algorithm is. If you DO have money, then you can always improve on it.

      Google's just the _Totally_ _Innocent_ _Victim_ here, honestly asking for advertisement dollars from fledgling indexers so they can provide exposure to their lowly competition. Y'know, so Google doesn't have a monopoly on search so that it can continue to do anything it wants. If Google hadn't made them available to you, how else would you have known about them?

      And God Forbid that anyone actually looks at or learns how to use the Options section in software. Just go the Gnome route: Here is it, we've removed absolutely all of the controls and options for your convenience. You wanted to all be different by all looking the same, right? /Sarcasm

  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @05:22PM (#59617468)
    Seriously, has Bing ever been relevant?
  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @06:04PM (#59617572)

    The choice is really between two search engines not four.

    Yahoo = Bing
    DDG = Bing
    Bing = Bing
    Google = Google

  • by Socguy ( 933973 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @08:57PM (#59618060)
    Duck Duck Go doesn't track and it's not as good a Google. But it's good enough and it doesn't track so I use it!
  • by Kaenneth ( 82978 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @11:52PM (#59618366) Journal

    So when will McDonalds be required to offer Burger King fries with their combo meals?

  • by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @06:59AM (#59618794) Homepage

    March 1 2020?

    I got this choice months and months ago, my phone wasn't new and already quite a while in use. Then one day when wanting to use search i got this popup asking me what my default search provider should be. I read about the ruling, so i figured they put it in place.

    I selected DDG.

Almost anything derogatory you could say about today's software design would be accurate. -- K.E. Iverson

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