And it fucking blows now. You don't get shit but ads.

I dunno on one side we have Google trying to wreck the entire internet and have their ads in your face 95 percent of the time.

On the other side is Microsoft who won't leave you the hell alone when pushing they're shit tiers programs and steal defaults on a weekly basis.

To me the only solution is ruling both companies monopolys and fining them to hell and breaking them up. Both are out of control and ruining computing and the Internet.

They should have invested in their potential, their search engines. It's getting shittier almost daily.

*To stifle competition FTFY

Relying on people's apathy is a business model with eras of success. Most people have never changed a setting other than dark mode, and even then that's probably your average superuser.

This validates my stubborn commitment to DuckDuckGo, ty

Crazy that it's cheaper to do that than it is to build a product that can find recipe blogs that aren't also novels.

I happily pay $10 a month for Kagi and it’s freaking great.

I’m never going back to Google.

Hopefully the antitrust trial will end up telling Google they cannot pay anybody for preference of their browser. That would be the best outcome.

The MO of current "market leaders" is not to compete but gatekeep.

I'd gladly switch back to Google if they paid me a million dollars.

how is that not anti-competitive behaviour?

It isn't the default search engine on my browser. I'm using Kagi at the moment.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Even if it’s easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot.

Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.

It was made public after a debate earlier in the week between the two sides and Judge Amit Mehta over whether the figure should be redacted.

(Apple’s outsize percentage of the total is why that particular deal has been such a focus of the first weeks of the trial.)

Until now, these numbers have been closely held secrets, leaving competitors and analysts to speculate about exactly what it’s worth to Google to be the near-universal default choice.

He also said that he sees Yelp and Amazon as competitors and that, in such a hot market, Google has to do everything it can to stay relevant and compete.

The original article contains 519 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Approximately 16% of their revenue or 29% of their profit. I'd take that tradeoff any day.