Google evil capitalist and you won’t find Google.
But that should be no surprise as Google has apparently been skewing its searches for some time at the expense of its competitors.
The company that gives off a hip, anti-capitalist “Don’t Be Evil” vibe is unhip, capitalist and pretty evil, according to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 that was made public yesterday, March 19, by the Wall Street Journal.
The FTC’s Bureau of Competition found evidence that Google deliberately demoted rivals and boosted its own services at the expense of local businesses (that would be the little guys), shopping websites, and travel websites by changing ranking criteria and removing content from those sites.
The FTC bigwigs, however, decided not to sue Google saying that while it posed “real harm to consumers and to innovation” it “doesn’t violate the American antitrust laws.”
CNN Money speculates that the feds just thought it was going to be a tough case.
We, however, will note without comment that the company’s billionaire principles Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are all huge donors to the Democrat Party and Barack Obama, with Schmidt actually being involved in the Obama administration.
We would suggest that one use for seraches DuckDuckGo, a scrappy Paoli-based company reputed for its respect of privacy, and Firefox in lieu of Chrome as one’s browser.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for almost a year, now, and it’s just fine.
I don’t have a problem with Google skewing its searches in its own favor. It’s their search engine, and it’s like a media outlet. I just remind myself that there is a bias. You run into trouble if you forget that.
No, my problem with Google is more about their habit of capturing and storing info. That’s what drove me to research and find out about DuckDuckGo in the first place.
Fair point, but you have to ask yourself if the Obama administration would have treated a different company that did the same thing the same way.