Google At the very least, it has a rather gray legal future due to various allegations of abuse of its dominant position, both in the search engine sector and in mobile devices. One of the last people to testify in the matter was Gabriel Weinberg, the founder DuckDuckGowhich essentially said that the deals Google makes with smartphone makers and other companies stifle competition.

DuckDuckGo needs no introduction, it is the most used among non-tech giant internet search engines, with Google and Bing (Microsoft) leading the way. The US Department of Justice claims Google stifled competition by paying companies like Apple and Verizon to make its search engine the default. on many computers and smartphones.

This brings us to the $26 billion that Google paid in 2021 to remain the default search engine in web browsers and on select devices such as Apple iPhone mobile phones. The Mountain View giant argues to the Justice Department that its search engine’s position is strictly meritocratic because it is objectively better, which, to be honest, has at least a lot of truth, but that doesn’t cancel the payments that prevent mobile device and web browser manufacturers from setting another service as the default. such as Android and Mozilla OEMs.

Gabriel Weinberg, for his part, testified in Washington District Court “we hit a roadblock with Google’s contracts” when it comes to expanding the use of DuckDuckGo. Besides, he also said that Getting users to switch from Google is complicated because it’s a process that requires 30 to 50 steps. change the default setting on devices that use it by default when it can be done with a single click.

Another aspect that Weinberg points to is targeted advertising that is displayed based on the user profile created. DuckDuckGo’s founder cited internal surveys that showed his users’ biggest concern was privacy, even before the quality of search results. This may have been influenced by the improvement of alternative search engines in recent years.

It’s important to remember that DuckDuckGo is under a company and that the infrastructure that supports it doesn’t just live on air, so the search engine displays advertising as a way to generate income. However, this is only based on the search term entered by the user. This approach helped gain many users, especially after Edward Snowden revealed the massive spying programs of US agencies.

Let’s go back to competing with Google, Weinberg said DuckDuckGo only accounts for 2.5% of searches made from the United States. Because it’s a private company, it doesn’t disclose its financials, but the founder said it’s been profitable for several years and generates more than $100 million a year in revenue, which isn’t bad at all, but it pales in comparison to $283 billion in annual revenue Alphabet, the parent company of Google (formerly the parent company of Google).

Another aspect Weinberg pointed out is that DuckDuckGo is based on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. This allowed the Redmond-based giant to track some DuckDuckGo users until a researcher uncovered the matter. The founder of the alternative search engine repeated his apology in this regard, saying that his blocking of trackers now includes Microsoft.

Going a little outside the DuckDuckGo framework, it’s also worth collecting words Eric Lehman, former Google software engineerwho witnessed it Mountain View’s dominance in the search engine sector is due to the vast amount of data it collects from user clicks, which in turn is used to improve future searches faster than its competitors.. This may be related to the privacy concerns expressed by Weinberg.

An interesting fact is that according to an email sent in 2018, which was reproduced in the trial, Lehman himself recommended that Google’s competitors, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Baidu and Yandex, use machine learning to improve their search engine results and be able to better compete with the variant that has dominated this segment for decades.

A notable quote from Lehman’s email is that “large amounts of user feedback can be largely replaced by unsupervised learning from plain text.” The engineer expressed hope that search engines will largely shift from relying on user data to relying on machine learning.

We run into two problems here. First, the obstacles that Google puts up to make it easier for its competitors to gain ground, and according to Gabriel Weinberg, they also put up a lot of artificial obstacles. Second, there’s the growing concern about privacy, which on a usage level doesn’t seem to be hurting Google too much, at least for now.