The french government is not using google as its default search engine. It's symbolic but won't really affect anything
I'd argue it's a pretty strong symbolic gesture when an entire government decides not to support one of the Internets most used tools, though.
I don't know about their choice of replacement since it's apparently a French/German search engine but if it's like DuckDuckGo then it seems like a step in the right direction. Search engines should respect privacy a lot more than they do and governments should definitely not be dependent on foreign services, even if they are a service provided by an allied nation.
This is how it ends.
Not with a bang, but with a Bing.
Good, the more the internet spreads out again, the better IMO
Bing is my choice for searching for a certain type of video
they could also go one step further and forbid contracts for search engine defaulting on software distributed in France, there's an argument against monopolistic practices there.
I don't understand what you mean?
yahoo was paying for a long time to have yahoo as the default search engine on firefox, bing is the default search engine on edge/exploder, chrome defaults to google, java updates defaulted everything to yahoo+mcafee safe, mcafee updates default to yahoo, and famously google pays apple billions to ship with google defaulted on safari.
its a very opaque industry worth billions and all possible because they don't bother to prompt the user with a choice of search engine when they first start up, or worse, bury the changes under a little tick bock somewhere in a routine update.
I don't really understand what youre advocating for here.
Do you think french softwares being higher in search results in france is bad?
no I'm saying if they wanted to go a step beyond the symbolic gesture of the government not using google they could.
I see. Everyone with basic knowledge of computers uses chrome and firefox here even though edge is bundled with windows though. French made search engines are getting popular though.
I guess in an ideal world the kind of services Google provides would be all decentralized
If apple released safari on windows id migrate in a heartbeat tbh
the mac client is perfect, runs like butter
The Bing Bang
While it's definitely better to have a search engine that respects your privacy like DuckDuckGo, it's unfortunately also one of the only instances where the gathering of data actually has a measurable effect on the quality of the service.
Google is still far more likely to show you results for a search query that are relevant to you than DuckDuckGo is, unfortunately.
I don't even use Google as a search engine anymore. I switched to Ecosia (though there are plenty of alternatives). Every search under Ecosia plants a tree somewhere and they also don't hide any search results so I can easily find "watchseries" sites and whatnot when I want to watch my shows. Google filters out those results.
In my case, with a Quack.
its not the chrome its the way they bundle search engine defaults.
www.binguette.com
you kinda need a default search engine though right? I can't imagine why google wouldn't have their search engine come by default with their browser. I see your point but I don't see a solution that makes sense.
prompt the user what engine they want to use? they already prompt you for other stuff when you set up or first launch it.
I bet $500 that the vast majority of the French government will continue using Google despite this.
Is that just a meme or true>?
It's true. It will have a stroke and flood the results with the most random shit when you search for anything SFW, but search for smut and it becomes a goddamn genius with pinpoint accuracy that reads your fucking mind and gives you EXACTLY what you were looking for before you can even press enter. It's amazing.
That's why you use privacy respecting search engines primarily but when they're struggling to return what you need you can hop off them and use a less secure search for the convenience. 90% of the time DDG gives me results that are plenty useful, occasionally it doesn't. If it doesn't then I either just don't bother or, if it's important enough, I hop over to Google or another search engine for two seconds.
I only use google maps now, I haven't needed to return to google since switching to DDG.
A good decision tbh. Google has reached monopoly levels and it's only a matter of time before they start trying to smash any kind of competition whatsoever. Plus their recent political donations to Cindy Hyde-Smith might have pissed off France as well.
I occasionally need to use it when looking for programming related stuff. Usually DDG is really good about it but on rare occasions it just turns up nothing at all for seemingly no reason.
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