Big tech needs to be stopped yesterday. This literally has china great firewall energy and I hate it.
Big tech needs to be stopped yesterday. This literally has china great firewall energy and I hate it.
This is one of the rare occasions I’m siding with Google. The news outlets are claiming that they should be paid money for those result snippets. It’s not because I’m caring for Google so much but because that stance hurts small search engines.
EU: You have to pay to show our news.
Google: Ok. We won’t show your news.
EU: Pikachu face
That’s what basically happened in Germany like 10, 15 years ago when the first publisher had that idea. Its news stories would still show up in search results but only the headline, not that text snippet and no thumbnail image. These results were less attractive to users, so traffic from Google to those web sites crashed down by like 80, 90 percent.
In the end the publishers gave Google a free license to reproduce text snippets and thumbnails. The tightened copyright law provision wasn’t repealed. Small search engines without leverage still (AFAIK to this day) have to pay.
So Google pays nothing, publishers earn nothing, upstart search engines can’t afford the fees, and so Google leaves even more in power because of a law not even they wanted.
But, is this bad? Google makes a crap-ton of revenue compared to publishers who are now struggling with AI content competition. They need revenue to pay journalists.
Hard to define the good guys on this one.
Note: It’s also a misrepresentation. The EU asked Google to do this.
Unless I’ve misunderstood the law, it doesn’t hurt small engines, because small search engines don’t have to pay.
https://lemmy.world/comment/13446861
It’s also worth noting that if Google has to pay, they may very well just not bother to show that information in search results which also hurts small search engines who rely on Google for part of their search Indexing.
My brother in Lemmy, this is what stopping Big Tech looks like.
Europe made laws that say that Google and others need to pay if they want to link to EU publishers. Well, maybe the price they are asking is not worth it.
You’re right about the firewall energy, but that’s simply how these laws work. The point of copyright, as well as age verification and other such laws, is to control who may access certain information.
This is the opposite of what you think it is.
Google says it’s running the “time-limited” test because EU regulators and publishers “have asked for additional data about the effect of news content in Search.” The company says it will continue to show results from websites and news publishers located outside the EU, and it will resume showing results from EU news publishers once the test ends.
This is the EU testing what it would be like if they ditched Google, not Google testing what it would be like without the EU. The test also doesn’t impact the US.
If they could at the same time make one without usa news that would be great
Users are testing the impact of not using Google.
Spoiler: non-LLM enshittified search engines return reliable results and usually are not censored.
DuckDuckGo is still the main one but the Bing results annoy me (MSN news proxied articles from other news sites)
Up and comers that are promising:
Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org/
Startpage: https://www.startpage.com/
Stumbled on this today, worth a look: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
The EU already doesn’t like what google and the like are doing, maybe this gives them proper ammo
What a good timing, honestly. In recent news of Nov 11th, Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech (TechCrunch news article):
Qwant, France’s privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index.
The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines — including and especially around generative AI — as well as reducing dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft (Bing) and Google. Both currently rely on Bing’s search APIs while Ecosia also uses Google’s search results.
Maybe it’s time for Europeans to support more European tech companies and leave USA-based tech companies behind, here is a good start: https://european-alternatives.eu/
Removing outside sources of information? There are a few countries that already do this, and they’re not great places to live.
