This partially emerges from the lively discussion that’s been going on in the comments for today’s article, Conservatives Must Fight Big Tech or Lose, but also from conservatives touting DuckDuckGo.
I use DuckDuckGo myself or one of the similar alternatives. But there’s a right reason and a wrong reason to use it. The right reason to use DDG is privacy. But it’s not an alternative to Google because while DDG has its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, its results mostly rely on Google, Bing, and a few specialized search engines.
Using DuckDuckGo and claiming that you’re not using Google anymore is like watching a pirated CNN broadcast and claiming you’re not dependent on the media.
DuckDuckGo solves the problem of Google having information about you. It doesn’t solve the problem of Google defining what the internet looks like by controlling 80% of search.
DDG cleans up some of Google’s more outrageous biases, its preference for corporate media sites, etc. For example, Google blacklisted my articles a while back, and if you search for Daniel Greenfield on Google, my Front Page articles won’t come up, they will on DDG. But it’s still the equivalent of me reblogging a CNN article.
There’s a huge difference between the pre-Google monopoly when there were a wide variety of search engine options and today when there’s basically two, Google and Bing, along with some specialized and international search engines.
DDG is currently arguing that Google’s monopolistic power through Android is dangerous and that’s expected to play a role in the DOJ’s anti-trust assault on Google, and that’s great. The only thing that will fix the Google monopoly is breaking up the company.
Leave a Reply