Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.
Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?
The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.
You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.
For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.
Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.
Don’t they, err, already do this?
I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.
There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.
I once tried to install Linux around then, not long after ISA cards with Plug n Play became a thing.
Linux: So now to even pretend to get the card to work you have to download and run a tool to generate a config file to feed to another tool so you can then install the driver and get basic functionality from the card (which is all that’s available on Linux). Except the first tool doesn’t generate a working config file - it generates a file containing every possible configuration your hardware supports hypothetically having and requires you to find and uncomment the one you want to actually use. Requiring you to manually configure the card and thus kinda defeating the point of Plug n Play (though I guess that configuration was in software, not by setting jumpers).
Same card in Windows at the time: Install card, boot Windows. Card is automatically identified and given a valid configuration, built in drivers provide basic functionality. Can download software from manufacturer for more advanced functionality.
That soured me on Linux for a long time. Might try it again sometime soon just to see what it’s like if nothing else. ProtonDB doesn’t have the most positive things to say about my Steam collection, and I imagine odds are worse for stuff not available on Steam.
Stromfront is a literal white supremacist neo-Nazi forum. As in the logo on their website has “White Pride World Wide” written around a Celtic cross. If you’ve ever seen The Boys, that site is the reason the character Stormfront is named that, and she’s positively nice compared to some of what goes on in that forum.
The whole point is to liken Reddit to Stormfront, and it’s connected to hexbear because ChapoTrapHouse is on hexbear and ChapoTrapHouse is more or less the only lefty subreddit to ever be punished under rules against brigading, calls for violence, etc. They were quarantined and later banned. So since Reddit banned an explicitly lefty sub that one time, that makes Reddit akin to a white supremacist hate forum.
You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?
Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.