Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.

The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.

  • Greg Clarke@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    Google has become an awful company. I’m in the process of degoogling but it’s not easy given all the monopolies they have created

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 days ago

        Use them at no benefit to them. Obviously, don’t buy yt premium.

        I use Grayjay. Get it from the grayjay website and sideload it instead of through the apk store. Updates come quicker. It gives you commercial free YouTube, pretty much all the premium features, and let’s you download vids.

        • el_abuelo@programming.dev
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          7 days ago

          My grayjay hasn’t worked for a couple of weeks now, “block attempt detected” warning and then the video starts over.

          • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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            7 days ago

            I had a similar issue, but I google searched and found a setting I had to redo or change and it’s worked fine since then. Afraid I don’t remember what I had done. It was like a month ago and late, but it’s been problem free for me.

        • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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          7 days ago

          I already use Tubular, and I have been using NewPipe (or the fork Tubular) since the very first alpha.

          Grayjay doesn’t work well for me since I’m subscribed to over 1000 creators and they force rate limiting over 200, which makes it completely unusable for my usecase.

          • pooky55@lemm.eeOP
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            8 days ago

            It’s not so bad and you can follow some normal people or channels - there is whole spectrum of channels and the video upload is not bad and you can listen to videos in background but they don’t have any mobile app.

    • Korkki@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        8 days ago

        No, that’s an insane option. Look at how the government runs other services and ask yourself if you really want Google to be run that way:

        Do you really think the government is capable of running something like Google if they can’t even keep up with tax returns?

        No, nationalizing it would likely just make things worse, breaking them up makes a lot more sense.

        Government should stick to things where it can actually make a difference a commercial company can’t, like welfare programs, policing, etc.

        • Facebones@reddthat.com
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          8 days ago

          On today’s episode of “underfund government agencies so we can argue govt doesnt work and privatization is bae”

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            7 days ago

            Are you suggesting that this time would be different? The reason things are inefficient and crappy isn’t particularly relevant, just that they are and adding to that mess isn’t going to suddenly make it better.

            • Facebones@reddthat.com
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              7 days ago

              I said what I said. Properly fund shit and put people in charge that understand it instead of politically charged appointees.

              Big tech has done nothing but hemmorage money and make everything worse, why are you celebrating them instead of calling it busted when they do it?

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                7 days ago

                Big tech has been making money hand over fist, especially Google. If you want to know how Alphabet (Google’s parent) is doing financially, you can look at their financial statements, but basically they’re making tons of profit.

                The thing that’s busted isn’t that they’re unable to turn a profit, but because they’re so obsessed with profit that they’re breaking anti-trust law. Breaking them up should help competitors and eliminate a lot of the issues that have been created due to their anti-competitive behavior. Nationalizing it would likely just result in the service sucking after a few years, and may encourage lawmakers to protect it from competitors. It’s a lot easier to break up a commercial company than a government agency.

                • Facebones@reddthat.com
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                  7 days ago

                  Google has, Google isn’t the only tech company.

                  Google also wouldn’t survive being broken up. Their entire business model revolves around the strangleholds they have. Somebody would absolutely pick up the search product if it went under and I’d rather it be public than owned by another Musk who will just decide that only fox news and breitbart can be displayed on the first few pages.

                  Some things SHOULD be publicly owned, in everybody’s best interests.

                  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                    7 days ago

                    Some things, sure, but I think that list of things is fairly small and completely unrelated to services Google provides. I don’t want government anywhere near something as important to free speech as search.

                    And I think Google would be just fine, they’d just have to adjust their business model a bit. That means they’d probably have to raise/introduce prices to certain services to make them viable. For example:

                    • YouTube - my understanding is this is largely unprofitable as-is, so they’d need to renegotiate contracts with creators, and perhaps narrow focus on the type of content they host
                    • search - other search engines manage to turn a profit at much smaller scale and with far few integrated products (Brave search, Bing, Mojeek, etc), so this wouldn’t be an issue
                    • advertising - revenue per impression may go down since they wouldn’t have the wealth of data that search and other services provide, but it’s still absolutely viable
                    • gmail/drive - would probably need to reduce free storage quotas and adjust pricing tiers to encourage more people to pay
                    • Android - I assume the Play store is already insanely profitable; if the Play store is separated, they’d have to charge more to manufacturers for Android SW updates

                    Each of Google’s businesses is absolutely viable on its own, but if they can’t be sold together, they’d have to adjust some prices down and other prices up, which is good for competition.

        • Korkki@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.

            • Korkki@lemmy.world
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              7 days ago

              Not on it’s own, I recall. it carries it’s weight inside google’s ecosystem, but outside it, it wouldn’t make economic sense to keep that many servers streaming video all over the world with just add youtube internal add revenue and premium subscriptions. The data harvesting is a big part of it.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        It is good. The problem I’m having is they still gobble tons of data from any Android device that hasn’t been rooted and locked down.

        For example the Google Play store, the main source of apps for everyone, grabs what when and how of everything one touches in there, and they squirrel it away with all your other juicy information to craft the better advertising weapon.

        Yes, F-droid, apkmirror, others. But the point is it’s not enough to just limit interactions with official Google apps, the platform itself has to be locked down via a custom rom (which is its own, different set of challenges).

        • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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          8 days ago

          Well… Tech nerds lead the charge on making Google who they, gonna need toead the charge on unwinding this clown as corporate regime.