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Bill said
Funny, I just went on YouTube and a 2 1/2 minute ad came on first for DuckDuckGo giving about 5 reasons why you should use it instead of Google/Facebook. I was surprised YouTube, owned by Google, would run the ad. Anyway the ad gave me the impression that just using DuckDuckGo doesn't stop Google from tracking what you're doing, you have to do some other stuff which I didn't understand, but I guess as my priority is a search engine that doesn't curate my search results (one point the ad made is different people get different results from Google for the same search term, based on their "profile") I don't really care if Google knows.  

Yes, Bill, to your first point, that's because Google dominates both search-based and website-based advertising (it's less dominant on mobile device advertising, such as ads within mobile apps where Facebook has a nearly equal share). They do offer an opt out mechanism, which they purport to honour, in terms of tracking, but if you ideally delete your Google account or just sign out of your account, and delete all your Google-associated cookies (*.google.*; *.doubleclick.net and *.dclk.net), you should be fine.

To the latter point, yes, that's the very thing you don't like, though, no? That is, in their process of serving you the most relevant results to you, they're effectively filtering down the relative size of the Internet for you by a substantial amount in that you can no longer find results that would normally be less relevant to you. This is the "filter bubble" and is particularly problematic when searching for information on topics for which you wouldn't normally search because Google thinks they know you better than you know yourself so they arbitrarily exclude those results.

As for the ads, they're served automatically so they wouldn't prohibit Google alternatives from advertising on their platform (they make money either way!).

I actually think breaking up so-called "big tech" is something Democrats and Republicans could find bipartisan support on amending antitrust laws to effectively do that. I would love to see Google forced to divest DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook forced to divest its ad technology. It could still be an ad serving partner of the divested company, but it would provide for more competition, provide a firewall of sorts between the now separate businesses, and concentrate less revenue in their business.

Cheers,
Doug

Bill said
It's not the "filter bubble" I don't like, I don't care if they think they know what I want better than me, even though it's clear there are dangers in a democracy when people are sheltered from viewpoints that are not echoing their own. The real problem to me is their search engine effectively promotes specific social and political views. Thus Google is shaping our personal beliefs, views, etc. Random example: google "women can" and then "men can" and check out Google's auto-complete suggestions, plus the first few search results, then do the same for DuckDuckGo. You'll see a difference in "tone", I think.  

Right, I don't mind that as much, either, Bill, if it wasn't so fundamentally problematic. Try searching for something obscure, on a topic for which you wouldn't normally search, and sure you'll get the odd blog, probably, that might be tangentially relevant; however, because of the "filter bubble" of Google Personalized Search, that one obscure result one needs cannot be surfaced. Google definitely has certainly political views and, indeed, they were something like the biggest corporate lobbyist in recent years, spending, annually, hundreds of millions of dollars in Washington, D.C., circles, but to me those are secondary issues. Even Microsoft employees and the company itself would share similar political views to Google, but at least you don't get the "filter bubble" there.

Cheers,
Doug