They’re deindexing ALL news, not just the union website.
Also:
The firm launched this project after European publishers demanded more information about the traffic brought to their websites by Google search as part of the implementation of the EU Copyright Directive.
A few years ago, the EU expanded copyright so that “information service providers” have to get consent to use news articles in any way. So google has obtained licenses but the publishers want more money. Google says it’s not worth it. Given how notoriously delusional copyright owners are, I believe google.
The core concepts that “they’re stealing from us by linking our content” and “they’re fucking us over by not including our content in their results” are mutually exclusive.
But somehow the same groups are consistently pushing both.
Why is the dystopia so boring
I can’t even think of a way to be devil’s advocate here: there’s no world in which this is good for anyone, even the benefits for Google are highly questionable in lost trust.
No matter what people think of legacy media and news, they’re still important and sometimes the only source of information. Seeing them missing from searches really makes you question what else they’re hiding from you.
Google also removed 10,000+ negative reviews for the Robinhood stock trading app when Robinhood prevented individual traders from buying GameStop and AMC shares (large, professional traders were still allowed to buy those stocks): https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55853568
How convenient.
Google speedrunning irrelevancy I see. Their search results are already garbage. Things like this just make me (and others) that much less likely to use them at all anymore.
Recommended FOSS search engines anyone?
Searx is the only one I know of. Most others repackage one of the big tech companies’ results.
Edit: Brave uses its own search index, but isn’t open source. Also Brendan Eich is a tremendous asshole.
Searx is a meta search engine, which uses google by default as well. If you’re going to use it, you should probably go into the settings and turn on a bunch of other search services as well.
One of the benefits is that if you use a public instance, it’ll act as an anonymiser for google so they can’t track you as well.
mojeek has been pretty cool so far. been using it on & off a few weeks now.
Established with a commitment to user privacy, Mojeek operates its own crawler-based index, setting it apart from search engines that rely on third-party search results, such as those from Google or Bing. Unlike many mainstream search engines, Mojeek does not track, profile, or personalize search results, ensuring an unbiased and transparent search experience for its users.
Great thank you, I’ll give it a try
