Google’s claim that search users have choice is “bogus,” Microsoft CEO tells judge::Google's search dominance creates "vicious cycle," Satya Nadella testified.
Microsoft is hardly one to be involved in this. They're just as bad in different ways. But. As far as search goes, I think it's incredibly simple to change search engines but the problem is Google doesn't give users that choice up front when installing chrome but even if they did most people don't give a shit and will just use Google anyway.
And the fact that Chrome has a virtual monopoly on the browser market isn't going to help them either. Other than Firefox and Safari, every other browser is Chrome, and most web devs only test on Chrome.
It's IE all over again, and I'm a bit scared that iOS's app store restrictions are the only thing stopping Chrome from being a complete monopoly.
While one browser dominating is obviously bad, they at least won the market [roughly] fair and square. Unlike Microsoft which bundles it with their OS and makes it impossible to uninstall.
And harasses you ceaselessly to use it, advertises itself if you look up Chrome in it, gets reset back to default on updates for a bunch of file types.
Ever try using Google's sites in Firefox or Safari? Most people use Google services and started using Chrome because of Google hounding them to switch. Hell, every major site says to just use Chrome now, and if a real Chrome ever comes out for iPhone, people will just download Chrome because it's what they use on their computer.
DDG is Bing by proxy, has been for ages. A while back they had a controversy for having microsoft trackers or something like that, and mentioned it was some stipulation for using Bing results. But they still backed off on that anyway.
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.
Source: Wikipedia
So it's definitely not a "proxy to Bing" but it does use data from Bing.
I think it’s incredibly simple to change search engines
It's not though, because the other search engines all suck. I have changed my search engine, but I still keep going back to google all the time because it's often the only way I can actually find the page I'm looking for.
Microsoft's claim is they can't create an accurate search engine because they just don't have enough users to have reliable data on which pages should be presented to the user. Google has better results because they have more users, and they will never lose that advantage unless there is government intervention.
I don't think Google should be punished for having a superior product. If users prefer to use Google then the market has spoken. Users can still use Bing even though it sucks.