A Deepness of Thought Pat's Blog

Google is not your friend. Google is not your friend; Google is a deceptive and predatory monopoly advertiser. Google started out as a search engine. It was not the first. Before Google, there was Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, Lycos and several others. Google will try to convince you it was somehow better than the others, that they had algorithms that made search results more relevant, but this is simply not true. Google eliminated its competitors by out spending them for market share. Google wants you to believe they are different because it is still easy to switch to another search engine. Google needs you to think you are still getting the best search results while it is feeding you advertising. Google need to fool you in order to make money off of you. Here is an example of how Google works. I have a vacation rental cabin that I have advertised for years on a web site called Vacation Rental By Owner (VRBO.com). For many years, I paid an annual fee for my ad on VRBO. During this time, VRBO bought out all its completion but kept the competitor's brands and websites operating to give the appearance of competition. Once VRBO had bought out all the competition, they started raising their rates. Then things got nasty. They started forcing all communication between the guests and property owners to pass through their web site. They started charging outrageously large fees to both the guests and property owners. They tried to force all rent money to pass through them and then they started seizing it. Then they sold to Expedia for $3.9 billion. Expedia continues these monopoly practices in order to make enough money to pay Google. A competitor to Expedia/VRBO would have to spend vast amounts of money to Google for search placement. As a property owner, I am stuck. I no longer have any alternative to advertising through the Expedia/VRBO/Google monopoly. While Expedia/VRBO is doing the dirty work, it is Google that is making all the money. In 2016, the top two travel web sites, Expedia and Priceline, paid Google $6.1 billion for advertising. Most people using Google are totally unaware of this. When you do a search on Google for something like "vacation rental", you probably think you are getting a list of vacation rental web sites. But you are getting only sites that are paying Google for placement. Let me say this again, you are not getting a search of the web, you are getting paid advertising. It is an easy situation to fix. There are three other search engines: Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. We need to keep these alternatives to Google operating by using them. You can change your default search engine on your browser. If these last three alternative search engines go under, there may not be any replacements and Google will have full control of our web searches.

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