According to news, Google threatens to leave Australia.
What do you think will happen?
Edit: for those that said VPN. VPN aren't free, and the links that Google redirects to will be under the VPN bandwidth, is it not?
What Happens if Google Leaves Australia?
Frankensnore on 23/01/2021 - 18:27
Last edited 24/01/2021 - 10:37 by 1 other user
Last edited 24/01/2021 - 10:37 by 1 other user
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What about Bing? 🤨
Google will never leave anyway, they're just bluffing.
@WhyAmICommenting: Or some greedy people want them to pay ABC and Murdoch by slugging them with an unfair tax?
@sjj89: They weren't originally, but now they are, I believe.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/abc-sbs-included-in-…
@darkmattersunB6c0MV: You know they pay like 1% tax right? They make billions, give nothing back, then throw a hissy fit at the idea of paying ANYTHING.
@Sxio: https://www.michaelwest.com.au/revealed-australias-top-40-ta…
Lifetime Achievement Award: Rupert Murdoch’s News Australia Holdings racked up $16bn income but paid zero tax over six years even on the $246m they declared in taxable income.
We pay for things like this
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/22/coali…And news Corp are right wing nuts impact on democracy and people being rational.
Now this is a cash grab from the government and news Corp. Google is right that it would impact on democracy and skew search results if companies pay to get to the top.
It goes the other way too. Do you think if Google didn't exist that Newscorp would be in a better position?
@Korban Dallas: Wow…. That list!
But they'll come after me if I don't pay my 40%…. That's not right.
I don't know what will happen man but I think all companies doing business here should follow the rules. I remember a time before Google and life went on just fine. If they want to leave, alternatives would rise and anything that helps dent their monopoly long term is a good thing. But that's exactly why I think they won't leave. They make too much money from us and have too much power. They won't give that up. Even if they have to pay a percentage.
@Sxio: give nothing back? If you search for information, and you make use of a service, is that not something being given back? I know that before Google (or search engines in general - but they've got the better algorithm), searching information was a hell of a lot more difficult.
I find the service they provide to be very valuable. The media companies can go if they can't find a business model sustainable enough.
@jatyap: I feel like you don't really understand what Google does with your info, if you're arguing that this is a good system and should go on unchanged, just so you can get convenient search results.
@Sxio: I work in a related field, and yes, discussions about what Google does with personal/search information is rife. What they do or don't do with personal and search information is outside the scope of this discussion or my comment, methinks.
Also, regardless of what you think about their handling of personal information, the search, services, apps and products are "giving something back".
why do they wanna leave?
Case in point: Some online Aussies don't even read the news!
@Scrooge McDuck: Hell yeah they are bluffing… they made $5bn profit mostly from search… paying companies a fraction of this for their journalism data they glean would not be reason to throw that away. However it shows how powerful they have become and shows a new side to them for that to be a threat.
they made $5bn profit mostly from search…
It has been mentioned many times in this thread. If you actually google it, Google Australia generated $4.x billion revenue, and revenue is not profit.
Obviously a lot of it gets passed to parent and associated companies through low-tax countries, but Google Australia still has to pay hundreds of its Australian staff, contractors, rent, equipment, and most importantly — their publishing partners. Google AdX is the biggest programmatic display ad marketplace out there, and while Google takes money from the advertisers, they also need to pay a big percentage of that to 3rd party publishers, including OzBargain. So they ended up with $134 million pre-tax profit, which is far less than the "$5bn" quoted.
@MrFrugalSpend: May I suggest you read this article on ausdroid.net (who are an independent small media business), to get more familiar with this topic.
@Scrooge McDuck: If they do leave, it's must be calcualated more valuable to leave. Otherwise they won't :)
Google will never leave anyway, they're just bluffing.
You sound mighty sure , little duckie. Mind walking us through your reasoning?
Here's Ozbargain's:
If big retailers asked the government to enforce a law that
OzBargain should pay the retailers for deals & links posted on OzBargain
OzBargain cannot simply block those retailers, as the law dictates it's either all or nothing
OzBargain has to provide retailers 14 days advanced notification for any rule changes
I think I'll also pack up and shut down the site…
@cloclo: Finally, someone bloody gets it.
I'm all for Google paying more tax or whatever, but this proposed change will break the internet.
You simply cannot have Site A paying Site B for allowing a user to link from Site A to B.
The problem is real, it took me some time to understand it and I would like to see it fixed. Google news receives 'free content' as some viewers will search for news, read the headline and some of the start of the article, and that's it. So the media company didn't get paid for that user to read the news.
So another approach is, Google doesn't scrape the article at all from the news providers. But what the Federal government is proposing, good god.
Write to your local MP everyone, I did, still haven't heard back.
@conza: It's true to say Google is big and monopolise the search engine, but that's just how it works. The best player wins the game, they aren't big because they're crap at what they do. Obviously, over the years they've listened and implemented what's good and right. If the biggest isn't allowed to dominate simply because they're good at their game then why don't we start penalising Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes next time they win a race because they're too dominant. Just as well Peter Brock and HDT aren't around anymore otherwise we'd be complaining about them winning the motor race all the time, too.
What a stupid idea that you have to pay simply because you're showing the link. As far as I'm concerned if you don't want your link to be shown then why don't you make them private. Oh, wait I guess then people won't be able to read their news right…dooohhh…
@Deal Or-No Deal: I realise my comment may have gone back and forth slightly, so to reiterate.
I am against the Federal Government's proposed change to solve this problem.
I agree, that there is a problem that media companies are not making money from the content they're producing.
So instead, my solution would be to block Google from showing people snippets of the news, forcing them to click on the headlines from X news site, X news site then runs their own ads and hey presto, Google is still the search engine delivering users to the news, the media companies earn some money for their news articles. That's just 1 solution, I'm sure there are others too, possibly better solutions, I am against the Federal Government's solution to this problem.
Too right it is stupid for Site A to pay for linking to Site B, too right, that's what I was saying as well.
@conza: No, I totally agree with you. When I said you, I didn't mean you literally. I mean the news people or sites that provide news.
Bing is for porn, or so I've heard…
It’s not even good for that…. so my friend tells me…
I have only used Bing for the last 5 years and I've always found what I am looking for, no issues at all.
So if they left, I really couldn't care less, but I know others insist and prefer on using Google search and that's fine - each to their own :)I actually find Bing really bad for finding stuff on youtube and other google eco-system (which is fair enough) but makes it a deal killer for me. I better try out duckduckgo though just in case.
i dont want herpes
It’ll become I’ll DDG that 🤔
Or you can just say I’ll search that ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Not sure why language has to be vendor specific.
Hand me that Sharpie.
Reading all this has given me a headache. Anyone have a Panadol.
Here, you dropped this \
Anyone got a Band-Aid?
Surely DDG and Bing also will need to pay news companies as well. This isn't a Google / Facebook specific tax.
It's more likley Google's smaller competititors who aren't as profitable will have to 'leave Australia' and close down their local site.
Google will benefit in Australia, but they are worried about the precedent this will set in more competitive markets like the EU.
@greatlamp: The precedence has already been set by France.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-agrees-to-pay-fre…
Call their bluff.
DDG sounds dirty.
Duck Duck Go is not a good alternative to Google. For privacy and all that, sure, but its search results are definitely inferior.
Have you tried Ecosia? Solid search engine. I would say the results are very close to Google's.
Oh and they even plant a tree for every ~47th search.
I just tried it then. I like it! might have to make the switch.
They used Bing to do the actual search.
@kale chips suck: Same goes for DuckDuckGo (despite them using "multiple APIs"…like Yandex). In fact, the DuckDuckBot doesn't even index the web! Apparently it just acts as another layer to rank results from their 100s of APIs and also perform their own filters. It's funny how people claim "search results" preferences for Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia etc which are all fundamentally Bing wrappers when the location is set as Australia. As someone that deals with SEO you realise how limited your choices really are (and Bing gets a lot of anonymised data it would still find useful).
Baidu is truly something else though…
@peterpeterpumpkin: Interesting - I didn't know that was how they "indexed". Makes me wonder why Bing, etc, don't just block them from mining its results.
I suspect it's a "follow the money" situation if you want to figure out exactly who is doing what (and why) with how search engines are effectively cross pollinating.
@peterpeterpumpkin: wait yahoo uses bing search engine? I thought they have their own search engine….?
@Zachary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
From 2003 to 2010 they did have their own web crawler (after they bought out Overture, which had Altavista). But they've been sleeping around with Google and Bing at different times for years. Since late 2019 they're back in bed with Bing.
@peterpeterpumpkin: Interesting, so really the only search engines in existence that have their own crawlers are google and bing and the rest just piggie back of these two but rebranding themselves to sound different or unique or better in some way than either bing or google? So besides privacy or brand names of when bing or google goes down for whatever reasons, there's no point in using other search engines than bing or google?
@Zachary: In most countries there's no viable alternative unless you want those random websites that get penalised by Google/Bing or wouldn't mind some out-of-the-box information, since most people give up after the first few pages on a search engine but Yandex/Baidu/Naver might show them on the first page. In former Soviet Bloc countries Yandex is useful. For Chinese speakers Baidu is useful. For Korean speakers Naver is useful.
Ask.com and AOL Search and all those "alternatives" we hear about are just Bing or Google. Most search engine software engineers expect to get paid and competing with Microsoft or Google in the English speaking world takes a lot of work and has been unprofitable for over a decade.
@peterpeterpumpkin: What if you're making up your own search engine just for fun and have no interest in turning a profit or competing over-zealously against Bing and Google - just enough to keep it going indefinitely as a viable alternative to Bing and Google that doesn't use their search algorithm or database? Is that possible?
@Zachary: As a personal programming exercise it's possible. Assuming you don't get blocked as a bot after the first few million attempts (more likely after just a few hundred these days). To have any meaningful data that covers just the English-speaking world you would need a lot of storage space (on top of other costs such as server, bandwidth, electricity etc). Dealing with websites that game results would be an ongoing issue regardless of how you change the algorithms, but like mentioned before you'd have a lot more "random" results like you had in 90s search engines, which could be useful for ideas/inspiration when working on a project.
I think YaCy is the only P2P search engine that's still semi-functioning since "search engine belonging to the people" was all the rage in the 2000s. If you try https://searx.everdot.org/ and type "!yacy" before your search phrase it should restrict the search to YaCy (searx is one of those old fashioned meta search engines that display results from multiple search engines, which is a bit of a joke since most searx mirrors just show results from so-called DuckDuckGo).
@peterpeterpumpkin: is that with a space after the phrase or no space? For example, if I was looking up "[email protected]", would I search for "!yacy [email protected]" or "[email protected]"?
Yeah, the only searx mirror I know of is https://searx.info/
I use Duck Duck Go where I can but you definitely need Google for any tech related issues
Just put !G at the start of your search.
Ikr?
But nerd hipsters act like it’s a real alternative lmfaoIt's funny how smug you are when you don't even understand how search works.
@nikoris: If a company has 15+ years of searches to model its algorithm on then it will have an advantage.
Saying its not a real alternative is ridiculous, its a perfectly functional engine and only gets better as time goes on despite the fact they don't cache user data because they don't need to.
People wanting to protect their searches and data are apparently nerds and hipsters instead of what? brain dead bogans who would happily sell their privacy for nothing?
@Telios: No its not a real alternative for everyone. If you actually use search for specific esoteric questions about e.g. programming, duckduckgo completely fails to return quality results, whereas google does an excellent job.
And your claim that it gets better over time and dont need to cache users data is proven wrong by the fact that I first tried using duckduckgo 8 years ago and its still very subpar in 2021.No one is saying we dont want to protect privacy. Dont make that straw man.
DDG is shit though.. I tried using it for a week just to see, had to switch back before the week was over.
You high mate?
@buckethat: Ya na … do some research.
A couple of good videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT-k1kDIRnw
@[Deactivated]: Yeah.. thats how search engine algorithm works.. Google is dominating because it's giving the most relevant result using its algorithms and what it thinks you're looking for based on the data they have on you.. Some people might be scared because google knows everything but I for one.. find that pretty convenient.
If I get to what I'm looking for faster and having to go through less relevant results to get there, then all the better.
Google helps me do that, DDG doesnt.
That's no different than Netflix showing me things they think I'll like to watch based on my viewing history. I prefer that much more than them promoting films I am less likely to enjoy. Personalisation may be invasive, but its convenient.
That's no different than Netflix showing me things they think I'll like to watch based on my viewing history.
To be honest, for the billions they have spent on their recommendation algorithm I still find it pretty poor.
Google gives you "better" results because you are in their search bubble and you find what you think you want to find not what you actually need to find.
I suppose you could say that, but that's also what any search engine does. It uses key words and phrases to "guess" what you are wanting to search for.
You could also say that the more they know about you, the closer the "what they think you want" comes to "what you actually want". And I have no doubt that googles information gathering gets them pretty close.
To be honest, with Chrome, Gmail, Google Assistant etc, the amount of information they gather means that not many search engines can come close.
To be honest, with Chrome, Gmail, Google Assistant etc, the amount of information they gather means that not many search engines can come close.
What it really means is that you are the product, not the customer.
@[Deactivated]: It's really interesting the huge divide between people who either don't know or don't care about the increasing invasion of their privacy, and those who are actually trying to prevent huge companies from buying/selling/controlling what everyone does…
The fact that people think Google needs them to come to its defence over their own bad practices is amazing.
Its been in numerous documentaries, all over the news with the likes of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook getting smashed in European courts and US Supreme courts, continuous hacking of services of bigger and bigger companies, and people still think they should be giving these companies as much data as they can for the sake of boohoo my search results required 15s more effort
I swear you could give most people a beanbag chair, fridge full of soda and a VR headset and just let them live in a goddamn fantasy forever as long as they have YouTube and FB/Instagram.
I swear you could give most people a beanbag chair, fridge full of soda and a VR headset and just let them live in a goddamn fantasy forever as long as they have YouTube and FB/Instagram.
Y-You can do that for me? Take my money please!
What it really means is that you are the product, not the customer.
Sure, that doesn't change the fact that they are a superior search engine because they have the means to know these things. Others will not be able to do that unless they have similar infrastructure.
1 problem this is phase 1. once they get google you can guarantee the other search engines are going to end up in same boat
Murdock wants the whole pie
For those who haven't seen it, here is the direct video statement from Google AU chief regarding this issue
I'd recommend you watch this - there is a great analogy of giving recommendations for good coffee to your friend…
might stop people from saying "google that"
.
Going to kill "Let me Google that for you."
Time to start a search engine called Oogle
And Google will just buy Oogle as soon as the ministers who rallied against them have retired or been voted out of government. Or just do a 100 million dollar "Google's back" campaign, like when they got rid of New Coke.
@pjetson: I mean "they", the secret world government that ultimately makes all decisions for corporations and federal governments of each country.
@brendanm: The one that goes to secret meetings to burn owl effigies and touch kids in pizza parlours?
Noob questions, but would this:
Impact the use of GPS/Google Maps as the search feature is integrated with location data?
Render any Google Home product basically useless (except for YouTube music etc)?
Didn't Google strike a deal with France for new snippets? They could do something similar here.
Aus Gov has gone harder. French case was about "Google News" posts, Australia's case included news links that come up in Google searches.
Only Google's search engine according to reports I've read. Just migrate your searches to DuckDuckGo.