News European legislators call for Google's break-up

Not a big surprise don't they own 80% of mobile and closer to 90% of search engine market. ( be surprised if the search engine is not higher in truth) once you go past 80% governments get edgy.

 

If someone made a viable non **** alternative to Google Search, then this wouldn't be an issue.

Bing, though? Really? Has any European legislator tried using it? It's no wonder Google has no competition if that was the closest anyone got to 'competition'.

 

Heh, imagine if Google actually went "Fine, be that way." and then proceeded to stop working in Europe for a month or 3.

Pretty sure those legislators would change their tune reaaal quick...

 

Indeed, I bet 99.9% of Politicians wouldn't even be able to find one single alternative search engine without it.

 

Oh look! It's one of those "Microsoft/Google/Everyone should tell Europe to sod off because reasons! Ur Ur Ur Ur Herp-a-derp" people.

Do you live in the real world? I never cease to be amused by people exposing their ignorance to the world so happily.

 

I wonder what they think breaking Google up would achieve, wouldn't it just be business as normal ?
But instead of just having Google.inc we would have GoogleSearch.inc & GoogleAdvertising.inc ?

 

Thats the problem.

Obviously nothing anyone in the UK or in the EU does will affect Google in America, so forcing Google to be broken up in Europe would just mean that there would be Google in America which then has Google Search Europe, Youtube Europe, Gmail Europe and so on as fully owned subsidiaries.

And as for the rampant data hoarding / sharing between the various parts of Google, I'd be far more concerned about the relentlessly expanding surveillance by the Government, newest one on that front.

 

Yea but surveillance by the Government is only to keep you safe.
I mean it's not like they would ever misuse any of that data they gather, or gather data on innocent people.

 

Even if Google is broken up in the EU they will still have the overall global market share, Google have created a monster that now might well depend on the NSA to survive, does Google have a competitive edge because the NSA are riding shotgun and watching their back, you would think so but, hey, it's all in the name of national security, right?

techdirt.com

 

Is Bing actually **** though?
You ask: "Has any European legislator tried using it?". Have you tried using it recently?

And I mean beyond trying it for a couple of searches where the fact you're unfamiliar with it will clearly hold quite a lot of sway.

To me a lot of the actual results are very similar in practice, and while I still use like and use Google most of the time Bing also has some nice design and functions that are probably superior to Google.

While this is a Microsoft site, the side by side comparison seems fair: http://www.bingiton.com/

You might prefer Google, but can you really in all honesty say Bing is ****?

 

Well, I used Bing the other week to get to the microsoft IE download page when doing a re-install of Vista (I kmow, don't laugh). So, having an up to date IE was a requirement and just used the bing bar in the existing one. Now, it was early hours of the morning and I was a tad tired but I clicked on the first obvious link - as I hit the 'allow changes' dialogue I suddenly thought 'crap, that didn't look quite right'. Malware ridden piece of crap happily installed, bugger.

Bing may have some nice touches, but I wouldn't want to use it full time after that lovely experience. I have never had a problem using Google under those circumstances and I certainly won't be making the same mistake again.

Politicians are myopic at best, blind to reality as a default state. Separate out the individual businesses so they can't share data, ad revenue in the region tanks, less funds to support excellent (imho) cloud services and mobile platforms. Lots of small businesses use these and would suffer, so the economy (which is fragile) would also suffer. Less taxes due to falling GDPs, more government debt to patch the holes......

 

Yeah, I tried updating IE manually using Bing on a work machine a few weeks ago, the ACTUAL link I needed was about 6th!

 

I use Bing all the time and it works perfectly well. Having used it for a long time I think, overall, it works just as well as Google, neither are perfect.

 

I know they can hardly be taken as separate entities, but the top two links are ads.

Obviously allowing ads for those sorts of downloads from that sort of search term is a fairly big issue.

However, the actual search results for "update internet explorer" and the like are better on Bing than Google in my opinion. Both have the same site as the first result but Bing's other results are more geared to the actual process and includes tabbed instructions.

 

I have a much more effective counter-terrorism proposal. Stop being douchebags to fundamentalist wackjobs. But they don't listen to me.

 

I just used bingiton out of interest but Google won 4/5.