>> Probably the reason they're pulling a dick move and forcing everyone to Enhanced Campaigns which
That's not a "dick move," it's calculated. They're betting you will not leave since they have all that traffic and can deliver eyeballs to your ads. At some point it will be too expensive for you. Some new guy will try for a while but long term it's nasty for Google.
>> A few years ago to grow profits they forced all Quality scores down.
These past two years many sites have been destroyed by Panda and Penguin and many have been forced to advertise to replace the lost traffic. Coincidence I'm sure.
There was a discussion on "How Google is Killing Organic Search" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971560 by essentially having all ads on the first page. I wonder for how long can Google keep doing that, before users and site owners revolt and leave /promote another engine?
Google, as a company, desperately needs new sources of revenue, Google Search is already over-monetized. I wouldn't touch Google at current stock prices.
Microsoft then bought out Skype even though it was clear it was non-profitable.
Lots of non-profitable companies are bought all the time. Skype had hundreds of millions of users and now Microsoft is urging users to make Bing as their default engine when upgrading Skype (just one example). Of course it can also be integrated for Office users too so that angle is not likely.
Do you have the dates for the switch? IIRC the previous owners joined PRISM before Microsoft bought them out.
Another thing: Microsoft needs to be in the good graces with the US Government, so does Google and to an extent Facebook. This NSA thing is quite popular for a reason or another among different senators, politicians and people that know know people. Piss them off and bad things could happen...like FTC, DOJ and IRS investigations.
IANAL, but it seems like there is so much precedent against vehicle searches that it's staggering that TSA thinks this is acceptable. Every case I've read related to vehicles indicates that probable cause is required for a car search
Maybe you have given up those rights by entering a special zone near the airport? Not justifying it, but maybe explaining it.
This is expected of the TSA, every bureaucracy will seek to justify and expand itself.
The government repeatedly made accusations of terrorism against Anwar — who was also an American citizen — but never charged him with a crime. No court ever reviewed the government’s claims nor was any evidence of criminal wrongdoing ever presented to a court. He did not deserve to be deprived of his constitutional rights as an American citizen and killed.
Surprised he wasn't charged, just as a formality. At least then they would have said he "refused to answer to an arrest warrant...blah blah...plan to kill Americans." Unless the matrix is playing tricks on me, he did admit to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki a lot of stuff that we call terrorism. Generally speaking, if you refuse to surrender, they can't take you in and are plotting to kill someone, the police can kill you.
But to throw a freaking bomb from 10000 feet in a cafe just to kill a person...that's a huge no-no. It just doesn't win you any friends. If it was his car, I could see it, traveling with dangerous people, is dangerous.
Drive /documents are one aspect of what is stored in Google, Microsoft+++. The point I was trying to make is to be careful, even if they secure Drive, don't assume that other services and data are NSA proof. The companies are all in PR mode, trying to reverse the damage done.
The stuff on drive and Azure it's easy, I can encrypt it yourself. Email location data, call logs, videos watches, pages visited etc are the real problem.
This sounds like an ad for Google, including the Microsoft and Verizon bashing. The truth is that Google 'needs' to see the messages, all you other info and documents in clear text to serve ads and mine them. That's their business model and they aren't about to change it.
Oh and as other said, NSA can force them to do what Microsoft did.
The most obvious ones are the "eBay shoes" type of searches, but probably they cost less than "shoes". Still it's a cost. Expect Google, Yahoo and even Bing to fight this tooth and nail, data or no data.
don't think it's hyperbole. Snowden planned this for a while and looks like he had access to and knew where to find everything. USA probably spends $100+ Billion in intel and knowing what foreign leaders, generals and business leaders say and write can be more powerful than a few aircraft carriers.
Of course then there is the trust issue, many world leaders will be pissed to learn that their "friend" has been reading their emails and monitoring their phone calls, even private ones.
His point is that if NSA wants they can do this and that. I suppose they can also take you to a Romanian black ops site and beat you bloody till you cough up your passwords. The idea is for average Joes and Janes to have a little bit more privacy. When you search on Google, they try everything possible to have you search while logged on and save your search history. All this is linked to:
your real name, location (Android)
maybe credit cards (Google Play, Adwords)
emails sent
videos watched
books read
sites visited (Google Analytics, sites visited that serve Adsense, Google hosted jQuery)
your private docs (G Drive, Documents)....
This is of course to make more money off you, they can charge more money to advertisers, and all this info is ready to be siphoned by Booz Allen and Hamilton employees and to be added to your file.
What do they get from DDG? Relatively speaking, nothing. The idea is to split your activities to make it harder for them, which is great for an average user. By using everything Google, it's even better than sending them a memo detailing everything you did each night.
If you're a target, long live TOR, which is not really usable on Google.
Less data-points for Google /NSA the better it is.
Firefox managed quite fine even without $300 million a year and the idea is not use Google for everything, not to ensure that FF has billions in their bank account
I, too, do not like the omnibar and can speculate Google did it to drive traffic to its search engine, not to help you. They judge that this (highly profitable) annoyance is not enough to drive from Google.
I wonder if the recommendations are however slightly linked to CPC of the terms, wouldn't surprise me.
It's cheaper and better to buy off all but one competitor and then both jack up prices and provide no customer service. AT&T i hell bent on getting back together
Big Telcos are at the mercy of big governments for anti-trust issues, contracts so this is not a surprise. DOJ and FBI can cause them many headaches.
This should bite them though when trying to buy foreign firms, cable links etc. No rational and influential country would let them do it after these leaks.
