Apple Showing Signs It May Soon Launch a Search Engine To Compete Against Google Search (coywolf.news) 109
An anonymous reader shares a report from Coywolf News, written by Jon Henshaw: For several years, it's been reported that Google pays billions of dollars to Apple to remain the default search engine on Safari for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The deal ensures that iPhone, iPad, and Mac users search with Google when they use Safari. That is unless they manually change the default search engine in Safari's preferences. The deal between Apple and Google may be coming to an end soon. In July 2020, Reuters reported that the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority was taking aim at the deal. If the U.K. regulators take action, there may be a ripple effect from the European Union, which has a history of going after Google for anti-competitive behavior. Regulators in Europe may force Apple to remove Google as the default search engine and have users choose which search engine they want to use when they first launch Safari.
Regulatory pressure, a contentious relationship with Google, and the maturation of Apple's Siri and iCloud are presenting an opportunity for Apple to create and launch a search engine. There are several signs right now that indicate Apple may be doing just that:
- Apple doesn't need Google's money: Apple is now the world's most valuable company. They may want the money Google gives them, but they don't need it.
- Apple is pouring resources and money into search: Apple is investing heavily in search, as shown in their job postings for search engineers. The job listings reveal they incorporate AI, ML, NLP, and more into all of their services and apps.
- iOS and iPadOS 14 beta bypasses Google Search with Spotlight Search: It's not clear if Apple uses Bing anymore, as results are labeled only as Siri Suggestions. It is clear that Apple has started to return search results within Spotlight Search and is completely bypassing Google altogether.
- Apple recently updated its Applebot web crawler page: In July 2020, Apple published a significant update to its About Applebot support page. The additions are very similar to the details Google provides to webmasters and SEOs. Here are the changes they made to the Applebot support page: Added how to verify traffic from Applebot; Expanded details on the Applebot user agent, including differences between its desktop and mobile version; Expanded robots.txt rules; Added a section stating that they don't just crawl HTML, but also render pages similar to Google; and Added a section on search rankings and the factors that affect how it ranks web search results.
- Applebot has been busy crawling sites: Checking my server logs on WP Engine revealed that Applebot had been regularly crawling my sites daily, something I haven't noticed until now.
Regulatory pressure, a contentious relationship with Google, and the maturation of Apple's Siri and iCloud are presenting an opportunity for Apple to create and launch a search engine. There are several signs right now that indicate Apple may be doing just that:
- Apple doesn't need Google's money: Apple is now the world's most valuable company. They may want the money Google gives them, but they don't need it.
- Apple is pouring resources and money into search: Apple is investing heavily in search, as shown in their job postings for search engineers. The job listings reveal they incorporate AI, ML, NLP, and more into all of their services and apps.
- iOS and iPadOS 14 beta bypasses Google Search with Spotlight Search: It's not clear if Apple uses Bing anymore, as results are labeled only as Siri Suggestions. It is clear that Apple has started to return search results within Spotlight Search and is completely bypassing Google altogether.
- Apple recently updated its Applebot web crawler page: In July 2020, Apple published a significant update to its About Applebot support page. The additions are very similar to the details Google provides to webmasters and SEOs. Here are the changes they made to the Applebot support page: Added how to verify traffic from Applebot; Expanded details on the Applebot user agent, including differences between its desktop and mobile version; Expanded robots.txt rules; Added a section stating that they don't just crawl HTML, but also render pages similar to Google; and Added a section on search rankings and the factors that affect how it ranks web search results.
- Applebot has been busy crawling sites: Checking my server logs on WP Engine revealed that Applebot had been regularly crawling my sites daily, something I haven't noticed until now.
Apple hasn't needed money for a long time (Score:2, Flamebait)
But you don't get to be hyper-rich by stopping just because you don't need anything.
Rich people are all psychopaths and rich companies tend to be run by rich people.
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Rich people are all psychopaths
The word is "sociopath" and you're fucking dumb.
The word is "psychopath": "a person having an egocentric and antisocial personality marked by a lack of remorse for one's actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies. "
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But you don't get to be hyper-rich by stopping just because you don't need anything.
Rich people are all psychopaths and rich companies tend to be run by rich people.
Quoted against the censorship mods, presumably from Apple fanbois. However, I would have been tempted to mod it off topic if I ever had a mod point to give. The root of the FP problem is...
More like a (Score:3)
Re:More like a (Score:5, Insightful)
BING replacement, not Google...
Whether it's Apple or somebody else, Google Search needs a fierce competitor, it needs it badly and it needs it ASAP.
Re:More like a (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well problem with Apple in this case, it will be a search engine you are FORCED to on their devices..
For about three seconds until I CHANGE the default search engine in the browser settings: https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/30... [9to5mac.com]
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No, Apple won't force you to use a search engine in any browser, Safari or otherwise. It may default to it, just like they do with Google Search now, but it will still give you an option to change it. Doing otherwise invites the EU regulators to open a monopoly investigation which is bad for business. Just ask Microsoft. For the very same reason iOS 14 now allows you to set a different default browser and email client.
And that is why I like the EU commission, if corporations don't want to cease abusive anticompetitive behaviour the commission will twist their arm and make them, thus sparing all of us having to wait 30 years until the invisible hand of the free market gets around to it.
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We need to come back to having regulations that will encourage competition, not remove it. That means lots and lots of companies that compete against each other and encouragement from the government to be so. Google has a natural monopoly, but, they have turned evil on its use. I wish that we would break them up into multiple companies, along with others
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No, Apple won't force you to use a search engine in any browser, Safari or otherwise. It may default to it, just like they do with Google Search now, but it will still give you an option to change it. Doing otherwise invites the EU regulators to open a monopoly investigation which is bad for business. Just ask Microsoft. For the very same reason iOS 14 now allows you to set a different default browser and email client.
iOS/iPadOS browsers are still forced to use the same rendering engine as Safari, Chrome et al are basically just skins of Safari on iOS/iPadOS.
So I guess they'll have a box that says Google, but whatever you type in there just routes to Apple's search engine.
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> iOS 14 now allows you to set a different default browser and email client.
Bit of a shame it took them fourteen revisions of the OS to be able to accomplish that.
Of course, setting a different browser is an exercise in window-dressing, because browser engines other than Apple's are banned on iOS.
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Watch it be like the App Store (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Watch it be like the App Store (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it all ties to the current iteration of Apple, the country club of computing, you pay a premium and expect the kind of service you would expect from a country club. Your privacy assured, you compute in peace, free from harassment, your privacy never invaded. So adding privacy based search inevitably and by far the easiest way, buy branding from duckduckgo, Apple just pay for the Apple version of it, and require the duckduckgo adhere to the privacy rules it claims.
All that is left is for Apple to get into multiplayer gaming. Not pay to win rubbish and avoiding PvP but much like a country providing opportunity for more cooperative gaming but again a privacy safe environment, keep relatively free of untoward behaviour, with a more skill based range of games covering a broad spectrum of gaming styles and games that present creative opportunities for apple hardware users.
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All that is left is for Apple to get into multiplayer gaming.
Apple doesn't understand gaming even as much as Microsoft did when they launched DirectX, let alone when they launched the Xbox. Apple has zero chance to make any substantial contribution in gaming since Nintendo already owns the portion of the market into which they would hope to insert themselves.
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Perhaps they"ll buy Nintendo?
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Apple doesn't understand gaming even as much as Microsoft did when they launched DirectX, let alone when they launched the Xbox.
Didn't people say something similar when Apple launched the iPod? And iTunes? And the iPhone? Then again, the AppleTV streaming service isn't doing great.
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letsth don't be thilly . . .
that's not how it would work.
Quite obviously, it would simply keep 30% of the results! :)
hawk
Great news! (Score:2, Troll)
Now, from the makers of Apple Maps comes... Apple Search! Results you can depend on(tm).
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This is what I came here to say. Apple has never had an original idea. At best they polish someone else's idea and make it more commercially viable. Windowing GUI was Xerox, mouse from The Demo, MP3 players from creaf, smartphones from samsung, you name it they copied it. And sometimes they copy it very badly, like WIMP->iTunes, or as you say, Maps->Maps. The best they can possibly do in search is to create something half-assed that will keep Apple users too dumb to change the default (assuming that's
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Go look at a Xerox Alto sometime, and compare it to the original Mac. Maybe you'll learn something and quit embarrassing yourself.
You mean the Xerox Alto that Apple outright said [mac-history.net] is where they got the GUI concept? Not stole, since they were invited to see the project again and again, of course? Tell me all about it.
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Apple’s genius in this case was copying it years before Samsung released a product.
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LOL I got a troll mod for this. Does SuperKendall get mod points?
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Where independent Apple repair shops are expunged as being "dangerous".
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Now, from the makers of Apple Maps comes... Apple Search! Results you can depend on(tm).
I clicked on an Apple Search result and my office chair drove off a cliff! I want my money back!
Apple wants it all (Score:4, Insightful)
Would anyone really be surprised? Apple has been steadily pushing out partners in pretty much every operational area. Necessity may have sparked some of this (Intel's flubs on CPU improvement, for example), but I get the idea that Apple has steadily been moving in the direction of "own everything" because they like the idea, and in the long run, if they can get buy-in from Apple customers, it'll make them even more money than present arrangements.
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[Apple] laptops are around 3x price different for a pc laptop with comparable specs
This has been debunked so many times it isn't funny.
https://www.aboveavalon.com/no... [aboveavalon.com]
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I've checked multiple times over the years in response to claims like yours. So far as I've been able to see, that hasn't been true anytime in the last decade. If you check their prices at launch against comparably specced computers from other major manufacturers, I've only rarely found anyone else with a better price than Apple's (though Apple will sometimes keep models at the same price and without any changes for a year or two, at which point they admittedly may go from being a good deal to a bad one), a
Not because they like it (Score:1, Interesting)
I get the idea that Apple has steadily been moving in the direction of "own everything" because they like the idea
It's not so much the idea is immediately appealing, as the partners all suck.
You are building devices that need processors. Your "partner" is Intel, who languishes compares to competitors and doesn't seem to be bothered to try and improve processors the way the market would prefer.
Can you see the motivation for Apple to do their own processor work?
You need a search engine on that device. Your
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Does Apple have the touch of death? Apple uses 68000, it falls behind. Apple uses PowerPC, it becomes irrelevant. Apple uses Intel, Intel fumbles and looks like it's going to continue to fumble.
Are vendors failing Apple, or does Apple poison its vendors?
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Are vendors failing Apple, or does Apple poison its vendors?
Why don't you ask ARM, who is obviously ailing and doing so VERY poorly... :-)
The choice between two evils. (Score:5, Informative)
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It sounds like you have a philosophical disagreement with Apple's tightly controlled ecosystem (but isn't "tightly controlled" just a different perspective on "carefully curated"?). It seems unreasonable to classify something as "predatory" when consumers are fully aware of the walled garden they're walking into. If you buy an iPhone and your reaction is "What?!? This thing doesn't have a USB-C connector or headphone jack? I can't trivially install non-App Store apps???", you deserve it.
When I think of pre
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Try to buy an ebook from your favourite online shopping app. You can't. You can buy products to the value of tens of thousands if you like, but try to buy that "digital" item and Apple will demand their 30% cut. Why? What's different? They've already accepted that they have no issue with the app's payment mechanism for all its other products, why prevent the sale of ebooks?
Because admitting that ebooks, a digital item as defined by Apple, can be sold via an online shopping app via its ordinary checkout proc
If it's anything like their maps (Score:2)
If it's anything like their maps - it will only work in the dedicated application on macOS, not in a browser - so no access to non-mac users, and need to exit the browser and switch to a dedicated application :)
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Probably for their app store (Score:2)
I don't know if anyone has tried searching on the App Store lately, but their search is garbage. Leaving aside that an app can buy search terms that are literally the name of another app, actually trying to find what you want in the store is bad.
Search is a broadly useful competency for a company like Apple. I don't expect them to launch a search engine because it's more headache than it's worth. It provides no real additional value to their company. If they wanted a search engine, they'd be better off buyi
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"I don't know if anyone has tried searching on the App Store lately, but their search is garbage. "
So like Amazon, Google, Bing, ....
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It's only BILLIONS of dollars. (Score:1)
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Just raise the price (Score:2)
The solution to this is pretty simple, on Apple platforms just charge more, if they take a larger cut.
You could even just split the difference, and charge 15% more on IOS than on platforms where you didn't have to have a cut taken.
Sure some people would go seek out your other forms of payment but ease of use commands a huge premium for users. Which is why it's so valuable to be on iOS to begin with.
Much like votiing (Score:1)
I hope they give it a really cool name. (Score:2)
Many have tried many have failed (Score:1)
Google recoups a lot of that (Score:2)
Google's top search results are ads which they make money on.
Will it be any better than google is now? (Score:3)
Maybe it'll be like google 10 years ago.
Google now sucks. Example: I just did a search for static grass applicators (never mind you're not interested in what they are). Then went to shopping, and selected "sort lowest to highest"
I had the words in quotes, so it should *ONLY* have gotten the applicators. Instead, it gives me pages of packets of static grass.
The signal to noise ratio (or is that signal-to-ads?) has gone so far that google sometimes is utterly useless.
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Google now sucks. Example: I just did a search for static grass applicators (never mind you're not interested in what they are). Then went to shopping, and selected "sort lowest to highest"
You're actually criticizing a different Google product, Google Shopping, not Google Search. It does look like a part of Google Search, but it's not what people think of when they think of search.
Also, I've never yet seen a product search tool that wouldn't fail in the way that you observed Google Shopping to fail. They all include closely-related products in the results, so if the thing you're looking at is more expensive than something closely related, sorting by price low to high will give you all of th
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When I put something in quotation marks, it should be looking for THAT.
Hell, a few years ago, I was looking for high men's boots. I put a ton ( 10) of exclusions, including -"women's"... and there was a sponsored ad, with wo[bold}men's[/bold].
No, they really are crap.
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Yet another crawler wasting bandwidth? (Score:2)
Applebot has been busy crawling sites: Checking my server logs on WP Engine revealed that Applebot had been regularly crawling my sites daily, something I haven't noticed until now.
Geeze... What would it take to get ONE or Two crawlers industry wide? Let someone do the crawling and sell the data output/indexes to all the search engines to analyze and build out their search capability with. Imagine how many gigabytes and billions of dollars in server resources are going to waste worldwide, because
thank you apple (Score:2)
Maybe, just maybe, Apple will force them to straighten up.
Don't Search For IOS Issues (Score:1)
Will Apple put up a "webmaster" site... (Score:2)
The battle rages on! (Score:2)
Sherlock (Score:2)
Google search no longer works (Score:1)
Re:I can expect.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar to Bing, yes. Actually it will probably be similar in other ways, e.g. it won't actually be a very good search engine.
Apple don't have a great history with this kind of thing. Siri is known for being a bit thick and not providing particularly good answers to questions that other assistants so better with. They tend to rush things too and the first few generation products are really poor, e.g. Apple Maps.
Their usual strategy is to simply buy something who has a half decent product and then run it into the ground like they did with Siri. Have they bought any search related companies yet?
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Spoken like a true Googler.
What makes you think that Google software engineers are so hyper intelligent, that nobody else on the planet can make a better search engine?
A search engine isn't exactly rocket science.
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Company valuation isn't about 'hardness' it is about being able to extract revenue. Google owns search, people search for things to buy, and Google can extract revenue from placement, keywords, ads, etc. Flying a rocket into space and getting it back safely, the way SpaceX does, is technically much harder, but it's not as big a revenue stream because there isn't a huge volume of space launches to compare to internet search. StarLink might end up growing into a huge revenue stream, though - they could have m
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I have my doubts that Google’s search algorithm has much to do with their valuation.
Re: I can expect.. (Score:2)
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That they stay relevant is solely a combination of their emerging when no one had such a lead
Others such as Webcrawler, InfoSeek, AltaVista had a lead and Google overcame all the players by building and continuing to develop a superior product, and clearly they are still developing it, and have done very well to address issues such as people trying to spam it.. so uhm, its not just that they were first its that they are insurmountable since they continue improving their product by leaps and bounds i
Re: I can expect.. (Score:2)
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Even if one of those had a Google sized lead
Webcrawler had a product 1994 almost 4 years before Google even existed as a company, and none of the work that lead to Google making a product had occurred. The head start they had was a veritable eternity, and they had all that time..
The others did essentially have what would now be the Google-sized lead by being the dominant options consumers were using; the only option, evens, and clearly they blew it by not making investments in fundamental research
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Nobody else has made a better search engine. Google has been the best for about 15 years.
Apple has had poor search results since they started doing them with Siri and Apple Maps.
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Apple has had poor search results since they started doing them with Siri and Apple Maps.
Exactly. A recent experience in Apple Maps -- we wanted directions to a local restaurant in Abbotsford, BC, searching by its EXACT name. Apple Maps kept giving us driving directions to a SIMILARLY named restaurant in Calgary, AB. Google had no such problems.
Simply put, Apple puts the minimum amount of work into their cloud-based services. Just enough to say they have them, but not enough to make them successful.
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Nobody else has made a better search engine
That's daft. Entering into the search market when Google did is a completely different animal than entering into the search market now. Google's one good idea--PageRank--was so much better than the other methods that it quickly dominated. From that it built a market valuation with very few rivals. During that time, the Internet grew exponentially, and the technology required to keep up has grown commensurately. Google may have started as a box under Sergei's desk, but you can't do that now. There's simply t
Solution approach for maximum innovation? (Score:2)
I'm not against new entrants in the search field, but the easy way to encourage competition and progress to stimulate more innovation (while increasing our choice and freedom and making it easier to have smaller government) would be to cut Google HORIZONTALLY into competing companies. Ditto Microsoft and a host of other corporate cancers. Don't think it as a penalty for success, but rather an incentive program for reproduction.
And no, the precious shareholders would NOT be injured. They would start with new
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> A search engine isn't exactly rocket science.
Rocket science is easy. All you need is one equation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's rocket engineering that's fiendishly difficult:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p... [nasa.gov]
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"Similar to Bing, yes. Actually it will probably be similar in other ways, e.g. it won't actually be a very good search engine."
So like Google then.
It insists on showing me the things, it _thinks_ I might want to see instead of what I fucking tell it to show me.
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Can you give me some examples of searches that work better on rival search engines? I'm always curious about this because whenever I try rivals they are never as good but maybe I'm not searching for the right things.
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NB- I discuss Ron Unz below. I disagree with him on many things, and in mentioning his site I do not endorse the entirety of the contents. That should go without saying, but in this day and age... To his credit, Unz seems quite willing to publish people he strongly disagrees with if he finds their views of interest.
Now on to an example. This will be a long and slightly complex argument and analysis, so if that's not to your taste, kindly move on. Ironically this example likely helps a certain gentleman (who
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Never heard of Unz so checked Wikipedia.
"The Unz Review has been criticized for promoting anti-semitism, Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories, and white supremacist material.[2][3] In addition to Unz's own writings, the site has hosted pieces by white supremacist Jared Taylor, among others."
Sounds like Google is better.
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Had you bothered to actually read and digest what I posted, you might have found all that criticism. I agree, he has all sorts of disagreeable (as well as likely correct) things on his site. I appreciate the fact that you wrote, reflected very carefully, googled Ron Unz and responded very carefully to what I wrote in 6 minutes. You are clearly much faster than I with all that that entails.
But you are engaging in a classic ad-hominem attack. Run Unz's willingness to publish all sorts of disagreeable things h
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I'm just saying that Google down ranks white supremacists, anti Semites and the like because of their disgusting, harmful views that most people don't want.
The question you googled has a right and a wrong answer. Those other search engines gave you the wrong one.
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No, Google gave me a useless, ineffective and thoroughly unpersuasive set of answers as I discussed. Bing and DuckDuckGo were on point and persuasive and gave me a wider range of arguments, not answers.
I see the problem. You are searching to be told what to think, and to have your existing thoughts reinforced. I am searching to refine my thinking and better understand the world. To test, challenge, and in the strict sense of the word to prove my beliefs and replace them when they fail.
I want to see a divers
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How is answering your question with links to white supremacy sites debating and debunking it?
Maybe if they linked to some videos actually debunking that stuff you might have a point.
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Okay. Can you give me some examples of these names? I don't know any.
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Try this:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=buil... [duckduckgo.com]
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Thanks, that's a great example. Google certainly does seem to have a problem with pinterest spam.
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A level of censorship on this search engine that the Chinese government will be jealous of.
Why?