Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of Australia’s weird attempts to implement a transfer of power [and money] from Google to Murdoch under the veil of what is called a news media bargaining code.
There have recently been a lot of “expert opinions” listing Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc. as alternatives to Google.
Are they really valid alternatives?
If you spend 15 minutes using these “search engines'', you will be convinced that they are almost what Google was in the early 2000s if not in the late 1990s.
This shows why 95% of Australians use Google.
There have even been calls to the Australian government to establish its own search engine :). Well, last time we spent $70 millions to create a COVIDSafe app (actually, not from scratch, just from an existing Singaporean source code), which has yet to catch 70 COVID cases (The latest publicly available information is 17 contacts have so far been traced). Good luck with building a search engine!
Another way to understand the importance of Google in free flow of information and access to information is to look at countries where Google is either restricted or not operating or there exists such local search engines.
China: China has restrictions on Google, and three popular search engines there are: Baidu (~55%), Qihoo360 (~30%), and Sogou (~14%). How is the situation? Couldn’t be worse. Firstly, the quality of search is not any better than that of Bing and others you can find here. Second, all local search engines have their results heavily censored in favor of the government.
North Korea: No need for a search engine as the local population has no access to the global internet. There is a local internet called Kwangmyonga but the total number of websites is estimated to be under 40. There are mostly dedicated to what leader Kim Jong-un might be up to on any given day titled "Supreme Leader's Activities". Sounds interesting?
Russia: Russia is a rare example where Google is not the popular search engine. Yandex has been the leading search engine in Russia in the post decade, holding over 50% in the Russian-language search market share. In 2017, Ukraine closed Yandex offices and banned its services, accusing the search engine of illegally collecting Ukrainian users’ data and sending it to Russian security agencies.
Australia: Does Australia want to be next in the list? New Murdoch-branded search engine? State-owned search engine which features our supreme leader's activities?
Australia's current moves are dangerously in the wrong direction to further empower media oligarchs or pave the way for state-controlled media.
