How to make a problem infinitely worse. More government regulation.
At one time, Google were the good guys. I don’t even remember their predecessors, but they planted spyware on your computer if you used them. So I switched over to Google, and the other guys gradually died as everyone left them.
At the moment, my default search engine is Bing, but I switch over to Google if Bing can’t find what I’m looking for. At some point, if Google abuses it’s position enough, someone will take their place, and they will die, just like Watchacallit did earlier. Can’t even remember the name any more.
AltaVista? They were the one I used before Google came along. I don't remember any spyware, though. I always hated Yahoo. Too hairy a home page. And the concept of humans categorizing sites like librarians! What a cockamamie idea!
At first I didn't like Google. They didn't offer enough ways to tweak your query, as AltaVista did. But then I noticed I was getting better results from Google without having to tweak. Google had figured out to harness the linking smarts of the web authors to rank their results. Now, of course, all the search engines work that way.
>> I don’t even remember their predecessors,
DejaNews IIRC.
Google rocks but it would be cooler if it worked harder at being apolitical.