Google penalises other websites for stealing content or re-hosting stuff without adding value, then goes ahead and does exactly that all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
Whether it is significant or not is another matter entirely.
Still, I'm skeptical. The link doesn't really say In-Q-Tel influenced Google directly, I especially don't see evidence for influence during Google's early years.
It appears Keyhole (a company G acquired in 2005, who's software became Google Earth) was funded in part by intelligence money. Google went public in 2004, so they were already beholden to public shareholders by the time of that acquisition.
Besides, Keyhole just made good mapping software. DARPA funds lots of robotics labs, but I wouldn't say Berkeley and CMU are any more a part of the US intelligence apparatus than I am as a tax payer. Some work they do has utility to the gov, so the gov funded it. That doesn't make their efforts direct intelligence work.
Add in whatever the modern version of Operation Mockingbird is and those companies at the very least are sure to have been infiltrated after the fact. Probably willingly. You'd be surprised how servile people get when men in black suits with 3letter badges show up and say the words "National Security". All these factors and more in aggregate make the probability that there was government influence and involvement highly likely.
For those who want just a primer on this complex subject, here is a decent article: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
Another interesting interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfUm0RxXWxI
"MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve."
I ended up in their google maps product on mobile and was clicking around between their reviews, their location on google maps, the opinions of other google users about what they thought crate and barrel was good at, pictures of crate and barrel stores, etc...
But I could not find their websites URL... not in what I would consider a reasonable amount of time at least.
Obviously I found it in the end.
But I couldn't help but think that Google really doesn't want me even going to the actual URL.
They want me to call and drive to the store using their phone and their google maps product, and leave a review on their platform, growing their company's value for them.
Crate and barrel and my original intentions be damned.
I've stated this before, but it bears repeating:
Google does not make money from you finding what you're looking for.
Google only makes money from you hunting for what you're looking for.
Repeating problematic incentives is fine. Ignoring counteracting incentives is misleading but popular in all debates.
- Monthly: Incentives variable, but generally low quality results (for slot machine psychology.)
- For each match/hookup/"real" relationship: Incentives results that produce relationships that last exactly long enough to be considered a match/hookup/"real" relationship.
- One-time upfront: Incentivize finding the best available candidate ASAP in order to save server costs.
- Monthly, cost propositional to success rate: Optimizing for some specific length of relationship that someone calculated to be optimal.
There are most likely other funding possibilities, and I've most likely misunderstood some rule of economics. Note that none of these optimize specifically for happiness in relationships, only for longevity.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Crate+and+Barrel+Canada&t=ffcm&ia=...
DuckDuckGo has mobile apps: https://duckduckgo.com/app
So it proves that you can use DuckDuckGo to immediately get the link with no fuss, and that Google Search is increasingly not designed to facilitate that kind of interaction.
[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
The links obviously works, but if you want it to look nicer, why not just click and get the URL from the browser? That might even be faster depending on device and keyboard/touchscreen/mouse setup and usage.
This is easy enough [for me] to work around with browser developer tools on the desktop, but a PITA on, e.g., iOS, where these are not readily available.
Google could solve the problem without sacrificing telemetry by overriding the context menu for the link with an option to "show original link".
I just want the link :)
It proves that you don't understand how Google works.
Each search is custom to the person, profile, IP address, geolocation, search history, surfing history, purchase history, social media, and a thousand other trade secrets that Google holds. No two searches are the same.
This is why when Sally in Accounting searches for something on her work computer, and Mike in Facilities searches for the same thing on his phone they get different results.
There is little doubt that Sally, Mike, and everyone else, will get that website as the first result for that query on desktop, unless they specifically block English-language results.
Google search link fix https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
Google Search URL Fixup https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
Adding an addon feels more like gaslighting myself that they're not abusive really. Was bad enough when they "innovated" search by adding a JS redirect to every visible URL so what you saw wasn't what you got - just what you eventually got after they've logged and tracked you.
But you can't because they use google.com and gstatic.com.
I've been thinking about adding google.com to my hosts roundfile. Do you what other domains/IP ranges I should use?
I think best thing is switch default search to a new engine to get used to it, takes a little adjusting but worthwhile.
I just want a plain list of websites, thank you. If I want images or videos or news, I'll click that handy tab you provided for me...
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i...
This is openly hostile to the foundation of the web. They aren't even bothering to pretend anymore.
Chrome doesn't show http/s or www in the address bar anymore. this made me incorrectly communicate a URL yesterday. for example www.news.ycombinator.com and news.ycombinator.com look exactly the same in Chrome's address bar. no idea why they made that decision...
just yesterday i noticed that hovering some hyperlinks doesn't reveal the linked URL at the bottom of the screen. so weird...
Do you have an example of that behavior?
I wanted to know "what is a lure in counterintelligence?". Here is a link to the second search result, which happens to be a PDF:
https://fas.org/irp/eprint/ci-glossary.pdf
For the answer to the query, search for "dangle" in the PDF.