iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/09/2026

Judge Amit Mehta had presided over Google's "search" case, where we learned that Google had *deliberately made search worse* so that you'd have to search more than once in order to get your answer, which would allow the company the chance to show you more ads: pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/n...

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (24 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/09/2026

Google was able to do this because it had cornered the market on search. The company had spent years paying a $20b annual bribe to Apple to stay out of the search market, and they'd bought the default search placement for every operating system, browser and carrier.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/09/2026

If you encountered a search box in the wild, it was almost certainly wired into Google's servers. They knew that there was approximately *zero* chance that you'd ever stumble upon another search engine, which meant they could make their own search as shitty as they wanted and keep your business.

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