Google becoming big pharma- use other search engines

Can't believe people choose to use 'google a word/topic' thus making it a verb, I still use 'search the internet' and not google it. I think those who made google synonymous with search were responsible for google becoming such a giant monopoly. Like those few people who are interested in privacy and other security aspects and do not want 'manipulated'results, I don't rely on Google for searches entirely. I use sites like Ixquick/Startpage which places an emphasis on privacy and a few other sites to not concentrate my searches on one website so that I don't become a victim of target advertising or be documented in their databases as a 'profile'. Still they might have my profile but not an accurate and a complete 'profile' because I can still see targeted advertisements but off target by a degree :)

People think the words we type in on the text box or tell google search(esp. voice search on smartphones) are safe and private, but actually they go through a process of evaluation at a back end, where workers with some disturbing working conditions, work on them and re-arrange the results based on strict rules. These workers are called evaluators and are forced to re-arrange results so that results are presented in a pre-defined way---this actually can not happen on real time because then results would take time, this somehow happens at an algorithm level. For example, if an user searches for an apple(fruit) on the net, irrespective of the intent of the end user who is searching, the search engine entity decides --what to show in results, the fruit gets degraded to a lower scale, and the apple company that sells iphones and ipads gets the top slot. Similarly it degrades alternative therapies, blogs, chat forums to lower grade putting established medicine on the top, with some of the websites like webmd getting the top slot---I know many such examples for I know a bit about what goes on behind the scenes. Like the media that shows biased news, Google is also into returning biased results.

Yes these monopolies always grow and would also try diversifying into major money making businesses like pharma. Yes people need to exercise informed and responsible choices. Now we also have to keep in mind that we should not believe in everything that Google or any search engine returns as results for our search words.
[Edited by maheeru on 2019-08-08 23:37:15]

It'd be really difficult to erase the information itself but they can make it a lot harder for ordinary people to get access to.

Awareness is certainly needed.

Yes that George Orwellian Big brother definitely comes to mind. Now Big Brother in popular narrative not only pertains to a government it also refers to such giant corporations.