Users upset over YouTube–Google linking, and is Google showing greater bias in results?

I found out a day after many netizens: Google is now forcing all YouTube account holders to merge their accounts with their Google ones.
   As part of my de-Googling, I won’t be following suit. Instead, I plan to stay logged out of YouTube: it makes very little difference to me.
   So I won’t be able to comment or like a video—not the end of the world. In fact, I imagine I could very easily comment on videos on a blog and get any possible frustration I have out of my system that way. YouTube is still letting non-account holders embed. And I’m not really a YouTube video uploader: I can always go on Vimeo if I were that keen, or use SmugMug, which was in the digital photo-storage game long before Flickr, and which now hosts videos, too.
   I felt very sympathetic when I found that there were people far more pissed off about this development than I am. The only news outlet to have reported on the compulsory linking that I could find, Brandchannel, has scores of unhappy users who are commenting that the move has even locked them out of YouTube. Others are concerned about their privacy, with good reason.
   Looks like Google still hasn’t learned about user choices after the débâcles last year over Buzz and the other services it offers. If anything, it seems to be getting worse.

Remember, too, how Google has stated on numerous occasions that it would not bias search results? Consider this: I wanted to search for an old post of mine so I could link it from the above text. The term: Google Buzz “de-Googling”.
   On Duck Duck Go, I found the post immediately:

Duck Duck Go search

   Out of interest, on Google, it cannot be seen: only positive things are mentioned and Google Buzz itself is the first result.

Google search

   I know I have done more obscure tests to show that Google’s results are getting less precise. But the above is interesting.
   It backs up an earlier article I read online about how Google treats search results, and that there is actually some bias in the system now.
   I don’t begrudge Google for doing this, but it needs to stop saying that it doesn’t. We all know that it was quite happy to engage in censorship when it had Google China, already making its brand less idealistic than it once was.
   Having set this precedent and created this brand association, it’s easy to believe that it now does this quite selectively for a lot more countries.
   You might say that my one search is not a sign of bias, merely one where Google has a less than comprehensive search index and it could not find three old blog entries that have been around for a while. And which it used to be able to find.
   It’s quite a coincidence that three negative posts about Google are no longer easily found with the relevant search terms.
   That’s not great news for Google, either.
   Duck Duck Go is looking better by the day as the Google search engine, the one service to which its brand is tied, gets less precise.


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