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Cliff's avatar

Totally agree that the use of Google Search has got out of hand, and the use of 'Google' as a verb compounds the problem. By allowing political adverts to appear as search results is completely wrong and should be legislated against. However there are many other search engines available - I recommend DuckDuckGo - and if the general public felt sufficiently strongly about this issue they could easily take action and vote with their 'clicks', it doesn't need a panocracy. Sadly I fear that inertia will prevail. As for the State monopoly, Starmer seems to be making changes - how that works out we've yet to see. Merry Christmas anyway!

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jim peden's avatar

Hi Cliff and thanks for the comment.

I've noticed that, in general on substack and other social media, the more emotive the post, the more comments it attracts. I hope that when people get a chance to the panocracy system in action it will concentrate their minds!

I got an advert from the Labour Party on YouTube apparently extolling the virtues of the current government. However, I have to say that I mute the sound when adverts come up on YT and focus on the bottom right for when the skip button shows up. In general, I think legislation in this area is problematic. Apart from the freedom of speech issues, there are a lot of clever and unprincipled people out there in the ad industry and no matter how well constructed some regulation is, they'll find a way round it.

DuckDuckGo is pretty good. I now use presearch which aggregates results from several search engines. To help get around bias I go off the first page of results to where the real meat may lurk.

Yes, panocracy is to some extent about people voting with their clicks rather than having their clicks decided for them by unknown operators. As you point out most people don't seem to be bothered enough to influence Big G directly. It's possible that others do the same as me and ignore ads. This is the kind of thing that will influence Google.

The herd mentality and inertia are challenges for the design of the panocracy and correct handling will take a lot of thought, trial and error!

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