Yahoo’s search is powered by Bing (Microsoft’s search engine). Also, Google does pay corporation tax in the UK, just not as much as it would if it didn't use creative accounting methods.A couple of points:On the issue of tax liabilities:Any business would be pleased to reduce its tax liabilities. I am angry that vital public services are being trashed due to shortages of money, while large companies reduce their UK tax liabilities by billions, sometimes to zero. But I cannot blame those companies for doing so. Particularly in the case of US corporations, that’s their purpose. They are *required* to put the interests of their shareholders above those of their customers, wherever those customers might reside.This whole legal vs. moral argument is bunkum. Hot air for the media to pump out, and for politicians to use to grandstand while they distract us from their own intrigues. If it’s immoral, make it illegal. Until then, don’t blame companies for doing precisely what they exist to do.What I *do* find morally repugnant is Starbucks’ reaction to the hot air: to announce that it is going to cook its books again to magic up a £10m per year tax liability, rather than to magic up a £0 per year liability. Effectively a donation, given that it could choose to continue paying nothing under the current regime. It’s a branding exercise, and in my opinion they should be criticised far more harshly for their attempts to hoodwink the public than they should for using entirely legal accounting methods. In that sense, Eric Schmidt is being far more honest with us.On the issue of boycotting Google’s search engine, there are much better things to do than that, if you want to continue finding the things you are looking for. They make most of their money from people clicking on adverts in their search results (and elsewhere on other sites using Google Adwords). Solution: don’t click on the adverts. Better yet, use the Adblock Plus browser plug-in to remove the adverts altogether. In my opinion, Adblock Plus is what makes using the internet bearable.Secondly, log out of your Google (and Facebook) account/s when you’re not directly using them. Browsing the web and searching while logged in allows them to build up a detailed profile on you, which they can then sell on to third party organisations, normally again for advertising or marketing purposes. It might be “anonymised” in the legal sense of the word, but research has shown that multiple data points can be combined to identify the individuals they relate to, with the appropriate resources.If you want to go a step further, you can deprive online advertising companies of almost all data about you with other privacy protecting browser plug-ins such as Request Policy, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, BetterPrivacy, and more. Some of these require a fair amount of work and can occasionally slow/impede your browsing, but it’s a pay-off between that and information about you being transmitted to all sorts of organisations you may or may not want to receive it.If you must change your search engine, use one such as DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com which doesn’t collect any data on its users at all and has no advertising. It’s no Google, but it’s not bad either.
Max Duley ● 4857d