Yes, traps are usually designed so that it is simple to get into them. It is not that cheese is bad, it is that you are trapped.

Are you comparing something designed to kill a rat with something designed to help me go to a burger place I like, or leave on time for work?

Yes, because when one has already decided that feature $FOO is a trap, any further discussion is likely to be limited to describing how "yes, just like a trap is designed to...so is the thing we're talking about" whether the analogy is apt or not. Something something supporting a narrative.

By having burger places pay money to get on the list of places it helpfully gives us when we want to eat a tasty burger. I still get my tasty burger.

Before replying, you could at least have made an effort to understand what I meant with the distinction between simple and easy.

If you do not care what I say, why even reply?

Presumptuous much? Comments like yours are what makes discussions like this so difficult, and so much less interesting.

Do you never use digital tools to outsource mental effort? Seems like a similar argument could be made for using a calculator.

> subtly influence your behavior towards the most profitable results

This is the very common theory that a company will (shadily) try to offer you a worse product to make more profit. It fails to account for competing companies that would jump on that opportunity to offer their better product, and get the market share.

But what's funny here is that the suggested alternative is to not get any product at all. As in: "Poor OP, didn't realize that it wasn't really him who was enjoying that burger he was enjoying."

"Worse" is often subjective. And the problem is often just the removal of the possibility of a better product to take hold. For example, Google prioritizes Google services. It gets you on as many Google services as possible. Let's use, say, that it pushes you towards Play Music when you search for songs.

Maybe Play Music is the best thing. Maybe it is not. Neither of us can answer that. But if a definitively better product comes along it will have no way to make a foothold because Google is still pushing everyone to their own product, from their other product (Search), and even when people try your product, if they use Google's other products, they'll tend to stick to other Google products.

Honestly, the worst problem with companies like Google is vertical integration. The ability to provide a wide product line where you integrate best with other products your own company makes has an incredibly chilling effect on competition, and therefore, innovation.

And if your theory that companies prioritizing results for profit would lose to companies that always prefer the best products, why is DuckDuckGo still in what... fourth or fifth place?

> And if your theory that companies prioritizing results for profit would lose to companies that always prefer the best products, why is DuckDuckGo still in what... fourth or fifth place?

You'd need to argue that DuckDuckGo's search results are better; I don't think they are. That's what made Google first among many competing search engines, before there was even a clear business model in it. Today the incentive to outperform is bigger.

If a product Y definitely better than X comes along, and only Google Search fails to rank it higher, people will start thinking "I rather search on Bing too, as it finds better products in this category".