I would hope that any competent person can see that this can not end well.

Google must know that they are not a monopoly in search.

Number of search queries is such a bad metric for quality of your product. If your search is trash then the user is going to need more queries to get a satisfactory answer. That is, until they stop using your service of course.

I used to love the Eyewitness Guides books when I was a kid. Had no idea that it existed as a show as well.

TV tech is nudging ever further into Torment Nexus territory.

Then I will have my encryption program make the encrypted data look like text/images/whatever…

Ooh, I have a good one. While I was asleep my brain came up with “Late’n’Baked” which was some kind of instant foodstuff for stoners along the lines of Huel. This was apparently funny enough to wake me up.

In the UK we at least still have most of the residual EU consumer protection law in place, so a lot of this kind of stuff that’s common in the US would be illegal here. That said, companies still manage to innovate new ways to screw the consumer all the time.