Did you know that Google handles 90% of internet searches?
That is an astonishing statistic when you think about one company’s market dominance and ability to shape public opinion through search results. It’s also highly problematic if you follow Google’s pattern of anti-conservative bias and manipulation of its search algorithm.
Todd Ricketts, co-owner of Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs, is challenging Google’s dominance by launching Freespoke, a search engine that promises to provide uncensored and impartial information for its users.
Ricketts joins this episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast.” Listen or read a transcript of the interview below.
Rob Bluey: Before we hear more about the features of Freespoke, I’d like to start by hearing what inspired you to create a competitor to Google. There is no easy competitor on the market.
Todd Ricketts I believe that I am a skeptical person. I have always been skeptical about what people are doing and how they present themselves. And as I looked at Google results, I always felt like I was getting results that I didn’t expect, and I felt like they were a little bit left-leaning, that they were not showing everything that I was looking for, really, and trying to guide me down a path that was not the path I was looking for.
The best example that I have: I was showing this idea to a prospective investor in Freespoke and I said, “One of the crazy things that I’ve found is that sometimes when you type ‘NRA’ in Google, the NRA itself is the sixth thing that comes up.”
We did that and, luckily for us, the NRA came to the table in that particular meeting. It was very subdued, below-the-fold in newspaper talk. It just highlighted the fact Google is showing things that have been curated or manipulated in a way that you can use to direct your thinking in a specific way. And I just don’t really think that’s what search is all about.
I’ve always felt like search should be about presenting all the information and letting you make up your mind, and if I can tie that into our family business of Ameritrade that we sold to Schwab a couple of years ago—but really when Ameritrade came into business in 1975, it was deregulation of brokerage commissions.
The idea was that, before 1975 you had to pay high commissions for access to the stock exchange. With the deregulation of commissions, people could trade stocks without needing to get advice or pay a high price. It was a way for people to take control over their financial future.
So I think what we’re trying to do is kind of a similar vein. I want to give information back to people. I want people to be able to read all the news and make up their own minds about what’s going on in the world.
Bluey, thank you. In addition to being a coowner of the Chicago Cubs you also serve as a member the Charles Schwab board of directors. You were also a member the TD Ameritrade board in the past, which your father founded in 1975, as you mentioned. So you’ve obviously seen success in the business world.
And following up on that last answer, why do you think that there’s so much potential for Freespoke right now? And when you consider the potential audience for Freespoke and the users that would benefit from it, you can see why you are so bullish about its future.
Ricketts:The American way of life is competition. Obviously, when it comes to baseball and it comes to business, I’m a competitor. Google has 90% of all search queries on the internet, as you know. That’s too much for any one market player. There aren’t very many industries where you have one player that has such dominance.
And being around D.C. a little bit and hearing politicians speak, they talk about regulating these industries, but in my mind, I don’t want regulation. I want competition. Give me a level playing field and let me go out there and put out a product that’s an alternative to Google and to the other search engines that are out there.
And the fact that there are a couple other search engines popping up right now, too, just highlights the fact that there’s a need out there in the market for an alternative to search.
Bluey: Bluey was previously the CEO for Ending Spending. This group focused on fiscal issues. You also served as the national finance chair for the Republican National Committee. So as somebody who’s worked in both conservative politics and Republican politics, I’m sure you’ve seen the anti-conservative bias firsthand. What were some of the most notable things Big Tech did that sparked your interest in a Google alternative?
Ricketts: There’s a few good topics. The one that jumps out at me that is most recent is how Google was sending RNC emails into people’s spam folder.
Now, I think it’s fairly common that you get a bit of spam into your spam folder, but in 2020, Google, if you had a Gmail account, 80% of emails sent from the Republican National Committee to Gmail accounts were put into spam, compared to less than 10% of emails from the Democrat National Committee.
That’s a big deal, first of all, because these email campaigns are expensive and lots of people have Gmail. But it’s just an insight into how Google thinks about conservative views and conservative values.
You don’t have to look too far, that during COVID how there was so much suppressed information on people who just questioned what the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]was saying and being questioned about whether lockdowns, masks, and all the other things we did were legal. You were then taken off YouTube or taken down from a Google Search if you said this.
So there’s lots of examples of where Big Tech is trying to guide the thinking of the American people, which I just don’t think is right, and I don’t think it’s healthy. I think it’s dangerous.
Bluey: Let’s just get back to that. That is, by the way. studyThe information you cited came from North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science. This was not a partisan research.
And as somebody who has worked for a number of years to overcome the algorithmic bias of the social media companies, and we made a pivot several years ago at The Daily Signal to invest in emails, so we certainly appreciate what you’re talking about there, because it is the primary means in which Daily Signal users and our audience receives its information. We know that filtering our content into spam or inboxes can have a significant impact on how many people see it.
Ricketts: Yeah, exactly.
Bluey, I would like to ask about some of your expectations regarding the features and characteristics of Freespoke. You’ve talked about the principles behind the search engine. When they go to use the search engine themselves, what are some of the things that they’ll find there?
Ricketts: We identify news sources as being either left, right, or middle of the road. And really, it’s not a panacea. It doesn’t solve everything. But what it does is it gives you some quick context of where the person who wrote that story is coming from, and so you can adjust in your own mind, “Do I have to add a green assault to what I’m reading, because I know this person is coming at it from either a left or a right bias?”
And so, really, we’re just trying to help people sort through. Again, it comes back to putting information in front of people and helping them come to their own conclusions, and it’s really something that just seems to be outside of what the Big Tech world is thinking right now, where they want to guide your thinking.
The other part of it is that we’re trying to search all sorts of content. Our crawler is looking for new content all the time, and we’re expanding that crawl all the time, trying to find new sources of relevant information and highlighting those things. And really, if you go look for news on Google, you’ll find The New York Times pays for that first slot all the time. And so we avoid having that by not having people pay for that slot, and we’re trying to put content up as it is relevant, not as it’s paid for.
Bluey: Again, I feel like we have a lot of synergy here, as somebody who believes that it’s important to label news and commentary, and we do that on The Daily Signal. I like the fact you are offering that additional information and that you are taking that step.
However, I can imagine that many people who work at left-leaning news organizations tried to hide behind the banner of mainstream media. What might they say if they object to the classification that you’ve given them? Are you familiar with situations where a news organization has complained? And if they do complain, what’s your response going to be?
Ricketts: A few outlets have said that they would like to be called middle, so it is interesting that you ask that question. We’re going to continue to do it our way. We look at many sources. There’s Ad Fontes—an organization that identifies content as left, right, center sort of thinking—and we look at a few others, and we look at it ourselves, too, and identifying language that is either left or right. But we’re going to continue to label things to the best of our ability and as clearly as possible.
Bluey: Big Tech platforms promise to fight misinformation almost daily, whether it’s for climate change or COVID. You’ve talked about this now a couple of times. Why is it important to give people the facts and let them decide for themselves?
Ricketts: It goes back to that old saying: One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And so when you get into this world of what you consider misinformation, it’s a little scary to think that there’s some 25-year-old kid in Silicon Valley that gets to decide that.
I think that people are smart enough to know for themselves what’s good information and what’s bad information, and I don’t think we need to have this thought police that go around telling you that you have to have these thoughts on climate change. What consensus does climate change have? And I often say, “I’m not a denier, but I like to have an honest conversation.”
And so any sort of platform that says they’re going to suppress information of people that question the consensus on climate change, that is frightening to me. I think that, at one time, Galileo said the Earth was round and was put in jail because he wasn’t part of the accepted thinking of the Flat Earth Society at the time.
We don’t ever want to be put in one of those positions where we have a society where people who question the morays of the day get canceled. It’s the most horrifying thing.
We’re seeing it everywhere, too, especially in Hollywood. People are canceled and labeled “Whatever” for honest comments. And one of the things we want to do is make sure that we don’t cancel people and let people have that platform to speak.
Bluey: It’s so true. And I think one of the other aspects that you’ve seen social media companies employ, and even some legacy media outlets, is the use of fact-checkers. These fact-checkers are clearly there to help you achieve your goals. These social media companies will work with them and, in many cases, attempt to suppress content from outlets such as The Daily Signal or other. So there are a number of challenges and ways that they’re trying to combat “misinformation,” in their words, that ultimately just try to advance a certain agenda that they’re trying to push.
Ricketts: No, that’s 100%. And that exactly highlights the need for platforms like Freespoke, and there’s going to be others that we need. I don’t know if we’re going to expand beyond search in the future, but if you look at places like Twitter or like Instagram and these other platforms, there’s a real problem out there. We Americans need all information, not just one view.
Bluey: I’m curious on that point, because there has been so much focus in the conservative space, whether it be Truth Social or whether it be other platforms that have emerged recently. What motivated you to focus on search instead of other aspects of Big Tech, such as a social networking platform? Was there a particular thing that you felt that there was maybe an opportunity here that didn’t exist elsewhere?
Ricketts: There were two parts to it. The first thing, which was completely wrong in my thinking, I’m like, “Well, how hard can it be to build a search engine?” I say that a little tongue in cheek, because it’s incredibly difficult to build any sort of crawling technology that tags things in a way that makes sense. That was really hard.
But really, the real reason that I thought search was a great place to start is that, going back to Google has such a massive market share that you don’t have to get 50% of the market to have a viable business. If you think that Google has a billion regular users, and you just think to yourself, “Well, if I get 10 million, if I could just get 1% of that market, I have a viable business, or even a 10th of a percent.” So it’s just such a massive market. I felt like that’s where the opportunity presented itself to have a business that’s viable, even if you’re not a market leader.
Bluey: That is certainly true, and you’ve already seen, I think, in the success that you’ve had in building a community, you call them Freefolk. Tell us about who the Freefolk are and what they’ve been doing to perfect the platform and provide that feedback that has been beneficial in terms of creating a new business.
Ricketts: The Freefolk is a name we just like to have fun with. Freespoke is really for everyone.
I’m a Republican, but I don’t come to this business thinking, like, “Oh, this is a search engine for Republicans.” This should be everyone who wants to find the truth or educate themselves. It just so happens that these people are more conservative and less Republican. A lot of people on left seem to be fine with the way Google and other platforms present information.
We’re intended for everybody, and so everybody should be a Freefolk. And I think that if you’re an intellectual person in this country, you should be thinking, “This is a product that I need.”
Bluey: One of the other things that we haven’t talked about yet, but I think is another important feature, is the fact that you do not track or sell your users’ information. Why was that important?
Ricketts: It’s been talked about, but we haven’t seen it in the mass market, but I think as time goes on, people are going to become more and more concerned about their privacy of their personal information that’s out there on the internet.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, called it the creepy-line. Google tries to avoid being creepy by walking right up to the creepy lines, but I find it disturbing that he said that.
So, protecting your privacy online is going to be very important as we move forward, as more of your information is available. People need to be able decide what the rest can see about them.
When you’re on the internet, I think people should always have this in the back of their head, is that if you are not paying for something, you are the product. That website or search engine may sell your information to advertisers. And so if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. It would be a great way to protect your privacy online, if people could adopt that mindset.
Bluey: I agree with what you said, especially as this younger generation emerges. Since the time they were born, a lot of their life, and their entire lives, is now online. That is going to be a bigger issue and it’s a concern that I think all of us have as we see how these companies can sometimes manipulate data and know things about us that we never expected would end up where they are.
Todd, I’d like to make a shift for a second. Talk about your personal experiences, and how they have led you to where you are today. You’ve had a tremendously successful life, and as we talked about earlier with Ameritrade and some of the values that your father and your family brought to that company—your brother, obviously, being the governor of Nebraska—why are you a conservative? How did that happen? Share your story with us.
Ricketts: Nebraska is where I grew up. Two great parents taught us many things. My mom was a great sports fan and always encouraged us to be competitive. I always say that my mom taught us to compete on the field and to be kind and compassionate off of it.
My dad was all about risk taking and entrepreneurship. He believed that it was important to always learn from your mistakes and be able to fail at something. And if you’re not, you’re not trying enough new things.
He started many businesses before Ameritrade was successful. He’s a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. That kind of bug or that gene is probably in our family. My siblings and I, we’re always trying to push the envelope and test the common thinking and see where there’s markets that have opportunities.
Bluey: And you’ve obviously had great success with your Major League Baseball team, the Chicago Cubs. As a lifelong baseball fan myself, albeit for the Pittsburgh Pirates, your division rival, I want to spend just a moment here, in closing, to have you tell the story about how you help transform the Cubs, obviously a franchise that had struggled, that hadn’t been to the World Series, and then that moment when you won the World Series championship.
What was it like? You were there. You had the opportunity to experience it firsthand. It took five years to get to the point where you could transform an organization that was struggling into a World Series champion.
Ricketts: There’s a couple facets to it that are pretty interesting. We knew exactly what Tribune ownership meant for the Cubs when we bought them. And so if you keep in mind that they were owned by the Chicago Tribune, which also owned WGN, which was the TV network that they were on, they came at the asset of the Chicago Cubs, looking at it like, “This is great TV content.”
So they were able to broadcast Cubs games and make a lot of money at their television station, and they weren’t so concerned about how the team did on the field as long as they had all that content to put on TV. This is the number one reason. 1 reason why the team suffered so much in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s.
And so we looked at that and we said, “Look, this is a team that should be winning all the time. This is a team with great fans in big cities with great ballparks. And if you just ran it like a business that was trying to win, you would most certainly win.”
And it took us six years to win the World Series, but I’d say it took us about a year to put our strategic plan in place, which we called the five-year plan. From the moment we created our strategy, it took us five more years.
It was really just a matter of taking the entire operation down to its studs and renovating the house. We redesigned ticketing. Our entire advertising campaign was overhauled. Everything in baseball was completely redesigned. We built new facilities in Dominican Republic. We built a new spring-training facility in Arizona. We made significant investments in Wrigley Field to bring it up-to-date and make it a place where people can come and watch a game, not in a 100 year-old building.
And all of those things, that seriousness at all levels and thoughtfulness at all levels, carried through the entire organization to a place where people held themselves to higher standards. They still hold themselves to a higher level in every job they do at the Cubs.
It was a great feeling to be in Chicago and to be able give back that gift to all the fans who had waited so long to celebrate and have that kind of success.
Bluey: We hope as conservatives that you have that same success with Freespoke because it’s so difficult, as we know, the competitive environment in Major League Baseball, and the challenge that you’re up against here with Google is a massive one, but it is so needed to have an alternative.
I think there are many Daily Signal listeners, people that tune in to the podcast or read our site, and who are looking for something else in that market.
How can people find out more about Freespoke before we close here? I understand, obviously, it’s on the web, but you have an app as well.
Ricketts: One hundred percent. Yeah. Yes. Freespoke.comOur online search engine is, You can then go to the Apple Store or Droid and download the Freespoke App. This allows you to use the app on your mobile device and keep it handy at all times. And I’ve been showing people how you can move Safari out of your quick access bar down at the bottom of your phone and put Freespoke into it to use it as your default search engine.
Bluey: That’s a great idea. The problem is that preloaded settings tend to favor the big players. Therefore, we encourage Daily Signal listeners as well. Todd, thanks so much for being a guest on “The Daily Signal Podcast” today. We appreciate it.
Ricketts: It’s a pleasure. Let me conclude by saying that freedom and competition are what made this country great. We should not allow anyone to have a 90% market share in any industry without at least a challenge.
Bluey: That was Todd Ricketts, co-owner of Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs and the founder of a new search engine called Freespoke. You can visit it at Freespoke.comDownload the app.
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