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Comment by supremesaboteur | Hacker News Reader

There are many problems with Google's dominance.

1. The Filter Bubble. The idea that you can be shut in your own bubble, not being exposed to new ideas or ideas that contradict your own, is pretty bad

2. The idea that a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth ( with noble intentions of fighting 'fake news' etc ) is also pretty bad. It can be used for political or economic gain

3. The company has a largely hostage users that they can abuse through predatory pricing etc

The opposition is not towards technology, but towards one company controlling most, if not all, of modern technology

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> The Filter Bubble. The idea that you can be shut in your own bubble, not being exposed to new ideas or ideas that contradict your own, is pretty bad

This is a psychological and social question, not a technological problem. Most people are used to being surrounded by broad agreement; continual confrontation over basic values is highly stressful.

> filter bubble

That just means you've got to proactively seek out new ideas you're uncomfortable with, and be mindful that not everything can be found on Google. It's not a reason to use a crappy search like Yahoo or Bing (which only indexes 1/10 of the pages Google does: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/).

> a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth

Wikipedia is more of an arbiter of truth than Google; so far Google has limited itself to indexing information rather than summarizing or categorizing it.

> predatory pricing etc

Free is predatory? I guess they should be paying users to search, like Bing? http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/get-paid-search-bing-rewards-pr...

> so far Google has limited itself to indexing information rather than summarizing or categorizing it

Apart from Google's Instant Answers. Which have, in the past, captured misleading or flat-out wrong information.

> predatory pricing etc

See Firebase's recent price hike. [0]

Not all Google products are free, Google is not just a search engine. Some start off reasonable, you get invested, and then they suddenly become ridiculously more expensive.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409

(I work for google, but nothing to do with firebase)

How exactly is what I think is best summarized as "we had a bug in our pricing system that was undercharging a miniscule number of users by an order of magnitude, and when we fixed the bug, they were informed of the price increase and we even gave them ways to mitigate, but their app architecture was terrible which made it difficult or impossible, and then after they raised a stink about it we reduced the cost/credited them enough to be mutually agreeable" as predatory?

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