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Comment by ibdf | Hacker News Reader

I think people that blindly complain about google take for granted the amount of work they have done, and the amount of free services they provide (yes yes, nothing is free, I get it). Perhaps these same people were not alive in the 90s to see how bad things were then. But yet, this war of google vs amazon only leaves customers, who don't give a crap about who wins, with less options. Do we need to pick sides? No company can provide every service you need. What happened about doing one thing, but doing it well?

Amazon loses because now I don't trust them to show me the best product. Only what they want me to find.

Google loses because now I don't trust them to show me the best search result. Only what they want me to find.

You lose. Nobody wins. Corporations continues to profit.

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> Perhaps these same people were not alive in the 90s to see how bad things were then.

I was alive, and my memory is quite different: web search was way more useful back then. Yes, sure, the search engines were simpler. They were more about searching exact text phrases, and less about "guessing" what you meant, or auto-correcting the spelling in your query. But the web itself was different too - a web search with the engines back then usually returned a list of sites relevant to what I was searching for. These days, so many google searches result in a long list of clickbait, crappy content farms, shopping sites, fake "review" sites, fake blogs, malware/crapware download sites, sketchy "best price search" sites, and so on and on. IMO web search just keeps getting more useless over time.

I was alive as well, and just barely starting to get into coding, so my analysis will not be very accurate.

However, in a pre-google web, most sites would add thousands of keywords to their meta tags, hoping that even when the site was not relevant for most of those keywords, they would get the click, get paid by the ads and be incentivised to create more.

And since in those days the concept of relevance (and all that the page rank brought) was still far away, the sites themselves had to catalogue themselves, thus creating the keyword spam.

I remember jumping between search engines; Excite, Altavista, Yahoo, and not getting very relevant results.

I'd lose more if Wikipedia went away than if Google went away - the 90s/early-2000s substitutes for their products were usable, just required a bit less blind trust and a bit more effort (and remember: google isn't a magic no-effort-requiring box still - it just guesses right more frequently than it used to).

But there was nothing I remember back then like Wikipedia. Encarta? Extremely limited in comparison. (Or anything then that was like Amazon, for that matter.)

How am I losing if Google now shows me more results from a bigger variety of shops? Sounds like a win for me though.

Because Google no longer will show you the BEST results - it will show you the results that are most profitable for Google.

I wasn't aware that there was a simple measure of what is BEST result that we all agreed on. Would you mind sharing it, please?

Yes, I would like to know, too. Shouldn't we be happy that they are essentially creating competitors for Amazon? I'm no economizer, but couldn't this drive prices down?

That's a losing scenario for Google and a winning scenario for Amazon.

Google is primarily a search engine, as a product. Google shooting itself in the foot by not showing the best results, harms their reputation.

People already go directly to Amazon to search for things to buy. That has been a constantly growing trend for 15+ years. If Google's product goes backwards when it comes to delivering results people want, that will drive more people directly to Amazon and accelerate the trend of going straight to their site to search for things to buy and bypassing Google.

Google has likely already maxed out on search usage in the US, including on market share. Meanwhile online retail is still only ~11-12% of all US retail. That online share will double in the next ten years roughly. Amazon will be the size of Walmart, in retail, in another seven or eight years, further massively expanding its actual customer use.

Amazon easily wins that battle with Google. All of the expansion over the next ten years is on Amazon's side. Meanwhile Google has an aging, maxed out product in search, and a maxed out product in Android (annual global smartphone sales growth is near zero).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

Your reply almost implies that Google is a charity and is providing "the amount of free services" as a public good. It is not.

I knew this would be a comment, and thus why I said "yes yes, nothing is free, I get it"

Saying "yes yes, nothing is free, I get it" doesn't explain your reasoning though.

Agreed. I should have been more clearer. Any time someone mentions google's free services you hear things like "it's not really free", "google is not a non-profit" and so on. I'm not defending google but they have changed the landscape of the internet as we know it, and I think people tend to take sides and forget how different things were before companies such as google (not limited to) came along.

On another note, I'm often amazed at organizations this big don't crumble overtime with so many moving parts. It's practically impossible to be without fault.

>What happened about doing one thing, but doing it well?

Mass connectivity and the sorts of companies that entails might contribute, but financial structures are responsible for most of it.

Public corporations and investment firms decouple capital from production. The neoclassical economic theories establish this as a reasonable approach to a liquid market, but they fail to account for a few things, including mode of production, which comprises the means and relations of the production process. Whereas specialization brought efficiency to production, these recent arrangements remove production from sight, altogether. Our financial system is essentially just optimizations for doing this type of business, and other industries have followed suit. Monopolies are among but still the least of our problems.

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