Hacker News Reader

Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

Do you think Google is the new AOL? Way back AOL had their homepage where you saw an AOL recommended part of the web. You still had access to the web but for most first time users it was easier to use than a web browser alone.

I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a more or less static homepage of topics.

Are we all in a Google search bubble?

View on HN

I used to work for a company making a SaaS tool for SEO teams to use to see how their site was ranking for their desired keywords on Google. This meant searching Google six million times a day from a motley crew of grey-market proxies and IPv6 providers.

We're definitely in a Google bubble. It becomes very clear that they have intense control over what shows up on the first page of searches, especially in their Featured Snippets and Carousels at the top, and their native-looking ad results.

Control over search results is incredibly powerful in terms of anything from influencing the zeitgeist, to controlling marketing efforts at a grand scale, through to straight propaganda.

We really run an incredible risk as a society by putting too many eggs into the Google basket. Using their browser to use their service to consume their results means a complete monoculture; and while they're not really visibly abusing it now, it's clear that they can subtly manipulate things for a long time before they get caught, and they have the platform to be able to do far more should they (or any government actor forcing their hand) decide they want to.

One of those "Google is the new AOL" moments hit me when I heard a commercial for Google on the radio recently. Specifically, it was someone explaining that they had a feature built especially for veterans to find jobs relevant to them, and that you could get to it by typing "jobs for veterans" into Google search.

It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of people forgot about, but was literally often advertised on TV or radio as how to get to a given site or web feature.

I do not understand how you guys can call Google the new AOL, Google search works like a charm at a huge scale. What is the problem?

I think the crux of the others’ point is that Google’s increasingly complex secret sauce for returning search results, combined with its general ubiquity, has perhaps created a monoculture whereby we view the Web almost entirely through Google’s lens. AOL’s “curation” of the web via its portal was a bit more direct for sure, but I can see how the effect could be similar.

Oh believe me you can find all sorts of non curated filth as well using Google as well. I think it is still a pretty good engine for "if you insist, here is the path to rabbit hole". If you let google know about you, it will tune the results for you. I keep my history for this reason.

It’s not comparing technical merit or business decisions. AOL for a long time was the window into the web for lots of American users. Google is now a window into the web for users around the world.

Google’s algorithms have the ability to make companies essentially undiscoverable, deliberately or not, so there’s at least some comparison to be made with AOL’s keyword registry.

For me, the problem is that Google doesn't work like a charm at all. It used to, but it's been consistently getting worse over the years.

Examples? Maybe your expectations grew faster than technology to keep up?

Interestingly, that was the idea I distinctly remember from the dinner party: someone suggested the only fix for Internet searches was to implement something like AOL Keywords globally. A central registry of keywords.

What would you be trying to "fix" here? More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something. If I search for a company, the company's official website is nearly always the first real result.

The only thing I think is really wrong with search (and all major search engines right now are guilty of this) is making paid ads look very similar to real results, which makes it possible to pay to hijack a result.

They're referring to a conversation in 1994. In 1994 that was definitively not the case.

> More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something.

I can't remember that happening in years with Google. Now, it's unusual if the thing I'm searching for even appears in the first page.

Realnames almost achieved that, by being added to IE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames

Reply on news.ycombinator.com