Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

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It's been obvious for years Google is moving in this direction of favoring "big brands". I mean I think they even said it out-loud about a decade ago when they made a Google search algorithm update.

Then the whole thing with AMP and them "partnering with big publishers" to show you carousels of big brand content at the top of the search page also happened.

And the same thing with YouTube happened the moment Google decided to turn it into "web TV", also many years ago.

There's also the trend of top of all these other trends of Google trying to do everything by itself, which the European Commission noticed a while ago and started investigating it in multiple antitrust lawsuits. But I fear even several multi-billion dollar fines won't be enough to actually stop Google from going down this path even more.

Google has just become "The Internet" on the internet. Youtube is what the internet was. Tumblr is what the internet was. Facebook is what the internet was.

All those together are "The new internet" which is really just the new main stream media. We grew up with ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS. Now it's facebook, twitter, and youtube. Those new internet bootstrapped itself off the hopes and dreams of individual content creators and now that they are big enough, they are disregarding the individual and moving back toward the "mass brain" corporations.

20 years ago, the internet was the dream that now individuals could create and have as much visibility as big corporations. It was liberating. It was democratizing!

But the internet has gone the way of the airwaves and sadly, the content has too -- for the most part. Yes, there's still good content out there, but if ABC, CBS, and NBC won't show it to you, you have to work harder as a consumer to find it. Like at the library or from your friends and family, or idk, ddg?

We need a search engine that refuses to index any content with Google Ads on it. Or any ad network on it.

We need to actively disengage from anything associated with Google.

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