Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance.
Is this a bad thing?
Is this a bad thing?
In a way, yeah, they made the Web safer. And cleared it out almost completely in the process.
Should Google not adjust their algorithms to demote bad or harmful content. There are two sides of the coin.
Is it really much different from the security cat and mouse game?
Would you prefer no search or what we had before Google?
What would search look like of they did nothing? What would the world look like over the last 20 years?
Then Google started adding more portal-like features and using NLP to perform searches on what they wished you had entered in the search field. They also started tailoring search results to your past search history and whatever profile they constructed about you.
Some people might want a natural language question answerer, others might want a search of only current events, but some definitely just want to search for content.
Google has catered to the former at the expense of the latter. They try to stuff all their different modes into a single text box and display them on a single results page. There's no segmentation to clearly different functional modes.
For me I'd love to see Google go back to actual web searches. Support Boolean operators and term quoting. Return me only search results without offering me shit they think I want to see.
I abandoned Google as my main search engine in favor of DuckDuckGo years ago. While not perfect they at least show me actual search results. If I want other modes of search like video or news I can click those tabs but they don't force that content on me.
We might not see any obvious candidates for that, as Google was dominant and they had no market access.
Imagine a timeline where Palm ruled the phone market, and we’d be here asking rhetoric questions about what it would have been if Palm didn’t do it.
With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web?
Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed an HTTPS cert. Before that, I needed to confirm I owned the site to Google.
All things which may make the web better, but it certainly increases the operational burden and may discourage others from bothering in the first place.
The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
I would not recommend AMP, but there are dozens of standards that are not part of what the public sees, low level enough they don't care to see. These are the important things Google has caused the world to adopt as best practices. You don't have to have http, but you are telling users you don't care about their security. This was largely pushed by green/red indicators in the URL bar.
This heavily pushes the web toward centralization, which I see as a really bad thing, in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. It's happening in so many ways (have you tried standing up your own email server?) and this sort of thing drives it the hardest.
I don't think Google is all bad, in fact I appreciate a lot of what they have done for the world (you mention some of these things). But as with nearly everything in life, it's complicated. I worry a lot that we're headed towards an internet where the individual is at the mercy of organizations to allow them to have a voice.
But the bad actors don't really abuse technical standards. They abuse links. The only part in Google's list of criteria that has largely remained untouched in the last two decades and is still the factor for ranking. So much so, that I'm confident that, if ranking factor relevance was a search result, the first page would just be the same result over and over: Links.
That's the reason for the centralization of power: those with more links will be ranked on the top, will have more visibility and, you guessed it, get more links. Guess what happens: they then start to sell either links or they rent out subdomains and folders on their website.
Google, as a company, does not care about bad actors. Some teams in Google do, but they are not the ones setting the policies.
I'll visit YouTube for free entertainment sometimes, but I hardly depend on it for anything, and I really wish more creators posted their content elsewhere, even at a price.
What has Google actually created that's successful, in house, other than search & gmail?
Here you have Monty Python asking that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo
most of the folks who claim never to use google or google never makes something available - almost always hot air.
I do remember hotmail and MSN and AOL which preceded gmail, gmail was really pretty great when it came out.
I think microsoft may oddly be coming back a bit after the balmar years. I'm not a huge fan of facebook taking over (yuch).
Google took on and basically CRUSHED some major market players and powers (Microsoft basically lost the entire web and handset markets from a monopoly position) as a result of google service offerings.
Check out how much money they pumped into firefox as well - that used to be a major part of their push vis a vis IE.
Regardless of how much google "sucks" - they seem to have at least some things that folks like.
They have changed tune and I now call them the biggest COSS company.
I'd thought they were doomed (ie, no linux cloud offering expected, no multi-platform or open source offerings). Windows Mobile did crash and burn, but Azure actually has linux containers (most common type I think) and their other stuff is sometimes open source / linux friendly now - (SQL Server??) it's whiplash for those of us who were around for the EEE period.
Because of the market dominance
I don't recall them advertising until recently
By purchasing potential competitors before they got big.
Google launched AdWords in 2000
But I agree, not your fault for not looking.