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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

I will say both of the eCommerce businesses I worked at were 100% in thrall to google's decisions. Unless you are a brand the size of amazon that can get attention directly, everyone just does a google search. Which mean's if google decides to do something that impacts your ranking or ads you might just be completely out of business with in a matter of days, or slowly bleed out. They might even decide to compete with you or partner with one of your competitors. It's like if the owner of the streets could make a deal with walmart to build more lanes there and always have construction in front of your building. Or even not have a turn off. It controls online commerce basically.

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It almost feels like internet search should be a public property in the same way roads are.

I definitely do not trust the government to give better results than google.

In fact, I would expect them to actively censor and promote their interests. Also, would other people just not be allowed to make search engines? Wouldn't google v2 just take over again?

There is definitely a case to be made there.

In a very idealistic case, I would even go further and say it should be under the umbrella of the UN to accommodate other cultures, and be politics-agnostic.

I do believe that we are at the time when decent internet access should be pushed by the UN (or any other entity, hopefully in a non-commercial non-political way like food, shelter, and education.

I guess I would put food, shelter, health care in a bucket, and education with internet in another. And an unbiased search engine is quite essential for a functional internet experience.

That makes no sense. Search is more like a map or address book or perhaps a pamphlet station. What they choose to prioritize/display is inherently editorial. Why should that powe be given to the government?

You mean like the U.S. Geological Survey? National mapping agencies are very common [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_mapping_agency

They exist but it's been a long time since mapping were an exclusive privilege - which is to say a government search engine might make some sense but favouring it with funding to the extent of roads likely doesn't.

Remember how bad internet search was before Google? It would still be that bad today if the government was in charge of it.

That’s close to my theory as well, Googlebot is almost universally allowed, building the index happened at the right time to become to big to block. Trying to deep crawl to Google’s level may be impossible now, and maybe one way to encourage innovation in search/discovery is to force the raw crawl results for others to parse & rank.

Google doesn't seem to be popping up lots of competing businesses in all kinds of verticals like Amazon does (or Microsoft has for a long time).

Maybe I'm not seeing it right, but IMO Google seems less predatory than they could be... they aren't anywhere near Amazon level.

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