Sometimes I feel like that internet isn't for me anymore, and that's a little distressing.
We need a PBS/NPR of search engines.
PBS/NPR like solutions would be subject to co-opting forces as with other search engines. Look at wikipedia, touted as a “social good” but undermined by collective activism edits in the name of various ideologies claiming pure intentions of “social good”.
But it is still not so dire. I went back to bookmarks, reading lists and keeping note of writers I check out. It's not bad at all as long as I keep in my interest bubble. Google or not, I still would prefer today's internet world to the decades before the internet.
And of course, new search engine, something distributed and in the GNU domain.
Besides, all that can be done with img HTML tag (browsers do have 'disable images' thing already).
Ironically we’re watching this play out now with products and techs that market themselves as “decentralized.” Maybe after this phase the tech community will consider this isn’t something we can tech our way out of.
The reason Google isn't explaining it is because they can't explain it. They don't know why the ML is returning the results it's returning. And whatever it's doing in that black box, it's making gobs of money—Google's sole purpose since Ruth Porat started squeezing every dime out of every orifice–so just keep on keeping on.
banning advertising would help for awhile, but other profit streams would be optimised and expand to fill void, such as data collection/mining
- ad revenue would drammatically decrease
- buying ads would actually be affordable by local sellers
- the market would self regulate against monopolies
If surveillance capitalism is super-profitable, "making cell phones" capitalism must be even better since Apple is bigger than those companies.