Over the past six years, they've made $755 billion and not a cent paid to people for the use and sell of their data. And all because they provide services like ads above searches and link to shopping websites and Wikipedia, meanwhile selling people's data to whoever? Honestly, it's so hard to use Google as an actual search engine it feels like Google is more like a directory these days. Like, when I have to input a search as:
"yes" "i" "really" "want" "to" "search" "these" "terms"
This really undercuts your message. Google is a leech on society and their products aren’t even good, but you keep using Gmail because it’s kind of a hassle to switch.
You could switch to a different email provider and use DuckDuckGo for search. But you don’t. So your principled stance against Google doesn’t even extend to them most obvious examples of not giving them your business.
But sure, it’s very believable that the days of their products being good are “long and gone”.
I remember altavista giving me interesting results from actual personal websites and I could tweak it by being more precise. On google today the top results are pretty much always garbage SEO optimized aggregate nonsense.
Although lately Google does seem to be losing the battle with the scammers/spammers, at least for certain classes of queries. The number of garbage results I have to wade through if the answer isn’t in Wikipedia seems to be growing.
They single handedly lead the assault on our online privacy. Not that no others were trying, but they succeeded.
everything you think you know about "history" is misinformation. In 2032 Google AI-generates colorful VR videos of the Real Past and boy, I am telling you, we are much better off now!
Keep Googling, dpark, 2032