Who is going to replace Google for us?
michaeldehaan.substack.com
michaeldehaan.substack.com
The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals.
Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became subreddits, blogs became tweets, homepages became Facebook profiles. And we’ve hyper-optimized the attention economy to keep us hooked on clickbait headlines and 30 second videos. The Web just bears no resemblance to what it was 10-20 years ago, and web search results are a reflection of that.
Maybe there’s a way to restore the Web of old. But that seems like putting the genie back in the bottle. More likely, IMO, something will eventually replace the Web, and Web search along with it.
Yeah, I wish I knew how to get back to it, but I think that's impossible without a big enough movement. Yes, I know about tildeverse and some other things but the countervailing network effect is just too big for it to be sustaining right now. The closest is Mastadon but it's not really that great.
I never forgot that remark. So that's a thing that I'd recommend to Mastadon: make it viewable by anyone, even if they don't have an account. Nothing smells quite like "you are the product" than requiring an account.
Here's the profile directory on the biggest instance, for example: https://mastodon.social/explore
Problem a - shortness, means no longform texts there, so they are posted in different sites, externally. Short posts aren't very informative usually.
Problem b - stream. Currently almost all of the social media are structured like this and it is a bad format. It is not engaging, it is not possible to find something which flew by ten minutes ago. It's like a bad version of Facebook, if you didn't happen to see some post "in time" then it might as well don't exist.
Problem c - engagement, discovery, popularity and other similar issues. This is a common problem for all media, but for Mastodon it is even worse because of the fragmentation. It's broken even at the registration stage, e.g. just where should I register to find what I want? Impossible to find.
I've tried using it twice due to hype on HN, and abandoned it quickly.
B seems inherent to social media as we know it. What would be a better design for you?
C is handled in part by relay servers synchronizing content between instances. Small instances often aren't well-connected though and I think both instance admins and relay operators could do better here.
There are a lot of little things that could make the non-corporate internet more appealing to the average person. Why, for example can't I have a shared identity across several independent forums? OpenID came out long ago.
yah, money shouts, it doesn't merely talk. that's a consequence of (implicitly) deciding that money should have a voice in the first place. we explicitly sanction this via a gigantic industry, advertising, in which google has a prominent position. until we collectively decide to deemphasize this whole industry, at least in part by cultivating the small and interesting, the web and the internet at large will be dominated by money shouting.
> Maybe there’s a way to restore the Web of old.
At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources, hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the author of the freshness of summer produce, it's because that's the kind of content that Google will give a high ranking.
The web was a better place when it was quirkier, and there's probably a ton of quirky content that still exists, but it won't get surfaced by search engines that much these days, and it's buried under tons of garbage.
...
No, wait, some squatter sits on it.
If you don't like subreddits, twitter, or the mass produced crap - avoid it and focus on what you like. The early internet stuff has not been banned and banished. Some if it has been forgotten, maybe, but nobody is going to go through the trouble of keeping a VHS store just to tickle your nostalgia.
I still can find a community to play Re-Volt with. That is only possible because of the internet and the way it is.
And I get that people make a living by putting advertising on their pages. I'm not really against that. (Though I don't do that myself for my own reasons, I wouldn't presume to tell other people what to do with their websites.) But it's been abused to the point where number of ads on a page is a decent proxy for how crappy the content is.
When people decide to put ads on their content, the temptation is there to produce content to carry the ads. Before ads in the old days, you just produced content to produce content. Again, I'm not saying that ads are bad. But the purity of the old web is lost.
I don't think there's really a way to bring it back. I think the answer is that we just have to get better filtering on our ends to get the specific information that we want.
It's kind of a matching and scaling problem. The ad publisher wants to have a well targeted audience that will convert well, while the website wants to generate ad revenue that won't drive people away.
The problem is that the ad publisher probably doesn't want to deal with the hassle of negotiating with dozens of niche websites for their audience, while the websites don't really want to do the same either. Hence, the rise of ad exchanges, which offers benefits for the ad publishers (deal with only a handful of exchanges, all kind of ad targeting criteria) and the websites (deal with only the exchange, add an ad snippet to generate revenue almost immediately).
The catch is that to extract the most money from ads, the exchanges do all kinds of tracking to figure out the most optimal ads to serve and we end up with the current adtech industry, instead of manually targeted static ads.
> we count the number of uBlock Origin blocked requests on the page, and if too many, we kick it out, leaving only "clean" pages in the index.
My blog uses a 3rd party comment system that does it's own tracking, I'm sure.
This makes me want to ditch that to keep it clean.
Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old?
Google can trivially detect all of the things wrong with the modern web and use them as negative ranking signals. Ads, analytics and affiliate links are a pretty good proxy for "shit site".
The problem is that Google ultimately benefits from spam sites and bad results in many ways:
* bad results increase the time you spend on search result pages and increase the probability the best "result" is actually one of the ads at the top * spam sites may contain Google ads and analytics
Ultimately it is not in Google's interest to give you good results.
That still goes on, but the gold seems harder to find, the signal to noise ratio lower. Might be just nostalgia.
I don't think so, but the next-best thing might be to build an inverted search engine, where instead of crawling the web, people submit their sites to the index. I can imagine a company like Mozilla doing this to preserve the open web (if Mozilla were interested in preserving the open web).
- Google News includes stories from a source that the author doesn't want anyone else to be able to see. (If they just didn't want to see those stories themselves, then there's an easily accessible "hide sources from XXX" entry in the context menu).
- Generic complaints about shopping searches returning links to Amazon, or pages having referral links to Amazon. Might be true, but the case would be a lot stronger with some example queries that show this failure, with suggestions on the good content that is not being surfaced. Without the latter, how can we know that the results weren't actually the best that existed.
- An insinuation that Gmail and Drive are "treating the user as the product". (Seems basically untrue; Gmail has incredibly few ads, Drive I think none, and data from neither is used for ad targeting.)
- The author couldn't get individual customer support for "being the target of a really weird scheme". No details on the scheme. The person they didn't know whose contact details they got from somewhere wasn't enthusiastic about helping them either.
I don't think any of the major news networks have much credibility any more, it's just that some may seem better than others simply because they align more with your particular personal opinions and biases.
The only approach I've found is to consume a few news sources through the lens of their known biases in an attempt to get something resembling the whole picture.
Where? There are, sometimes, 1-2 ads in the "Promotions" tab, which i really wouldn't call "a shit ton".
Breitbart and Epoch Times shouldn't come up anywhere close to anything with "News" in the name.
I've yet to ever see an add in any of my Gmail accounts.
Huh? Looking in my gmail inbox, I see virtually nothing but ads.
I'm not the OP, however, being the service called News, one would expect it to contain actual news and not 100% biased opinion.
I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be dominant in several areas (most notably search) but I guarantee you somehow this era will come to an end.
We've had tech dominance in the past. IBM is a good example. Microsoft is another. Even Oracle could count within its space.
Dominance is a divergent state.
It's also why I'm not particularly worried about wealth concentration in dynasties. In 100 years the descendants of Bezos won't be the ruling class in the same way the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans aren't.
Relax. These things have a way of working themselves out.
The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.
I agree there should be universal health care and a social safety net. I think shelter in the form of housing should be considered a human right. A budget shortfall is built into your existence. This is to keep you a compliant worker.
But Americans aren't ready to have that conversation so my perspective is you're wasting your breath by having it. Half the country will die on the hill of stopping Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in taxes.
The only solution to this is labor organization. The government won't help you. Republicans are psychotic. Democrats are just the less terrible, feckless alternative who aren't actually interested in doing anything. Remember when Obama had a Senate supermajority and could've codified Roe v. Wade?
But I'm just not holding my breath that anything will materially change anytime soon and it's our fault.
When people who have benefitted from those productivity benefits then turn around and whine about how they aren’t getting “their share” of the <$20, or complain how it is somehow wrong that the wealthy can spend or transfer wealth however they like, I can’t help but cringe. The real societal problem is the modern education system is failing to educate people in basic economics.
Wealth doesn't work like that, though. It's not a zero sum game.
Wealth is infinite, and can be created from nothing by providing a good or service that people need.
I had a friend who was a multimillionaire, got there by building stone walls.
Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million, got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
I have a friend who's worth over a million, got there by working hard and saving his whole life.
Another friend who's worth over thirty million, got there by making web sites for auto dealerships.
Another one who's worth a bit over a million, got there by risking his life savings on opening up a winery.
A former neighbor had a multi-million dollar home. Also an immigrant. Got there by cleaning restaurant grease traps.
I could go on.
Wealth can be created from nothing. From something as simple as an idea.
The only qualifying factor is that you have to make something that other people want. It can be anything, a wall, a song, a good bottle of wine, an iron door, a NFT (ugh), ...anything.
There's no limit to wealth.
Our poorest today live like kings compared to those in poverty 100 years ago.
Because we've created massive, overwhelming wealth in this country.
And there's no end in sight. All we need is the willingness to do it.
To spend our time building up rather than tearing down.
Looking at someone's wealth and saying "that's not fair, we should destroy that and give it to others" is a juvenile solution that destroys societies.
I understand the temptation though. It's harder to create than to destroy.
It takes more intellectual rigor. It takes a leap into self ownership and responsibility.
That's hard to do when we've been taught from a young age that our situation is someone else's fault.
Class warfare is a tool that's used by conmen to gain short term power.
It ends up destroying everything.
Your friend did not make that much money building stone walls. Your friend made that money acting as a middleman hiring teams of low paid workers (likely undocumented migrants) to build the stone walls while he received a handsome cut for little effort.
> Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million, got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
Not sure why you mention them being an immigrant. Are immigrants less capable than non-immigrants? Anyway, same rule applies. Your friend did not do this work; they hired people (most likely undocumented immigrants) and paid them under the table. They simply act as a middleman too, extracting the vast majority of the wealth while paying peanuts to the workers.
I bet both of your friends got government loans to go to college and took advantage of the free government CARE loans and possibly even received huge tax breaks for his/her business; virtually all of this government money is unavailable to his workers.
> Not sure why you mention them being an immigrant
Illustrating the American Dream. They started from nothing, worked hard, and made it big.
There's a reason why people from around the world are flocking to this country.
With hard work, good ideas, and grit it's possible to achieve anything.
Anyone has the ability to change their stars in this country. I've seen tons of examples. I've listed just a few.
Instead of being inspired by these examples, you lash out, angrily. Accuse some very decent people of treating their employees badly (which is completely untrue, by the way).
You accuse strangers, who are friends of mine, of all sorts of abuse, with zero knowledge.
What sort of anger and disillusionment drives that?
I hope you can overcome it.
By the way, some of those folks I mentioned made millionaires of some of their employees too.
Slightly more than peanuts.
Just because a king dies and gets replaced by another king doesn't help the peasants.
The real issue comes when the really powerful can inflate their and their friends assets at will.
Who would be better at “investing” assets into a new venture: Someone who is wealthy and has a track record of operating successful businesses? Or a government bureaucrat representing the “will of the people” who ultimately makes his salary off the backs of taxpayers?
Furthermore, I recall reading once that wealth inequality was positively correlated with mental illness, even in the rich of a society.
As such, even if there is always some inequality, I think it is worthwhile to try to reduce it, although by boosting the lower part of scale. In other words, if you live in a world where only the rich have cars, you reduce inequality by making cars for the poor like Henry Ford, not by taking rich people's cars.
In the modern US, I think this would entail making housing and education and healthcare more affordable/accessible.
Then Henry Ford displaces John Jacob Astor. You still have wealth inequality, in fact it might have even increased. But the poor now have on-demand mobility to any part of the country in a matter of days.
I don't understand the focus on relative wealth. Why should someone not have, to borrow a phrase, more money than God, if it's not being stolen from others. Why should ability and capital be envied instead left to its own devices?
Bill Gates's fortune split up among everybody in the US would be about $500 a person. You can't seriously think that would make a wit of difference in people's lives, it would disappear in a blip without lifting anybody over the poverty line, and that's even if it was spent wisely, which it wouldn't be.
What the peasants need are ways they can earn money, because money comes from productivity and the peasants will quickly need more than $500 times the number of billionaires consumed by the revolution. BTW most of Bill Gates's wealth is actually tied up in productive assets that are producing things the peasants need, and providing them jobs.
That's the problem. It's tied up, and it doesn't need to be. Unlike institutional investors those who are in the Forbes 400 don't need to consult shareholders or basically anybody, they are already past that point. In fact a family office is essentially just the billionaire and a couple of accountants...people resent them for not going double or nothing on moonshots.
Bill Gates isn't getting any younger, so is Warren Buffet and Munger. When will they open the floodgates? The Rockefeller foundation is still standing and the founder died almost 100 years ago
In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism. What they had was a filter-bubble where the people were constantly told that the cause of their problems was some particular scapegoat and the solution was more state control.
Social media produces these filter-bubbles in a far more powerful fashion. Worse, it's setting up conditions for a civil war where one big bubble is told that the problem is "The System" and the other big bubble is told the problem is "those lefties" and both sides are told the solution is to stamp out the other side.
The Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Carnegies never built anything like that. They built infrastructure, and leveraged economies. Oil, railroad, finance... not the same thing as social connection engines.
You have a few misconceptions there. 19th century Germany wasn't a democracy, it was a constitutional monarchy with a very strong monarch. It was never socialist, it was social democrat (SPD). The actual socialist and communist uprisings were defeated, by the SPD collaborating with everyone, including the far-right Freikorps.
Gloria Vanderbilt wasn’t ultra wealthy by any means. Lots of retirees from modest backgrounds have $1.5 million upon death. My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of about a million dollars.
Meanwhile, the median estate is under $300k and the median bequest is under $100k. The top one percent have seven figure bequests.
Also, she left her fancy NYC condo to someone else, which was probably worth more than the amount she left Anderson. Which actually does put her in line with most Americans, in that their wealth is primarily in a home.
> My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of about a million dollars.
Retirement or bequest when he died at age 95?
A stable society/economy works like a Monopoly game, after a few rounds the distribution of wealth becomes rigid.
Perturbations are needed to trigger wealth redistribution.
This is why we need revolutions, pandemics, wars and technological innovations to reset the game.
Big money hates innovation because it is always associated with risk, and usually, for mega corps, innovating means killing the golden goose.
The problem, in my opinion, is that there is an end-game to everything, including technology, we're not there yet, hopefully.
Sure, Musk and Bezos are the richest men in the world, according to publicly available data. That doesn't mean these other families are all poor. Some have squandered their wealth. Others have magnified it. And all that still have it have become better at hiding it from the public, something that the "new" rich don't have much experience or capability in.
The poor still, well, are poor. New kings for old kings doesn't change shit. But alas we should wait out the neo-feudal age, that's your plan?
[1] https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
LOL. Maybe you need to move somewhere unfashionable. You know, be around all those yucky people who go to church & stuff.
So if Google ends up being dominant for 50+ years does it really matter? I mean, does that somehow materially impact your life?
> It is pretty cold comfort to know that income inequality that makes home ownership an impossibility right now will work itself out in a few decades.
That's a completely separate issue and one I agree with you on. But the US in particularly has too many brain-broken temporarily embarrassed millionaires who will die on the hill to avoid Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in tax to pay for th esociety that made his wealth possible and continues to make it possible.
This is late-stage capitalism. Some argue it's the beginning of neo-feudalism. I'm not quite that pessimistic whiele agreeing the situation sucks.
What people in power need to realize is the ultimate valve for extreme wealth inequality is violence. War or revolution is the ultimate form of wealth redistribution.
But the political landscape in the US is one where just arguing that trans people shouldn't be murdered gets you labelled as "far left". America is not ready to have the conversation that a capitalist organization of the economy is screwing them over.
Personally if I was 22 and just graduating college with huge debt, no prospect of owning a house and income that means living paycheck to paycheck I would just... leave [1].
[1]: https://www.studentloanplanner.com/flee-country-student-loan...
Yes, but how they work themselves out and where they work themselves out to matter quite a lot.
Also, both of those things, the how and the where, are not random. They are influenced dramatically by the blood, sweat, and tears of people with ideals and the willingness put in the work.
Those people putting in the work, are they people who share your vision of what the world should be like?
If you don't participate in the process, you can't complain about the result.
Andrew Carnegie believed in 100% inheritance tax, on the condition that the money raised was used to provide a level playing field for absolutely everyone to have the same opportunities. I can't imagine many/any of today's billionaires believing this, given that pretty much all of them have depended on the backing of generational wealth and the unequal opportunities that gave them to make their fortunes.
Haven't they all signed the Giving Pledge?
> given that pretty much all of them have depended on the backing of generational wealth and the unequal opportunities that gave them to make their fortunes.
While it is true that most of them come from upper-middle class backgrounds, AFAIK the vast majority of the fortunes of Page, Brin, Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes from their companies.
Unless you mean generational wealth as in "they were rich enough to pay for a university that costs $80,000/year", at which point, yeah I could see that.
While choosing to give most of your money to various charities, generally of your choosing and while you are still alive to see the benefits, is all well and good, it is very different from favouring having all your money being taken on death by a government you trust enough to use that money provide equal opportunities to all.
> "AFAIK the vast majority of the fortunes of Page, Brin, Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes from their companies."
For most of today's billionaires it isn't just an expensive education, it is family conenctions, e.g. Gates being set up with IBM via his mum, or family investments, e.g. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page etc. having parents who gave or loaned them the money to start their companies (not to mention the safety net they'd have had should they have failed) - this isn't "self-made" in the traditional sense.
I have a different take, which is that tech leadership rarely changes in a particular technology, it's just that new technologies arrive that displace the old. Microsoft is still absolutely dominant in desktop operating systems. IBM has 90%+ marketshare in mainframes. Oracle is still the top enterprise database.
So we seem to see these posts periodically now on HN, about "who is going to displace Google in search?" Sorry, that ain't happening. First, despite HN missives, Google still tends to work better than all the competition. Second, the startup costs to have a viable generic Internet search engine are now astronomical, to the point that hardly any VC would invest in a startup whose approach would be "just be a better Google" WRT search.
So the question really is, "what new technology could displace Internet search?" And it's very, very difficult for me to come up with an answer to that looking out 50-75 years or so. In addition, companies now are much more aware of "disruption" theories and will actively try to acquire their disrupters (e.g. Google's acquisition of Android and Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were key to keep them from getting displaced in mobile).
I would easily make the bet that Google (or potentially their government-induced offspring) will continue to totally dominate search 50 years from now.
Google is no longer focused on its core business >Search. They have 99 other projects they are focused on.
For example there is no dedicated search for Audio content on Google Search like there is for Images and Videos. There is no way to search comments on YouTube and there is no way to search your own YouTube playlist! This are just few shameful examples on how Google no longer thinks and behaves like a Search company.
I really like Larry and Sergey but unfortunately for them and Google the current Google's approach is not good for the future of Web. Maybe the culprit is ad business model, maybe it is their de facto Internet Search monopoly or maybe both but if Google is how the future of Web is going to look like then we are all in a big trouble.
Who told you they are not funding and ruling U.S. institutions anymore?
It takes my YouTube usage and promotes news stories based on that.
But that makes absolutely no sense. I go to YouTube to relax and/or look at things that are not so important. Sudoku solving, gaming news, and/or chess stuff.
I used to go to Google News to have an understanding of what’s happening in the world. But now my Google News feed is overridden by stories about the same things I see on YouTube.
Outside the main 2-3 stories of the day (which is invariably the top political news from the U.S. which one already knows about through the zeitgeist) everything else is personalized stories and hardly News.
But, my YouTube and Google search and ads, whole logged in, are based on what I do while logged in only. I might be naive but I have not seen correlation between my logged-in and my non-logged-in life within google products.
People try to explain it away as Big Tech's blackbox AIs being good of making inferences from "public" data, but fail to consider that their body betrays their mind by leaking information under the skin, which can be picked up silently with microwaves.
Do you have any sources or information I can look up to study this?
If you’re really bout it, get a few proxies and use foxyproxy to randomly route your tabs. Try to avoid too many fingerprinting prevention plugins because that actually makes you even more unique (according to effs panopticlick)
It's also convenient when researching a particular topic, as I can keep a dedicated per-topic browser instance self-contained in its own directory, for as long as I need it.
It does a good job in bypassing backend "personalization".
It's actually an official Firefox project, although it comes as an extension. Though I think it should be a first class feature in the base install.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
The ability to boost your favorite sites is a really nice feature, especially for developers. Also not having to sift through all the content-stealing websites and SEO scams is a huge plus. Recommended!
(No connection to it, just happy user).
Personalization is everywhere but I really hope that Google also allows for customization by the user. Till then, I really have to diversify my product usage from different companies to have some illusion of control.
The "directory of the web" approach was already hitting its limits in 2000. I'm pretty sure you could find a "directory of the weird stuff" page somewhere, if you looked for it.
But I still used Youtube a lot, I found interesting content there, and the algorithm mostly managed to keep me interested, even if many of the suggestions were crap.
But for some reason it suddenly changed a few days ago, the suggestions are all crap now.
Nothing of interest for me.
Why? Probably an update or some ongoing A/B test ongoing.
I'll miss the good suggestions, as I miss the old Google, but my plan is simply to stop spending so much time there, probably for the better.
I am curious if anyone else have experienced a similar change.
I more or less know where to go for what I am looking for these days.
At the same time I get less and less interesting/useful results from Google.
Neva tends to surface better results on these kinds of things, but I'm currently trying Kagi, which groups all the "top n" posts into a section instead of polluting the entire results with them, which is nice.
More and more I'm just giving up, going to a store I have a reasonable amount of trust in, because they care about their reputation, and pick something off the shelf... trusting their buyers did some work. It's a lot faster and easier and avoids a lot of the paradox of choice issues.
Manyverse[1] and Iris[2] are good examples of apps that will enable this more in the future.
I just want to search “harry potter” and see everything my friends have written about it. If I follow some institutions or encyclopedias, I should also see what they write about it. And I should be able to choose which sources I want to rank higher in search results.
The average lifespan of an established corporation is only about 20 years. The average lifespan of a new company is only 10 years. So anything that lasts longer is living on borrowed time.
It's like reaching your 50s-60s which when the 2nd derivative of death goes into overdrive. Only by surviving that period is there evidence as proof of life that you are doing something right or had good genes. The same for corporations and then 10-20 year period.
So Google in exactly in this cusp. They may not survive it but "that will be that" without moral or ego judgement. If they die now, it's simply that they didn't not find the magic elixir of life or purpose or business model. I think the handwriting about that is already on the wall - they did NOT and we are merely watching its decline. It just happens.
The best way to avoid the problems of dependency on an entity is to not become dependent in the first place.
Just like allowing one to be coddled and never growing up is a bad long-term strategy because that person's parents won't live forever and they will survive parents alone. They will be ill-prepared to do without but nothing in this universe can undo that reality once it happens. The answer is always for a parent to make sure your children are independent and well-prepared enough to live without you. Not doing that is misparenting.
In the economic sphere, blindly becoming dependent on only one technology or vendor is similarly an error on your part. Either create alternatives or find ways to live differently that do not require it in the first place.
But my question is why can't duckduckgo be the replacement?
The worry is that Google implicitly rewards some content over other content with views, and therefore promotes some production over other production. As another user wrote intelligently in this thread:
"At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources, hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the author of the freshness of summer produce, it's because that's the kind of content that Google will give a high ranking"
No one.
The only thing that could happen is Google is broken up like Standard Oil.
And frankly, Google over the last decade has made moves under the assumption they will be broken up (i.e., making each division a standalone business and Alphabet as a holding company - when structured this way, it makes a forced breakup much easier).
I'm not saying I endorse those news companies. It's just like... I thought this was going to be about google search or something that actually matters
> … I thought this was going to be about google search or something that actually matters
That’s what the other paragraphs were for. #itgetsbetter
There is no doubt that Google et al. are better than ever in terms of technology and operational excellence; and ever further from their original mission statements... but isn't that normal?
I don't like Google. I was wary when they entered the blogsphere ~2004 with "Blogger", but for me it was the DoubleClick acquisition that solidified my mistrust of them, and everything else since has only added to that opinion.
None of it matters though, they are in business to make money, not win our hearts. If you don't like them, don't use their products, that is the only way to make a difference. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The issue with Google is that people expect too much out of it. The author of this page, like many others, expects that there are many people out there putting great information on the Internet and doing it for free, and all Google needs to do is find that information. The problem is that getting good information is hard work. People aren't doing it for free.
Google is like the old Yellow Pages, or Computer Shopper. You didn't pick up the Yellow Pages looking for enlightenment. You were looking for a plumber. Google is great for commerce, and for other odd things. The author pines for the old Yahoo directory, but one reason Google superseded it is that if I were looking for a link to, say, the University of Michigan, on Yahoo I had to drill through a directory to find it. Google surfaces this kind of thing instantly and this functionality is something people now take for granted - which is why I'll bet most of the Google gripers still use it multiple times daily.
The gripers are expecting Google is some portal to free world knowledge. Not going to happen, because knowledge is hard work and people don't like to work for free.
For monetization, vast amounts of stuff moved behind paywalls and other walls. The obvious one, distribution platforms are walled and inaccessible to Google; probably their biggest existential risk. On smaller scales, many specialists started to monetize their knowledge. Instead of dumping it for free on forums or blogs, now it's on Substack or many other outlets. What remains free is increasingly free for strategic reasons, so it's either ad-monetized (with poor incentives for quality) or released entirely for branding/promotional reasons.
Distribution format is another factor that I only recognized very recently. A lot of content/knowledge is now accessible only as videos, podcasts, or similar, where in the past there would usually be a text version. If you only want text, you will miss a lot - stuff is on YouTube now, instead of small forums.
What's more annoying are the comment and reactions features which Microsoft News started to use. It's filled with angry faces and very questionable comments. From conspiracy nutjobs to the far right with their racist and inhuman nonsense. And of course absolutely no moderation whatsoever.
But regardless of that, i also noticed the search quality on Google going down. On some occasions i have trouble finding things. That's when i switch over to alternatives.
I wonder if a co-op model, for at least search functionality, is realizable in the near term. What I mean is using cloud resources to spin up an indexing/search interface with minimal management that can be used by any number of shared participants for a fraction of the total compute/storage costs. It wouldn't be purely decentralized in the blockchain/p2p sense but "decentralized-enough" perhaps to function much better for results people actually want to find. The costs would naturally scale with the desired level of decentralization.
How do you figure? I never use Google and get through my searches just fine. What am I missing?
The reality is that Google is trying to auto recognize things that humans could categorize themselves, and without a lot of work. And the owner of the information should not be the only one able to do that. We need more collaboration. The biggest pain is how to create a categorization system that works for everyone. I haven't seen any yet
BTW, all nerds/geeks note that Google is not exclusively for you. Just walk to a cafe (not the one near FAANG campus). See those people with smartphone? They use Google. There are 100000x more such people compared to people that use substack.
> is impossible to contact a human
TBH, no one cares. I had friend that lost google account due to 2FA. But did they regret. No. It is only geeks/nerds that want to preserve their first email, photo for ever.
Feel free to thank me later.
> I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit.
Wait, weren't those humans cultivating the Yahoo directory also just random internet strangers?
Only Russia and China have their own independent semiconductor fabs, so only they can, maybe, replace Google.
I'm not sure if even a government attempt to split it up can realistically work in any shape, sense, or form.
I will never forgive Google for killing Reader.
Trying to get my investors interested in a "non-shit google" requires a bit more color around the edges.
Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting. Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers that don't sacrifice security and privacy.
Why not just use another site, that you know, isn't Google? Like they suggested, you can search Reddit, or you can search Tumbler, or you can find a Facebook group, or where we found this article: Hacker news.
I miss the yesteryear when people didn't expect Google to somehow be the answer to everything on the web. Here's an idea: your fan sights can co-exist as well as Google.
And the irony is, the authors own blog home page uses a dark pattern to try and convince you to subscribe to their newsletter! Talk about ruining the web for commercial purposes!
We're living through another tragedy of the commons, but the culprit isn't human nature itself, so much as it is capitalism. The corporates have made sure they have absolute dominion over human usage of time and space, and anything they don't value (or that might represent opposition to them, now or later) dies.
In fact, Google Plus (2011-2013ish) was justified (in part) as an attempt to "rescue" the web from the enclosing grasp of the walled garden that is Facebook -- which couldn't be indexed, searched, and presented openly. (Naturally this was hypocritical [in addition to being a failure] but that was one of the motivations given for the project)
Overall I think all of this had a lot to do not only with Google's positioning as an advertising company, but with the rise of mobile computing and mobile apps. The writing was on the wall when mobile use started to surpass desktop browser use. "The web" as we traditionally knew it ceased to be the primary interaction mechanism people were having with the Internet, and Google (and others) had to pivot quickly or they would lose the advantage they had.
Google from 2000-2015 or so seemed to innovate on "the web"; from search to gmail to news to reader (and even arguably to g+) it was about pushing the limits of the tech and excelling at making WWW products. Then it became about making... nice apps. I guess?
Story time: I worked on the Google (then "Nest") Home Hub. The original UI for it was written in HTML/CSS/JS and it was very well done by some super talented front end developers. My teammates were responsible for optimizing the Chromium rendering engine for that platform, to make it perform nicely on the bargain basement SoC we were using. We shipped this to millions of people and it was a success.
A few quarters later the whole thing was ripped out and replaced with Dart & Flutter. The UI was identical, but bias and and ideology dictated that that was what the UI had to be built in (they said it'd be faster: it wasn't, it was more about making it so the same apps could be built for Android and Fuchsia as the same time). Multiple quarters were spent on a transition plan to rewrite this whole UI and hack up the firmware on the system to make this possible, throwing out 2+ years of work.
So, yeah, you're right. Google was the "web" company. Now they're... I don't even know, but it's a lot about Android and mobile and also constantly chasing after what Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are doing. To the point that management was willing to throw out thousands of hours of engineering work done on a web app to replace it with a non-web version. That whole process left a bad taste in my mouth.
It'll be interesting to see the evolution of all these companies that've invested in mobile, now that mobile is so crapflooded, no one wants to pay for apps anymore. I don't know what the future of consumer computing looks like; I do know that I'd prefer not to have any part in it.
for anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the direction google was headed was plainly evident by 2004 (when it went public and gmail launched). google clearly saw the web as both a threat and an opportunity (much like microsoft before it), and deigned to control it, not cultivate it as a public good. google never "pushed the web forward" magnanimously, even if the leadership "liked" it at some point. the strategy was always to dominate the web (search itself was the kernel from which this strategy took shape), and "don't be evil" was merely cover for that, right from the start.
I just think that became untenable with the rise of Facebook and the rise of mobile. Or rather, they could not maintain the growth rate and long term security that investors demanded of them and at the same time do what they were doing. So they did what the market "demanded".
I think they're kind of lost now, though. I think we saw "peak Google" a few years ago.
to be clear, the founders still had majority control, and so this was a proactive decision the leadership made to grow at all costs, to dominate the web. they weren't forced by investors or the market to do so, no matter the pressures surrounding them.
It sounds like rather than a news search engine & aggregator, the poster would rather use a curated news service (e.g. CNN) that gives them a single particular viewpoint. Or at the very least, would like their sources to be vetted or editorialized in some way, as opposed to the original Google mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful".
Sputnik, Infowards, or NAMBLA shouldn't be on par with the BBC or WaPo and if you think otherwise you maybe should lower your redpill dosages!
EDIT: Downvote away! Karma is useless and you can't kill the messenger! Kids: misinformation is not information. They people that use it are sociopaths and will lie like hell and gaslight you to keep up their scam. If you think the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, et al are on par with Jordan Peterson, Breitbart, or Infowars then you have been really poorly served in your life. You are in a disinformation bubble and you don't even realize it. Escape now, model-based targeting is not going to make it easier.
Can you tell us more about the kind of problems for which you receive better search results via andisearch.com?
criticise corporations all you want, but don't you dare suggest an alternative
Corporations are groups of people focused on a given goal. Your solution to a group of people making what you consider to be bad decisions or morally wrong decisions is to involve more people? People are the problem. It doesn't matter what they call themselves - a country, a government, a corporation, it's all people all the way down. Why will one of those supposedly be a benefit and somehow make better and more ethical decisions?
if this was the 50s or 60s, they would have made this search engine publicly-owned, and today it would be a cherished part of society being threatened and/or deliberately sabotaged by the corporate right of politics, a la the BBC, or the NHS, or Medicare/aid, or libraries, or youth centres, or public schools, or whatever equivalent you have of those in your country
I know they compete in AI research, but has (no longer quite so) OpenAI shown any sign of competing for Google's cash cows?
We really need a web infrastructure where the index (or the indexer) is somehow public and neutral, not owned by any particular corporate entity. This should have been built into WWW architecture from day one. But legislation could attempt to make it happen now. Companies should be free to innovate on top of it, but we're effectively in a state now where monopoly power has been granted to the people who got there first (well, close to it, anyways).
EDIT: to be clearer, imagine a crawling infrastructure run by industry consortium. You pay a membership fee and usage / traffic fees and you get to upload a WebAssembly program that is called with the contents of pages every time the crawler hits them. What you do with them from that point on is up to you, but would presumably be something like building your own corpus for a search engine, etc. Moderation and regulatory oversight on the usages of this data would obviously have to be put in place. But to me it seems preferable to the status quo now.
Factual.
OSM needs more good apps.
Apple Maps is also great for transit, where it supports it. In Tokyo (several years ago) it would tell me how much money to put on the ticket for the trip I was taking, which would have been pretty confusing otherwise. Not sure if Google has made updates, but at the time I don't believe they had this.