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Comment by winddude | Hacker News Reader

> However, it does mean that Google will have to give up on its mission, “to organize the world's information.” Though that slogan looks benign, it is in fact anything but. Being the organizer of the world’s information is far far too much power for anyone to have. It’s time to give up on it.

Giving up on that is stupid, and would set society back. We need more companies and organisations doing it. AI has brought a few new startups into the search space, but yes, splitting the companies up may make more opportunities for them.

That said, if you can raise the capital you can get into search, because of opportunities presented by AI, and google has been sacrificing quality for optimising ad revenue. Email has also seen some startups making big leaps by adopting AI. I wouldn't touch video sharing platforms, or ad networks.

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After traveling through the middle east: Google is far from present here, it’s Yandex territory. And I bet Asian countries can be conquered by Chinese companies the same way.

I have to use Yandex almost daily, because Google has stopped indexing a massive amount of the Internet.

It's almost more useless than Yahoo was after Google came along, which is crazy.

What kind of stuff do you find missing? Is it strictly regional/firewalled content?

While my main search engine is still Google, I use Yandex more and more. I have no specific example right now but it's not unusual for Y to give me meaningful result when G, with the same search string, give me crap.

I use both for reverse image searches. It's crazy how much is missing from either (or both). At least from my use Google's index still seems to be bigger but I imagine that varies depending on what you are looking for.

China, Korea and Japan have never depended on google for search. Baidu, Naver and Yahpo reign supreme. Their bussiness model is very similar to goofle tbf.

ASEAN and India however rely on google heavily. Googles ad based subsidies for their other products mean that less well of consumers can have access to technology as well. I worry that the freebies will be very hard for many people to ween of.

> We need more companies and organisations doing it.

The current issue IMHO is having a single for-profit company doing it at such scale. They're inherently motivated to keep competition away and keep themselves relevant.

Companies shouldn't own the core data (yes, even when they farmed it themselves running cars through millions of km of streets), perhaps we could come up with a fixed price they have to abide to to sell their data to any eligible entity, with governing bodies being a potential reseller of it.

Meteorology wouldn't be what it is today if some single US company owned and organized the world's info. We need a similar model for the rest of it.

Being the organizer of the world’s information is far far too much power for anyone to have

It's what they said their mission was. It's not like it's true or anything :)

> Google'a mission "to organize the world's information"

Google already gave up on this long ago. Their mission now is to print as much money as possible (late stage capitalism).

It's unfortunate, because 2004-2014 was unlike anything we'd seen before, even in the dot-com days. Compared to anything before or since, ElGoog was Incredibly good for the 10's of thousands of rank-and-file employees.

Thanks Ruth Porat! (For serving as the instrument that ended the party.. at the board's request, ofcoz.)

You’re not giving Sundar enough credit for Google’s slide to the evil side. Ruth is as you mentioned merely an instrument. Sundar “McKinsey” Pichai is the Ballmer of Google. For as long as he’s at the helm I’m extremely bearish about Google’s long term prospects.

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