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Who is going to replace Google for us? (michaeldehaan.substack.com)
173 points by zdw on June 26, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 217 comments



Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old?

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.


Google also has an outsized influence on the kind of content that's on the web.

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.


Time to get back to curated lists of interesting websites.


I unironically do that. Maybe I should publish? We could make a small project that just has interesting websites and reviews? Yelp for the interesting web?


Please do. One of my favorite things about Hacker News is that it exposes me to a treasure chest of interesting and informative blogs and other content (both archival/“historical” and current) that would be unlikely to show up in my search results.


I think some aggregators, like Jason Kottke, post lots of interesting things, but not usually the weird, unpolished, personal stuff that I associate with the 90s web. Something like early Yahoo would be cool.


Well i wasn't really alive back then, closest i can do is tumblr


And you could call it something quirky, like Yippee!


No, I'm not based in the valley :/


Or Yahoo

...

No, wait, some squatter sits on it.


There is https://curlie.org/ already.


www.readsomethinginteresting.com / www.thinking-about-things.com are both pretty good aggregators.


www.stumbleupon.com was a thing I liked back in the web 1.0 days - impressed to see it is still going.


I miss the non-commercial web of old. It's got into the point where I think my ultimate search engine is one that ranks pages by fewest ads.

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.


I can't for the life of me understand why people don't put static ads that are relevant to the consumers of their content. I was close to doing this once for a product I was CTO of, but I couldn't push it all the way through. We were so niche, and knowing exactly who our audience was. It's mind boggling to me that we chose to darkly monetize their data instead of showing them relevant domain ads.


> I can't for the life of me understand why people don't put static ads that are relevant to the consumers of their content.

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.


it works the other way around now. you make a business blog written around your product


Teclis has a neat approach to this:

> 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.


Wow, that's great!

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.


Much of that still exists. It's just harder to find than it used to be because the corporate stuff is so loud.

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.


> "...he corporate stuff is so loud."

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.


I think we'll probably always have shouty corporate stuff on the internet, but perhaps we technologists can help bring the rest to a broader audience.


You're... right in that that stuff still exists. Many websites from 2004 are still online. But many are not. And new sites haven't been created. Instead, sites like reddit/facebook/twitter have captured all new content.


  Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old?
I miss both, but I miss the Google of old more. How can I be sure of that? Because much of the web of old still exists! There are plenty of decade-old pages out there. And a person could still find them on Google today, if only Google didn't fill its initial page of search results with advertisements and content-farmed dreck.


  > Maybe there’s a way to restore the Web of old.
Maybe search engines should also be able to link towards old cached content, internet archive style. Even if we can't rejuvenate the old internet without creating new economics to support it, we could keep the information alive.


The web of old was inaccessible to 99.9% of the world. Most people do not want what you're looking for. You can find it by diving deeper and searching differently.


Spam, clickbait and malicious content has always been around, yet Google somehow managed to filter it out just fine back in the day. As another commenter points out, good content from the past still exists even, yet is no longer surfaced.

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.


> Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old?

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.


What would make Mastodon more appealing for you or the hypothetical user for whom you think it's not that great? The main thing that comes to mind for me would be more people I know in person using it.


Nothing really. The core concept is let's say "wrong" (for my personal case). Mastodon is a stream of very short posts.

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.


A also bothers me. It isn't hard for an instance admin to change the character limit, and does seem like a way instances could stand out from each other, yet it's rarely done. Federated instances do seem to handle long posts gracefully (there's a "read more" expando link).

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.


Many moons ago, someone on Reddit said "Facebook requires registration in order to view content, which tells you all you need to know."

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.


You do not need an account to view content on Mastodon. Posts can be set followers-only, but most people don't do that for most content.

Here's the profile directory on the biggest instance, for example: https://mastodon.social/explore


I think I agree with that but also I think it needs something like groups like Facebook has. I only want to see gardening stuff today, for example. I do like the whole mood though... it's not the battlefield that Twitter is.


It seems to me that use case is better served by forums, but it would be nice if I could use my Mastodon (or Diaspora, Frendica, Pixelfed, etc...) account as my identity on multiple forums. I don't think it's necessarily desirable for one piece of software to try to do everything, but it's great when different services can talk to each other.


Yeah, that would work too but it's kind of hard to find forums since reddit dominates all search results... I've been trying to train myself to look for them specifically though.


I can imagine paths to improvement that don't rely on Google improving its behavior or something displacing it as a search engine. For example, what if forum software spoke Activitypub so people could follow threads and boost insightful comments from Mastodon?


It was a bit before my time, but peak usenet and mailing lists of the era looked awesome. The breadth and depth of the people who would participate in discussions (specifically in my field, e.g., comp.arch and the like) was quite amazing. Luminaries in the fields of computer CPUs, networking, programming, operating systems, etc. From academics to professionals to students and hobbyists.

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 it's just nostalgia. The barrier to entry for the early internet was much higher on a financial front and on a knowledge front. You had to really be a techie to get deeply involved in the internet in the early days.


> Maybe there’s a way to restore the Web of old

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).


Supposing it's just a youthful phase. Like the fashion industry for example. Where skinny jeans were popular in the 80's then baggy jeans in the 90's. Then skinny jeans are back in sync now. Don't you think personal blogs and forums will come in sync at some point in the future?


Big news old man: skinny jeans died a few years ago and now the mom jeans of the '90s are back in


I thought we moved on/back to baggy jeans


Nah, we back on ripped jeans now homie. Prob by the time I’ve hit submit on this we’ll be on 70’s flares again. Cycles are speeding up in this as everything.


How old? The commercial aspect was already inseparable from the rise of the web in the mid-90s...countless startups of the dot-com boom scrambling to find a niche to turn a profit from. Many an interesting site shut down upon failing to do so, that's certainly unchanged to this day.


HN reminds me a lot of the old web.


Yes, I miss it very much. I miss the days when people wrote RFCs for something they felt deserved to exist, rather than business plans for something they hope someone will invest in.


yep.. i even just miss the google reader days. why don't sites use rss/atom anymore? it drives me nuts


The evolution you described happened only because the internet is freely accessible to anyone, anywhere, except if you're a communist. Reverting it back to some state you deem worthy is saying the internet was broken. Trying to nudge the Web into some direction you like is exactly the thing that will destroy the Web.

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.


> the Web of old No


The most concrete complaints in this piece appear to be:

- 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.


The Epoch Times isn’t just a “source” that some people don’t want to see. And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads. This comment isn’t a reasonable critique of the article it’s denialism at best


> And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads

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.


Dunno about you, but easily half the emails I get are advertisements.


Are you sure it's Gmail sending you those advertisements?


My off-gmail account flags it as spam.


>And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads

I've yet to ever see an add in any of my Gmail accounts.


Yea I thought the same. Sounded more like fragile “milennial” complaint than an actual good article with solid facts. You could find 100 solid ways to distrust google. Didnt think the author hit a single credible point.


If you don't think "Breitbart is not a credible news source" is not a valid point then oof, yikes, etc.


[flagged]


Who mentioned left wing news sources?


I'm curious, what is a "credible" news source these days?

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.


I think that is not true in the EU at least. There are many credible news sources in the Northern European countries, that I follow, and they have different political leanings.


Unfortunately, in the United States all of our major news outlets are extremely biased and have been caught red-handed manipulating or outright lying about the news.

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.


the credibility does improve the further the news outlet hq is away from the location of the topic.


The shopping links to SEO spammers and shopping comparison sites is in part because the govt has said google CAN NOT discriminate against these sites.


> Google News includes stories from a source that the author doesn't want anyone else to be able to see.

I'm not the OP, however, being the service called News, one would expect it to contain actual news and not 100% biased opinion.


> Seems basically untrue; Gmail has incredibly few ads, Drive I think none, and data from neither is used for ad targeting.

Huh? Looking in my gmail inbox, I see virtually nothing but ads.


The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will.

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.


Honestly, I think the fallacy is to just believe that Google's dominance will magically end.

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.


>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.

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.


Now language models are on the rise. They allow access to information (including verified information from trusted sources) in a more accessible and adaptive format. I think Google isn't happy for losing the ad space but the interface we use to search will improve a lot thanks to big language models. I think they are too expensive to deploy now but will be everywhere soon. LM's will be the new "operating system".


So, don’t worry, it all work out? Vast wealth being sucked up by a few people while huge swaths of society have little to no ability to handle a $1000 financial hit? Passing the big ball of wealth between a few select people and families over history is acceptable?

The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.


Wealth isn’t sucked out of anything. If I build a product and sell if for $20, but it creates $100 in value (Let’s say some software that saves a person 4 hours a day of manual labor) I created $80 worth of value, for <$20 worth of profit, minus my costs.

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 inequality is a separate issue to the dominance of Google.

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.


This way of looking at things assumes that wealth is a finite resource, and that by some people having a lot it is depriving others.

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.


> I had a friend who was a multimillionaire, got there by building stone walls.

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.


You certainly are full of assumptions about people you have never met and have no information about.

> 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.


What the peasants didn't understand was that having a Monarch is fine. In fact, I bet in a few generations it will be a totally different royal family running the show.


Na, just introduce a social safety net, like most of europe had for some time.


So, put “those people” in the Matrix, so they won’t be a problem instead of addressing the real problem of a lopsided economic system is the answer?


No, the European system allows you to use that for studying for little money, learning a new job etc as well. It’s not perfect but (western) Europe hasn’t seen this huge inequality growth in the last decades AFAIK


Lopsided economic system is not a problem, it is a feature.


The problem isn't one specific wealthy family, it's that wealth is always concentrated on few people.

Just because a king dies and gets replaced by another king doesn't help the peasants.


Wealth will always be very unequal, see the Mathew principle - just like a few songs have the most listeners and a few books the most readers. And it's hard to stay at the top too, so the elites are always changing.

The real issue comes when the really powerful can inflate their and their friends assets at will.


Inequality fluctuates.

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.


> 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.

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?


The fact that the wealthy can invest into assets at will doesn’t seem problematic to me.

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?


but nor does redistributing the kings' wealth help the peasants.

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.


> BTW most of Bill Gates's wealth is actually tied up in productive assets

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


Yeah, makes you wonder what is wrong with Britain?


They do work themselves out, but sometimes the timeline for that can be 50+ years. Which is basically your entire youth and productive lifetime. 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.


> They do work themselves out, but sometimes the timeline for that can be 50+ years.

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...


> home ownership an impossibility

LOL. Maybe you need to move somewhere unfashionable. You know, be around all those yucky people who go to church & stuff.


This comment is needlessly derisive / combative (and frankly has no place on HN). There are many reasons why one would choose to live in a more populated area.


> "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."

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.


> I can't imagine many/any of today's billionaires believing this,

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.


> "Haven't they all signed the Giving Pledge?"

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.


You are a fool if you think time will balance scales of inequality. [1]

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...


What on earth makes you think the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Astors aren't part of the ruling class?


> Upon her death, Vanderbilt left her son, Anderson Cooper, almost her entire estate, which was valued at less than $1.5 million.

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.


You think the ruling class is only predicated on inherited wealth (at death, ignoring what could be given over a lifetime or via trusts)? Your example is that someone over a million people regularly listen to for an hour each work-night is not part of the ruling class? And that one branch of the family tree that was embroiled in litigation from when she was a minor over her trust and had 4 failed marriages may have only left seven-figures is evidence of total decline?

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?


This is true to some extent, but also not a given.

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.


> These things have a way of working themselves out.

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.


> 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.

Who told you they are not funding and ruling U.S. institutions anymore?


The damage to democracy can last for generations, though.

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.


> In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism

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.


... just maybe not in your lifespan, and that's okay too.


Google News has become completely worthless for me.

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.


This is where Firefox Containers[1] rules. Just open all these sites in new containers and you can keep them siloed and apart (either not logged in, or under separate accounts). You can have as many as you want and have them auto-assigned based on the website.

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...


I wrote [1] to create disposable profiles for browsing, cleanly instantiated from pre-configured (with optional extensions) "root" profiles.

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".

[1] https://github.com/atomontage/chrome-private


Use google news in an incognito window?


You would need incognito, VPN'd, and non-JS tab to not be tracked by websites.


In my anecdotal experience, FB is using non-logged in google search results to select which ad to show you. I assume google sells those to FB, based on IP address.

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.


Another hypothesis: Silicon Valley is using your inner speech - obtained with electromagnetic surveillance and machine learning.

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.


I am confused but very interested.

Do you have any sources or information I can look up to study this?


That's why I switches to running multiple browser profiles, along with multiple Google accounts when necessary. It keeps all those recommendations isolated from each other.


Just run Firefox and the multi container plugin. I also use the temporary containers plug-in which will open a new container with every new tab you open.

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)


Started paying for Kagi.com recently and is very satisfied with the results. Visiting Google again after being used to Kagi is an interesting and uncomfortable experience, it's very easy to become accustomed to how much ads and irrelevant information Google actually displays.

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).


Doesn't work with a VPN.


Google should not be using the same data from different products it owns - or at least give users an option. I really don't want my YouTube Shorts to be impacted by what I saw on YouTube. I don't want my Google News (as @addicted mentioned) to be impacted by my reading habits on YouTube or even my recent search results.

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.


Having worked for a different FAANG, I saw the immense pressure to incorporate data from other products. I imagine there’s a big internal push to aggregate all data from across Google services. It’s an easy win for product managers looking for projects.


Kagi & Brave’s new search engine look promising. And there are many other alternatives like Marginalia, Yacy, Swisscows, Ecosia, Bing, DDG, Mojeek, Qwant, Startpage, etc


+1 Kagi. I expected to get bored and go back to old habits but it's been very impressive and has "stuck" as my default for quite a while now.


> I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit. We had a lot of fun pages, fan pages, and so on. We need that again, our souls need that again.

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.


If you think of the web as Google search's "content", they have let it rot. If Google had spent 1% of their AdWords payouts on encouraging people to post quality content on the web through e.g. better web authoring tools and protocols, they would have way less of a problem now. Perhaps the walled garden (that they did partially achieve with Youtube) is too alluring. They could have even tried to pay more for engaging web content that had lower bounce rates and that users came back repeatedly for, instead of just raw views from clickbait SEO. Obviously having turned the entire web into blogspam for ad money is no good for Google search and they are already having to turn it into "Youtube, Google ML content, and Google Maps user content" search.


I stopped using Gmail and Facebook about three years ago I stopped using Google a bit later (without any good alternative, Bing and DDG are almost as bad)

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 watched one damn video a few days ago on mark hammill and my feed was dominated by star wars drek... coincidence?


Same, YouTube recently started promoting a lot more low quality videos somewhat in the same genre as what I like. It also consistantly hides videos from channel I am subscribed on. It upsets me so much.


We need to recreate the DMOZ web directory - probably in a federated variety with multiple competing "editors" for any given topic area - before we can hope to really do better than Google/Bing/DDG web search. Human curation is the best and most resilient alternative to SEO spam.


akebono.stanford.edu will never die


I should try to keep track of how often I use search engines. Because it certainly feels like I use them less and less.

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.


Usually when I want to use a search engine it is to find quality products in an area I know nothing about. However, Google has become useless for this, as the results are flooded with "top 10" lists that are seemingly auto-generated and full of affiliate links to garbage on Amazon.

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.


Is this a good thing? How does one discover where to go in the first place? Word of mouth?


I really look forward to interfaces that let me use my own index of data from my network.

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.

1: https://manyver.se

2: https://iris.to


Well, corporations have finite lifespans just like all things biological.

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.


Google became more and more of a narrow nightmare over time, to the point that people have started added reddit to their search keyword since the results have become so controlled away from the search and towards some paid content or authoritative source (which usually is outdated).

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"


> Who is going to replace Google for us?

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 stopped reading after the second paragraph. The author just started complaining about Breitbart and Epoch Times being in the news recommendations

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 stopped reading after the second paragraph…

> … I thought this was going to be about google search or something that actually matters

That’s what the other paragraphs were for. #itgetsbetter


I’m intrigued. It looks open for tackling and there is already, a product that very few people know about. From what I have heard it was built at Netflix, was inspired by Sphinx’s-gravity, Mentat, and CQRS knowledge base software solutions I.e: JanusGraph/Galileo. A form of Senantic-Persistence with Hybrid Index Memory appending A secondary index via the FoundationDB HTAP tuplestore layer as a service. From what I heard, they broke PostcresQL and cosmos. Very similar to gremlin, but Gremlin, like this product they say it’s about to be bought by Tim Draco. It’s a search engine, I saw the snapshot I swear. QIt’s a Webflow meets OpenAI Erlang Web service with React front end and a Lucene layer for Prompt transpilation at the sink


The internet itself has changed vastly over the last 25 years, so it is expected that the biggest internet companies have adapted as well.

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)_/¯


Google News is worthless because most of the worthwhile news on the Internet has been paywalled. The equivalent to the old Google News is Apple News, which has a pay tier.

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.


Very accurate. I think the two big changes recently (10-15 years) have been around monetizing content and distribution formats.

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.


Google is not a great tool for commerce. It wastes a great opportunity to close a sale by allowing garbage. They should just connect people to useful information.


Maybe that Google News thing is country specific? Here in Germany it's somewhat balanced. Yes, there is trash like the BILD, but there's also more reliable ones like Spiegel, NDR or Süddeutsche.

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 don't think Google search not performing as many people would prefer is due to technological short-comings of the platform.

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.


Google killed itself with the switch from good ol' finely tuned PageRank to blackbox neural networks with messy loss functions. It's still light years ahead of the competition


They killed them selves when they dropped “Don’t do evil.” And when they started working with foreign governments to provide censored versions of Google.


Yandex gives good results.


> It's still light years ahead of the competition

How do you figure? I never use Google and get through my searches just fine. What am I missing?


Bing, Yandex and DDG just don't achieve the same level of relevancy for me. Their indexes are missing many good results that Google gives out straightaway


Still not sure what I’m missing though since I find everything I’m looking for with those engines. Marginally better results (an opinion) doesn’t seem like “light years” better to me.


Maybe it is the way I search, but, as I've said, many websites are missing from their indexes. Yandex, the second best out of these, is also pretty bad at decoding the context of a search, seems like plain text search


How can you write an article dissing Google and not mention YouTube?


Me. The initial web 3 (the semantic web) could have killed Google. But it never worked, for ux perspective but also for the offer point of view.

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


No one. Nerds/geeks do not need one.

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.


Social media is a much bigger problem than any Google mining because social media naturally promotes the already dangerous both sides fallacies. Among other reasons.


Are there any promising search algorithms/crawlers out there? Obviously one of Google's advantage is the size of their index, but I would like (and probably pay) for a search engine that was as good as Google used to be, but only indexed a small portion of the internet that interests me. Maybe a business model of accepting payment to index certain domains could work.


https://kagi.com

Feel free to thank me later.


Nobody is going to replace Google, the web that Google crawls will simply be replaced by something better (just as open and interoperable, but better in other ways). Google will have a less relevant, even non-existent role, in this better web. This is how powerful companys with moats eventually lose in the end. A structural change makes the land they are defending less valuable


> about how the best way to use Google was to use it to search Reddit, but those are just random internet strangers, so that’s not super useful for finding the answer to anything.

> 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?


Eric Schmidt is working to ensure Google won't be replaced and by that he means he will disable the semiconductors of anyone who tries. You don't own your Intel/AMD/Apple/Qualcomm device.

Only Russia and China have their own independent semiconductor fabs, so only they can, maybe, replace Google.


My guess at what happened at Google. Stupid tech guys high up in the hierarchy with too much power that overrides what the marketing people are saying. One of the most amateurish things you can do is thinking that the data from product A is relevant for product B.


Another bad source of ideas is sometimes business people without ethics (or just plain short term thinking), who don't understand or care about the technology, and override the people who do care and/or understand how things work.


Yeah, very true, my naive view of G though is that they overvalue tech.


I get the feeling they more just undervalue "everyday" humans.


Google is so big now that handling each and everyone of its properties is likely to have not one, not two, but multiple conflicts of interest.

I'm not sure if even a government attempt to split it up can realistically work in any shape, sense, or form.


It used to be the case that people could simply pick which news sources they wish to subscribe to. At which point did we become complacent with subsisting on our corporate overlords’ algorithmic curated crap?

I will never forgive Google for killing Reader.


Can we even describe a compelling vision for what the replacement google would look like?

Trying to get my investors interested in a "non-shit google" requires a bit more color around the edges.


Fair enough. I think the issue is we need to get people involved in making it open, decentralized, fast and easy to use. We need DevOps people to make it easy to do things like host your own mail with CalDav and CardDav, email labels, nice interface, etc.

Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting. Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers that don't sacrifice security and privacy.


I love how they say "We used to do X on some non-Google sight, it was so fun; but I can't do that on Google - so GoOgLe hAs FaIlEd anD iS BaD."

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!


I can’t believe people are still using Google for anything. Use DuckDuckGo for search and Protonmail for encrypted private email. Use Proton VPN for everything else.


There's nothing wrong with Epoch Times as a news source, certainly nothing more biased & skewed than the New York Times.


Fifteen years ago, Google was "the web company". They weren't about walled gardens; they were about the future, which was the web. It turns out they only liked it so much because, back then, Microsoft was bad at it, giving them a comparative advantage.

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.


I think leadership at Google back then truly did like it. And they continued to "mostly" like it up to about 7-10 years ago. During the time I was there (10 years from 2012 until end of 2021) I feel like I saw the transition happen, slowly. It got really contradictory and messy.

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.


consider that your perspective might be biased by your temporal affiliation.

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 would never deny a bias. But an organization like google doesn't have a singular mind or objective. it's full of a bunch of contradictory tendencies and opinions and motivations. And market forces aside, I think the bulk of the pre-Ruth/pre-Sundar leadership had a very pro "open web" opinion at least. And I'd say that even post-IPO they were able to mostly keep their mission statement (“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) compatible with their advertising revenue stream and market forces as a whole.

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.


> "...investors demanded... So they did what the market 'demanded'."

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.


This makes a lot of sense, and thanks for the insight. I was at Google very briefly, but I bet if I mentioned my real name, it would ring a bell.

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.


we didn't have to let them get between us


DDG is fine. They addressed the fuss over them using Yandex as one of many sources particularly for Russian language results. I think we should be a bit more careful to not tar everyone with the same brush. I'd take DDG over Google any day.


>Here’s the thing that made me write this - I used to load up Google News a lot, I’ve now switched to bookmarks. It’s one thing for promoting junk news sources, but recently I’ve seen them cary both Brietbart (known for historically running a “black crime” section!) and the Epoch Times (a disinformation site being run by an actual cult) spouting absolutely false covid denial. I can’t support this in any way. I’m done.

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".


Brietbart and Epoch Times are the opposite of information. Misinformation run by people maliciously trying to get people to believe falsehoods isn't the same as an information source. And the misinformation networks are quite expertly run, just like blackhat SEO was.

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.


WaPo isn't really great, either.


On what basis do you say that? I doubt there are more unbiased and reliable sources of information out there. Since every source of information has bias and will contain mistakes, I am just interested if they are 1) interested in telling me the truth or an agenda or 2) if they are as correct as possible and issue corrections when they are not. WaPo is world class.


And religious organizations in America shouldn't be tax exempt. If you don't like misinformation then don't legitimize psychology since it doesn't treat most religious beliefs as a psychological disorder.


DuckDuckGo is still better than Google. I haven’t used Google search at home in years. I recommend Protonmail for email. You have to pay a subscription but the reward is encryption, no ads, and they don’t sell your data.


Google sucks, what do they even offer? Why replace it?


Google is great, I don’t think it needs replacing.


regarding search engines, i find andisearch.com as better option for some cases (working as a software engineer)


>better option for some cases

Can you tell us more about the kind of problems for which you receive better search results via andisearch.com?


For general search, andisearch and google gives you the same results... in andysearch i don't need to try 10 different combinations of the same sentence to get the expected results like in google, in andisearch i get the expected results almost at the first try (sometimes at the second one) for very specific searches.


in any reasonable society, these problems would be absolute cause for public intervention in the industry, possibly even as far as a publicly owned search engine. but somewhere along the way, corporatism has wormed its way into everything. the left, the right, academia, media, everything. and the message they've left is:

criticise corporations all you want, but don't you dare suggest an alternative


The thing I fail to understand about socialism and government as a form of alternative to corporations is this:

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?


not to be all "this is what they want you to think", but this is the very message I'm talking about

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


You.com


It kinda sucks now but I agree.


OpenAI will.


Sadly openai has fallen behind google at their own game. Google was able to invest heavily and optimize it's hardware and infrastructure down to the silicon, which has turned out to be the critical competitive advantage in AI. Openai is really struggling to compete with google because of this.


Are they struggling to compete? OpenAI's GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 are much better known than Google's competing models LaMDA, PaLM, and Imagen.


Unless they are quietly sitting on some really big work (which isn't out of the question), openai seems to be getting substantially leapfrogged by google. In terms of how "well known" googles language models are, most of us already interact with googles models daily via search. This gives them a massive market head start in users, and an enormous amount of data that will be impossible to catch up with unless google completely shoots themselves in the foot on this stuff.


Interesting. What do you mean?

I know they compete in AI research, but has (no longer quite so) OpenAI shown any sign of competing for Google's cash cows?


They made great progress in NLP, which is a big part of what Google Search is about. Also, they have the compute infrastructure for it.


The problem with taking on Google Search is that of taking on the document corpus they build and the spidering / crawling work they do. Google and Bing are permitted by hosts to crawl, but new entrants effectively barred by most site's robots.txt. The barrier to entry is massive on that front alone.

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.


How does DDG do it?



Why is this comment downvoted?

Factual.


Apple will


like Maps?


Maps has been consistently getting better. Don’t believe the meme.


Last year it took me to a completely different spot for a popular restaurant in SF. That’s like the reddest of the flags.


And last month Google Maps tried to convince me about 12 times to get off the highway and take back roads on a 900mi one-way trip because of hallucinated traffic.

OSM needs more good apps.


Google Maps isn't great for navigation either, but I can easily vouch for Waze (also owned by Google now).


While I still use Google Maps to look up businesses, I have long preferred Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation in the car. The timing of the queues is much better. Google often left me driving with no idea what my next move was until the last minute. Apple Maps tells you right after you make a turn what you need to do next, so you can prepare. It's much more relaxing for me to know what's going on.

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.


I agree that Google Maps navigation is terrible, but Google has Waze for that.


Yes but maybe they learned something. I know their crawler has been out a while


Not only that, Apple Search Engine powered by Siri.




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