Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

People used to say this about Altavista and Dogpile and Lycos before Google. Change is possible, but it's slow and hard.

Google is also the best at searches.

I disagree with you on this one. It used to be the best tool for searching. Now it's hit-and-miss. I've found about 70% of the time DDG works, and I only use Google when DDG turns up nothing useful.

Along those lines, other search engines don't have to be better at search than Google. They just have to be "good enough" at search. Then the competing search engine has to being in some killer feature so that the average person loses allegiance to Google and makes the switch full-time.

That killer feature probably won't be privacy, though. That's too abstract a notion for the masses.

The people within one of my company's divisions refer to the internal knowledge base as "the google." IT defaults their browsers to Bing.

I too want ability to control others

The difference is trust:

These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.

The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it.

I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem:

https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa...

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Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too.

The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too.

That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.