What is "Web"? Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.
Yes they can by using a VPN for example.
The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#32Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#33In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the decline of quality and coverage of Search (more spam and more older sites dropping out).
Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort.
Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the decline were apparent.
Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google" is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results.
I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI.
I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon, but the time to challenge them could be now.
Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#34What is "Web"? Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.
Uhh... I think it's http. Or maybe it's just any data that a web-browser can handle. Definitely a few OSI layers above the internet.
Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#35In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…
I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google.
To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS.
However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.
Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#36>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.
How can they even do it with encryption and CDNs everywhere? It's just not possible. The last trace is unencrypted domain name in TLS handshake and it'll be gone soon.
> The last trace is unencrypted domain name in TLS handshake and it'll be gone soon.
How can they respond to dns queries if they don't know what you're asking for?
Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#37In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…
There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1])
I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that.
Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era of low effort reposts, aggregators, optimizing for clicks and a large SEO industry.
In addition, most of the user-generated content is now inside "walled gardens" like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, and is either impossible to index, or much harder to quantify and rank than websites linking to each other.
There has to be something better out there, but it will be a difficult challenge.
Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory.
Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#38Interesting article that's somewhat ruined by a click-baity title that it can't support. I first got on the web in 1994. There was far more difference between 1994 and 2014 than from 2014 to 2017. And that's the crux of it: just because it's different doesn't mean it's dying.
Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#39In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…
Great points. The idea that Google was evil had been out there long before 2014 of course, and perhaps some of that tin foil hatism was prescient rather than ridiculous.
Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)
#40In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…
I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google. To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS. However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.
True but I think the parallel between Google and MS (of the 2000s) is more interesting in terms of the vital signs in their organization rather than on the product level. Because Windows was only improving from release to release, while Search is getting shittier and shittier (sorry, can't find a better word for at least my own frustration with using it today). So Search may in fact die a quick and sudden death at this pace. Theoretically replacing Search can only take one browser update: offer a choice but rearrange the options, for example.
However, what Google and pre-Nadella Microsoft share is let's say living in a bubble of a tremendous success of one product that's also the main source of revenue (MS Office, and Google Ads), plus inability to innovate. This is an institutional/organizational symptom more than anything else.
Old HN'ers should remember PG's essay[1] so maybe now is the time to reassess Google's place in the world.