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Web by Google (TM)

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Re: Web by Google (TM)

#261

Post by bambax »

The real mystery is why nobody has ever been able to do better search than Google, or at least just as good.

Of course search is really hard, but how is it possible that huge companies with nearly infinite money and talent (MS / Apple / Amazon) were never able to do it? MS actually tried; it's unclear if the others even gave it a thought.

The rest of Google is different. I use Gmail but could easily switch. I've not used Chrome for over a year now and really don't miss it (either on desktop or mobile). Google maps are the best but others would be good enough if need be.

But search? Every time I try to use Duck Duck Go I'm extremely disappointed. Google search is something I don't think I could live without.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#262

Post by JadeNB »

codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #203
Mary-Jane wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralization is clearly bad in the private sector. I'm curious why people here don't see centralization of government as similarly bad. With 3.5T in revenue, the US federal government is the single largest entity in existence, and it's scope is vast, covering things as disparate as mail and health care. There are plenty of examples of them abusing their position (and occasionally their people...), yet this forum ra…

I'm supposed to be represented by my government, which we collectively give power to through the constitution. There's no constitution for Google. We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. We are just figuring out how to curtail the power of internet giants today. There is no inconsistency.

> We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago.

I know that your parent explicitly mentioned the US, but let's not pretend either that the US found the, or even a, right answer to structuring government, or that no other country has found their own answers.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#263

Post by DarthGhandi »

jhoechtl wrote: post #175
alangibson wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL died off because the world shifted to the open web. The only way Facebook or Google die off is if a similar paradigm shift occurs.

It's about time for true change and the open interweb as Tim Berners Lee et al. conceived it. I currently only see ipfs as a viable alternative, but with another markdown format so we need no chrome browser.

Tim Berners Lee himself has a project aimed at this. I like IPFS but it's still quite clunky to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#264

Post by XCSme »

treis wrote: post #42
alangibson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP is the most transparent land grab Google has pulled. It's technically unjustifiable, is arguably value destroying, and as a bonus you can't disable it. It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.

The concept of AMP makes a lot of sense. It does speed up browsing and prevents sites from being terrible. The prloblem is that the implementation isn't great and it's Google driven. But the concept is sound.

But you can still do that without AMP, and probably even easier than with it.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#265

Post by harha »

dmitshur wrote: post #110
simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

> Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Genuine question, do you mind saying (or pointing to something) what are the implications of browser choice of individuals reading HN?

Assuming HN readers are creating a bunch of products people use every day:

I think at some point Chrome became significantly better than Firefox and did a better job listening to users, so power-users (developers) started switching, once they switched, they primarily developed for the browser they use themselves (it's just more convenient when you get a link to look at to open the inspector in the browser that is set as system standard), so support improved further on that platform, so market share would constantly rise. This in turn leads to more devs reducing their focus on Firefox, so users turn away when a site looks or functions worse.

Now, Firefox has caught up on a bunch of things, yet Google's market share is huge both in browsing and advertising. It would be good for more developers to actively support the strongest alternative platform, because this in turn might affect adoption of that browser, even if it's just small numbers (every site that doesn't work might lead to a user switching to Chrome). It would keep them at least a little more safe from a monopoly that might start imposing policies that are bad for their business, the same way app stores are causing issues because they are the only way to access mobile phones (outside of web app - which is the point of the whole discussion)

Edit: note there's probably many reasons - this is just one way of looking at it.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#266

Post by ma2rten »

fractionalhare wrote: post #205
simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

> Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh. Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago: https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers: https://imgur.com/a…

HN is not a typical user base.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#267

Post by fractionalhare »

ma2rten wrote: post #266
fractionalhare wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh. Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago: https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers: https://imgur.com/a…

HN is not a typical user base.

Of course it isn't, but we're talking specifically about HN users...these statistics are in response to someone asking about browser share of HN readers, not browser share of the general population.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#268

Post by mjburgess »

bambax wrote: post #261

The real mystery is why nobody has ever been able to do better search than Google, or at least just as good. Of course search is really hard, but how is it possible that huge companies with nearly infinite money and talent (MS / Apple / Amazon) were never able to do it? MS actually tried; it's unclear if the others even gave it a thought. The rest of Google is different. I use Gmail but could easily switch. I've not…

I suspect people optimising for google over the last, c. 20 years has made the difference.

ie., people have spent years writing their sites explicitly with google SEO in-mind... add-in all the data google has via adwords...

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#269

Post by jefftk »

jasode wrote: post #136
kristopolous wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally

>Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally AOL was dominant (~30 million dialup subscribers at its 2002 peak) but didn't build any "sticky" products such as Facebook's social graph (a very valuable online Rolodex contacts database of real names ). Each dialup us…

One way that AOL was sticky was email addresses. I still know a few people, and my parents generation, who pay for AOL because they don't want to lose their aol.com email address.

But I definitely agree that Facebook is a lot stickier: I have the impression that most of my Facebook graph would like to move somewhere else, but the combination of the difficulty of that coordination problem and no strong candidates for a replacement has kept us on Facebook.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#270

Post by mjburgess »

cheph wrote: post #234

> Two deficiencies have determined the course the Web has taken: lack of native search and lack of native payments. What exactly is the expectation here, that there is one integrated protocols stack that covers all of this? I don't see why. Nothing is stopping someone from building P2P distributed search engines, and nothing is stopping someone from building "safe and easy way of exchanging funds". Given that we stil…

Just read it as an interesting counter-factual: if the web had had search/payments via some native protocol, then it would have developed without google.

There is also a reasonable argument to saying that search/payments are so fundamental to what the web became that a solution at the protocol-layer would be appropriate.

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