61–70 of 103 posts
Love them or hate them, their impact on the internet and the world is unparalleled - Both positive and negative impact, but mostly positive.
Positive impact: Google maps The amount of people that were empowered to explore and discover (or time saved from getting lost) is incredible by any measure
I’m surprised the first result today for “how to cut a pineapple” isn’t an SEO optimized recipe with a wall of nonsense to scroll past before the actual instructions How much tuning did Google need to do for that?
I miss iGoogle............. :'(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Positive impact: Google maps The amount of people that were empowered to explore and discover (or time saved from getting lost) is incredible by any measure
It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players. I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
Google has been a constant part of my life from early 2000's and I'm grateful to them for providing so many useful products. Most of them were awesome and worked fully without annoying ads or subscriptions. They will come with something new (usually unannounced) and I will be so excited to try it. Technically, they would almost work from day one. Needless to say, I was a Google fanboi during the first decade of the c…
As much as I wish it, Google search is only the secondary focus. They multi-billion deal with Apple shows the massive cash stack developed from search, which would lead one to believe Google lives from search. I would have no problem with this co-dependant relationship, except it show the darker side of Google. Anything for installs. If Google was suddenly forced to be ONLY a search engine, I maintain they would fail - No gmail apps. No slides. No voice. A "nothing but search" Google would make unimaginable amounts of money, but it would only be clicks. Quick impressions, that don't generate the revenue Google stockholders now depends on.
The clicks themselves should be enough. My mind explodes at the concept of counting Google's click-thru revenue; thank god for 64-bit CPUs! As the world's finest data-mining corporation which {likely, obviously, as proven in court} funnels untold data to `todaysTLA {}` they have show time and time again, they care not for their free-tier customers, employees or paying "customers". The amount you pay pales in comparison to how much the revenue stream is from `{data mining data points for gmail, android etc}, of course they are going to monetize you. The massive income increase and the thankful government's soft-hand approach is the underlying motivator. The amazing ability of Google's lawyers to keep the vast majority of the current anti-trust trial relatively hidden screams of influence.
This being said, who do we turn to? Who's the stalwart, effective and visible protector of the internet now? Obviously not firefox, gnu, debian or mullvad. Where is their a major-league player that can take us back to the internet of old, the internet of a useful GeoCities page? I use Firefox on every device I own. I'd cross-compile before I go to Chrome, but they don't just own client-side-internet, do they?
The internet before capitalism was a wonderful thing, but we had a problem - someone eventually pays. Someone eventually pays for everything - email, www, gopher, newsgroups, ftp. Even today, at some point, you realize "the cloud" is just someone else's machine, which they pay for. Universities fronted the bill for years, but quickly bowed out.
Maybe one day we will reach a point that a `cloud_server {4-core arm cpu, 4GB ram, 40GB disk};` is so cheap as to be offered for free. Until that day, the internet is for those who pay in either money or information. I do not agree with the way TLAs work the system. I think the google tradeoff is bad. I understand that my ability to browse www.mario64speedruns.com depends greatly on if I trigger a captcha through Cloud{Flare,Front}, based mostly on my ad-blocking.
And even once we reach the promised land of free 4/4/40, it will only survive because of actual, paying, CC-on-file customers. The sooner we come to "horrible acceptance", where we realize the free-love-1972 isn't the world we live in, the better. It will quicken the people a thousand times smarter than me figuring out a way to keep 1% of the web free.
None sucks; better than none sucks less; therefore 1% is amazing,
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players. I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
People used to pay hundreds of dollars for GPS units and hundreds more for annual maps updates before Google entered the picture. There may be alternatives now, but Google Maps absolutely revolutionized the space when it showed up and brought online maps/GPS to regular consumers for the first time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There has never been such a world, Book publishing. Fine art. Music. Poetry. Travel and tourism. Food.... need I go on? > Capitalism abhors competition "One of the foundational blocks of capitalism is competition." [0] > I would argue that a strong unified platform ... the web, whatever) is good for user and developer "The Web" was [1] a standard , not a company or "platform". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capi…
>Book publishing. Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan combine for 77-91% of the market: https://www.statista.com/topics/9280/book-publishing/#topicO... >Fine art. This isn't an industry, just a tax evasion scheme for rich people >Music. 3 players control 70% of recording: https://musically.com/2023/04/26/music-copyright-publishes-i... >Poetry. Not an industry, never has been…
Once the market figured out how to sidestep government regulation of the ride-hailing industry, it got significantly cheaper, easier, and more accessible?
And how far they've strayed from the beginning. Don't be evil. Won't show ads inline with search results that look like organic links. Constant product churn, search results inundated by click farms, and one can't leave out WEI...
Google has been a constant part of my life from early 2000's and I'm grateful to them for providing so many useful products. Most of them were awesome and worked fully without annoying ads or subscriptions. They will come with something new (usually unannounced) and I will be so excited to try it. Technically, they would almost work from day one. Needless to say, I was a Google fanboi during the first decade of the c…