11–20 of 436 posts
So what had fundamentally changed here? Is it just that China is a bigger market now? Did Google think they actually had enough leverage to get the Chinese to back down? Are the founders simply less idealistic than before?
Too late... They will never overtake Baidu, who have leaks of Googles algorithm, more data to train AI on, government support, an existing (better) product in asian languages, and a massive userbase.
I'm sure they'll be able to overtake Baidu. Baidu's search product is terrible. The results are almost always unusable. The only times I find them useful is when it links to a quora-equivalent website where someone has asked your exact query.
What does "censored" mean in this context? No anti-communist or anti-party propaganda? Personally I feel that Google has slowly become more and more censored over the recent years, to the point that I do searches on multiple search engines if I'm not so sure about the Google results. More than often there's not only a filter-bubble in my results, but there's more and more sites that suddenly disappeared over the year…
A tactically-'ethical' startup of the near future's motto: "Don't be Google".
A tactically-'ethical' startup of the near future's motto: "Don't be Google".
It is definitely worse to have a startup phase with the motto "don't be evil" and then later remove it once they've got everyone's data.
This feels like a very different world than 1998 when G could launch an upstart search engine with 'free the world's information' in their DNA. in 1998 even in the tech bubble people still had no idea how the open web platform would be used. Now it's some combination of closed platform dominance, cookie farms, land grabs and spam.
Not surprising G is under pressure to play ball in china; the prevalence of android there (albeit in weird open forms sans G maps & tools) gives the government a geopolitical interest in tying some strings.
In other news I find it hilarious FBs license was revoked in Hangzhou just now. Suck it. Hahaha.
The majority of people don't really care how corporations behave. If they did Google search/gmail/maps would not be so popular. They have the right price point(0$) for people to ignore any moral misgivings they may have. I'm guilty of this and up to my neck in google services