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Who is going to replace Google for us?

michaeldehaan.substack.com

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Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#101

Post by Zak »

guerrilla wrote: post #85
freyr wrote: post #75

Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…

> Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? Yeah, I wish I knew how to get back to it, but I think that's impossible without a big enough movement. Yes, I know about tildeverse and some other things but the countervailing network effect is just too big for it to be sustaining right now. The closest is Mastadon but it's not really that great.

What would make Mastodon more appealing for you or the hypothetical user for whom you think it's not that great? The main thing that comes to mind for me would be more people I know in person using it.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#102

Post by mgraczyk »

freyr wrote: post #75

Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…

The web of old was inaccessible to 99.9% of the world. Most people do not want what you're looking for. You can find it by diving deeper and searching differently.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#103

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jmyeet wrote: post #28

The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will. I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be domina…

Honestly, I think the fallacy is to just believe that Google's dominance will magically end.

I have a different take, which is that tech leadership rarely changes in a particular technology, it's just that new technologies arrive that displace the old. Microsoft is still absolutely dominant in desktop operating systems. IBM has 90%+ marketshare in mainframes. Oracle is still the top enterprise database.

So we seem to see these posts periodically now on HN, about "who is going to displace Google in search?" Sorry, that ain't happening. First, despite HN missives, Google still tends to work better than all the competition. Second, the startup costs to have a viable generic Internet search engine are now astronomical, to the point that hardly any VC would invest in a startup whose approach would be "just be a better Google" WRT search.

So the question really is, "what new technology could displace Internet search?" And it's very, very difficult for me to come up with an answer to that looking out 50-75 years or so. In addition, companies now are much more aware of "disruption" theories and will actively try to acquire their disrupters (e.g. Google's acquisition of Android and Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were key to keep them from getting displaced in mobile).

I would easily make the bet that Google (or potentially their government-induced offspring) will continue to totally dominate search 50 years from now.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#104

Post by elromulous »

Cupertino95014 wrote: post #76
ericmcer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do work themselves out, but sometimes the timeline for that can be 50+ years. Which is basically your entire youth and productive lifetime. It is pretty cold comfort to know that income inequality that makes home ownership an impossibility right now will work itself out in a few decades.

> home ownership an impossibility LOL. Maybe you need to move somewhere unfashionable. You know, be around all those yucky people who go to church & stuff.

This comment is needlessly derisive / combative (and frankly has no place on HN). There are many reasons why one would choose to live in a more populated area.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#105

Post by sto_hristo »

freyr wrote: post #75

Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became s…

The evolution you described happened only because the internet is freely accessible to anyone, anywhere, except if you're a communist. Reverting it back to some state you deem worthy is saying the internet was broken. Trying to nudge the Web into some direction you like is exactly the thing that will destroy the Web.

If you don't like subreddits, twitter, or the mass produced crap - avoid it and focus on what you like. The early internet stuff has not been banned and banished. Some if it has been forgotten, maybe, but nobody is going to go through the trouble of keeping a VHS store just to tickle your nostalgia.

I still can find a community to play Re-Volt with. That is only possible because of the internet and the way it is.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#106

Post by cudgy »

andi999 wrote: post #54
cudgy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, don’t worry, it all work out? Vast wealth being sucked up by a few people while huge swaths of society have little to no ability to handle a $1000 financial hit? Passing the big ball of wealth between a few select people and families over history is acceptable? The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.

Na, just introduce a social safety net, like most of europe had for some time.

So, put “those people” in the Matrix, so they won’t be a problem instead of addressing the real problem of a lopsided economic system is the answer?

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#107

Post by sofixa »

softwarebeware wrote: post #98
jsnell wrote: post #52

The most concrete complaints in this piece appear to be: - Google News includes stories from a source that the author doesn't want anyone else to be able to see. (If they just didn't want to see those stories themselves, then there's an easily accessible "hide sources from XXX" entry in the context menu). - Generic complaints about shopping searches returning links to Amazon, or pages having referral links to Amazon.…

The Epoch Times isn’t just a “source” that some people don’t want to see. And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads. This comment isn’t a reasonable critique of the article it’s denialism at best

> And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads

Where? There are, sometimes, 1-2 ads in the "Promotions" tab, which i really wouldn't call "a shit ton".

Breitbart and Epoch Times shouldn't come up anywhere close to anything with "News" in the name.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#108

Post by TheBlight »

I don't think Google search not performing as many people would prefer is due to technological short-comings of the platform.

I wonder if a co-op model, for at least search functionality, is realizable in the near term. What I mean is using cloud resources to spin up an indexing/search interface with minimal management that can be used by any number of shared participants for a fraction of the total compute/storage costs. It wouldn't be purely decentralized in the blockchain/p2p sense but "decentralized-enough" perhaps to function much better for results people actually want to find. The costs would naturally scale with the desired level of decentralization.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#109

Post by permo-w »

Snoozle wrote: post #74
permo-w wrote: post #62

in any reasonable society, these problems would be absolute cause for public intervention in the industry, possibly even as far as a publicly owned search engine. but somewhere along the way, corporatism has wormed its way into everything. the left, the right, academia, media, everything. and the message they've left is: criticise corporations all you want, but don't you dare suggest an alternative

The thing I fail to understand about socialism and government as a form of alternative to corporations is this: Corporations are groups of people focused on a given goal. Your solution to a group of people making what you consider to be bad decisions or morally wrong decisions is to involve more people? People are the problem. It doesn't matter what they call themselves - a country, a government, a corporation, it's…

not to be all "this is what they want you to think", but this is the very message I'm talking about

if this was the 50s or 60s, they would have made this search engine publicly-owned, and today it would be a cherished part of society being threatened and/or deliberately sabotaged by the corporate right of politics, a la the BBC, or the NHS, or Medicare/aid, or libraries, or youth centres, or public schools, or whatever equivalent you have of those in your country

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#110

Post by clairity »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #43
cs137 wrote: post #23

Fifteen years ago, Google was "the web company". They weren't about walled gardens; they were about the future, which was the web. It turns out they only liked it so much because, back then, Microsoft was bad at it, giving them a comparative advantage. We're living through another tragedy of the commons, but the culprit isn't human nature itself, so much as it is capitalism. The corporates have made sure they have ab…

I think leadership at Google back then truly did like it. And they continued to "mostly" like it up to about 7-10 years ago. During the time I was there (10 years from 2012 until end of 2021) I feel like I saw the transition happen, slowly. It got really contradictory and messy. In fact, Google Plus (2011-2013ish) was justified (in part) as an attempt to "rescue" the web from the enclosing grasp of the walled garden…

consider that your perspective might be biased by your temporal affiliation.

for anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the direction google was headed was plainly evident by 2004 (when it went public and gmail launched). google clearly saw the web as both a threat and an opportunity (much like microsoft before it), and deigned to control it, not cultivate it as a public good. google never "pushed the web forward" magnanimously, even if the leadership "liked" it at some point. the strategy was always to dominate the web (search itself was the kernel from which this strategy took shape), and "don't be evil" was merely cover for that, right from the start.

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