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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#201

Post by shuckles »

redrove wrote: post #100
Xcelerate wrote: post #53

> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, j…

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Financially motivated types can figure out how to use git if that lets them gain a lucrative job. There as entire undergrad CS major to Associate Product Manager pipeline which proves this.

Re: Mourning Google

#202

Post by amadeuspagel »

> “Ten blue links” · I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted. They want answers to their questions, complete and correct, so much more wholesome than an abbreviated sampling of the General Internet Uproar. And that was partly right: When I type in “-12C in F” or “population of vietnam” I just want a number.

> But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.

Ten blue links are great on desktop, not so great on mobile, where websites take longer to load and the cookie banner takes up half the page. There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile.

Search engines should work completely different on desktop and mobile. Give me ten blue links on desktop, give me an AI generated answer on mobile. This might be true for other websites as well. Maybe responsive design was a mistake.

Re: Mourning Google

#203

Post by amadeuspagel »

> Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate. Safari and Firefox for non-Google stuff; they ain’t perfect but I think they’re better aligned with my interests.

Using a different browser for different websites doesn't make sense because of links.

As web user and web developer, a browser that's made by a web company is aligned with my interest, not a browser by a company for which the web is a kind of tax haven, a way for companies to avoid paying the 30% tax they're supposed to pay when selling to their users.

Re: Mourning Google

#204

Post by the_doctah »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #202

> “Ten blue links” · I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted. They want answers to their questions, complete and correct, so much more wholesome than an abbreviated sampling of the General Internet Uproar. And that was partly right: When I type in “-12C in F” or “population of vietnam” I just want a number. > But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by…

Tik tok as a search engine on mobile? Huh? Does it search outside its own content?

Re: Mourning Google

#205

Post by amadeuspagel »

cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

> And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/on...

Re: Mourning Google

#206

Post by ben7799 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #53

> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, j…

This problem existed way before 2010.. it might not have been a problem in companies like Google but it had already been a problem in previous waves of big tech companies. For example in lots of the Telecommunications giants that were building the hardware in the 1990s that made the growth of today's BigTech possible.

Re: Mourning Google

#207

Post by amadeuspagel »

herval wrote: post #37

> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell

"If only the czar knew."

Re: Mourning Google

#208

Post by GoogEngMgr2024 »

asah wrote: post #78
rezonant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm. In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.

Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any…

Google remains … less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking)…

This may have been true in 2009. It is no longer true in 2024.

Re: Mourning Google

#209

Post by YoshiRulz »

puchatek wrote: post #93

I really want to make the switch from Google maps to OSM but i always find that I also want to look up some data about the destination, usually the opening hours. Sometimes the reviews. OSM just doesn't have enough coverage for the place where I live. I wished there was some project that automatically looked up businesses in Google maps and copied their details to OSM but most likely that would violate some t&c or so…

It violates copyright, yes.

If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).

Re: Mourning Google

#210

Post by [deleted] »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

[deleted]
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