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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?

#51

Post by briandear »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #25
aftbit wrote: post #21

>Here’s the thing that made me write this - I used to load up Google News a lot, I’ve now switched to bookmarks. It’s one thing for promoting junk news sources, but recently I’ve seen them cary both Brietbart (known for historically running a “black crime” section!) and the Epoch Times (a disinformation site being run by an actual cult) spouting absolutely false covid denial. I can’t support this in any way. I’m done…

Brietbart and Epoch Times are the opposite of information. Misinformation run by people maliciously trying to get people to believe falsehoods isn't the same as an information source. And the misinformation networks are quite expertly run, just like blackhat SEO was. Sputnik, Infowards, or NAMBLA shouldn't be on par with the BBC or WaPo and if you think otherwise you maybe should lower your redpill dosages! EDIT: Dow…

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Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#52

Post by jsnell »

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. Might be true, but the case would be a lot stronger with some example queries that show this failure, with suggestions on the good content that is not being surfaced. Without the latter, how can we know that the results weren't actually the best that existed.

- An insinuation that Gmail and Drive are "treating the user as the product". (Seems basically untrue; Gmail has incredibly few ads, Drive I think none, and data from neither is used for ad targeting.)

- The author couldn't get individual customer support for "being the target of a really weird scheme". No details on the scheme. The person they didn't know whose contact details they got from somewhere wasn't enthusiastic about helping them either.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#53

Post by hitpointdrew »

ac130kz wrote: post #47

Google killed itself with the switch from good ol' finely tuned PageRank to blackbox neural networks with messy loss functions. It's still light years ahead of the competition

They killed them selves when they dropped “Don’t do evil.” And when they started working with foreign governments to provide censored versions of Google.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#54

Post by andi999 »

cudgy wrote: post #41
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…

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.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#55

Post by chillingeffect »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #32

I stopped using Gmail and Facebook about three years ago I stopped using Google a bit later (without any good alternative, Bing and DDG are almost as bad) But I still used Youtube a lot, I found interesting content there, and the algorithm mostly managed to keep me interested, even if many of the suggestions were crap. But for some reason it suddenly changed a few days ago, the suggestions are all crap now. Nothing o…

I watched one damn video a few days ago on mark hammill and my feed was dominated by star wars drek... coincidence?

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#56

Post by ModernMech »

ac130kz wrote: post #47

Google killed itself with the switch from good ol' finely tuned PageRank to blackbox neural networks with messy loss functions. It's still light years ahead of the competition

> It's still light years ahead of the competition

How do you figure? I never use Google and get through my searches just fine. What am I missing?

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#57

Post by croes »

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…

The problem isn't one specific wealthy family, it's that wealth is always concentrated on few people.

Just because a king dies and gets replaced by another king doesn't help the peasants.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#58

Post by slowmovintarget »

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…

The damage to democracy can last for generations, though.

In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism. What they had was a filter-bubble where the people were constantly told that the cause of their problems was some particular scapegoat and the solution was more state control.

Social media produces these filter-bubbles in a far more powerful fashion. Worse, it's setting up conditions for a civil war where one big bubble is told that the problem is "The System" and the other big bubble is told the problem is "those lefties" and both sides are told the solution is to stamp out the other side.

The Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Carnegies never built anything like that. They built infrastructure, and leveraged economies. Oil, railroad, finance... not the same thing as social connection engines.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#59

Post by metroholografix »

addicted wrote: post #5

Google News has become completely worthless for me. It takes my YouTube usage and promotes news stories based on that. But that makes absolutely no sense. I go to YouTube to relax and/or look at things that are not so important. Sudoku solving, gaming news, and/or chess stuff. I used to go to Google News to have an understanding of what’s happening in the world. But now my Google News feed is overridden by stories ab…

I wrote [1] to create disposable profiles for browsing, cleanly instantiated from pre-configured (with optional extensions) "root" profiles.

It's also convenient when researching a particular topic, as I can keep a dedicated per-topic browser instance self-contained in its own directory, for as long as I need it.

It does a good job in bypassing backend "personalization".

[1] https://github.com/atomontage/chrome-private

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