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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?

#71

Post by goldenkey »

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…

You are a fool if you think time will balance scales of inequality. [1]

Sure, Musk and Bezos are the richest men in the world, according to publicly available data. That doesn't mean these other families are all poor. Some have squandered their wealth. Others have magnified it. And all that still have it have become better at hiding it from the public, something that the "new" rich don't have much experience or capability in.

The poor still, well, are poor. New kings for old kings doesn't change shit. But alas we should wait out the neo-feudal age, that's your plan?

[1] https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#72

Post by ericmcer »

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…

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.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#73

Post by grepfru_it »

grumbel wrote: post #46
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…

That's why I switches to running multiple browser profiles, along with multiple Google accounts when necessary. It keeps all those recommendations isolated from each other.

Just run Firefox and the multi container plugin. I also use the temporary containers plug-in which will open a new container with every new tab you open.

If you’re really bout it, get a few proxies and use foxyproxy to randomly route your tabs. Try to avoid too many fingerprinting prevention plugins because that actually makes you even more unique (according to effs panopticlick)

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#74

Post by Snoozle »

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 all people all the way down. Why will one of those supposedly be a benefit and somehow make better and more ethical decisions?

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#75

Post by freyr »

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 subreddits, blogs became tweets, homepages became Facebook profiles. And we’ve hyper-optimized the attention economy to keep us hooked on clickbait headlines and 30 second videos. The Web just bears no resemblance to what it was 10-20 years ago, and web search results are a reflection of that.

Maybe there’s a way to restore the Web of old. But that seems like putting the genie back in the bottle. More likely, IMO, something will eventually replace the Web, and Web search along with it.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#76

Post by Cupertino95014 »

ericmcer wrote: post #72
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…

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.

Re: Who is going to replace Google for us?

#78

Post by cs137 »

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…

This makes a lot of sense, and thanks for the insight. I was at Google very briefly, but I bet if I mentioned my real name, it would ring a bell.

It'll be interesting to see the evolution of all these companies that've invested in mobile, now that mobile is so crapflooded, no one wants to pay for apps anymore. I don't know what the future of consumer computing looks like; I do know that I'd prefer not to have any part in it.

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