[HN Gopher] Who is going to replace Google for us?
___________________________________________________________________
Who is going to replace Google for us?
Author : zdw
Score : 136 points
Date : 2022-06-26 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (michaeldehaan.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (michaeldehaan.substack.com)
| honopu wrote:
| Apple will
| sedatk wrote:
| like Maps?
| al_borland wrote:
| While I still use Google Maps to look up businesses, I have
| long preferred Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation in the
| car. The timing of the queues is much better. Google often
| left me driving with no idea what my next move was until the
| last minute. Apple Maps tells you right after you make a turn
| what you need to do next, so you can prepare. It's much more
| relaxing for me to know what's going on.
|
| Apple Maps is also great for transit, where it supports it.
| In Tokyo (several years ago) it would tell me how much money
| to put on the ticket for the trip I was taking, which would
| have been pretty confusing otherwise. Not sure if Google has
| made updates, but at the time I don't believe they had this.
| falcolas wrote:
| Maps has been consistently getting better. Don't believe the
| meme.
| honopu wrote:
| Yes but maybe they learned something. I know their crawler
| has been out a while
| rvz wrote:
| Not only that, Apple Search Engine powered by Siri.
| geekamongus wrote:
| How can you write an article dissing Google and not mention
| YouTube?
| mancerayder wrote:
| Google became more and more of a narrow nightmare over time, to
| the point that people have started added reddit to their search
| keyword since the results have become so controlled away from the
| search and towards some paid content or authoritative source
| (which usually is outdated).
|
| But my question is why can't duckduckgo be the replacement?
|
| The worry is that Google implicitly rewards some content over
| other content with views, and therefore promotes some production
| over other production. As another user wrote intelligently in
| this thread:
|
| "At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started
| ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources,
| hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering
| why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this
| recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the
| author of the freshness of summer produce, it's because that's
| the kind of content that Google will give a high ranking"
| sk8terboi wrote:
| LeonTheremin wrote:
| Eric Schmidt is working to ensure Google won't be replaced and by
| that he means he will disable the semiconductors of anyone who
| tries. You don't own your Intel/AMD/Apple/Qualcomm device.
|
| Only Russia and China have their own independent semiconductor
| fabs, so only they can, maybe, replace Google.
| Arnie0426 wrote:
| Google should not be using the same data from different products
| it owns - or at least give users an option. I really don't want
| my YouTube Shorts to be impacted by what I saw on YouTube. I
| don't want my Google News (as @addicted mentioned) to be impacted
| by my reading habits on YouTube or even my recent search results.
|
| Personalization is everywhere but I really hope that Google also
| allows for customization by the user. Till then, I really have to
| diversify my product usage from different companies to have some
| illusion of control.
| axg11 wrote:
| Having worked for a different FAANG, I saw the immense pressure
| to incorporate data from other products. I imagine there's a
| big internal push to aggregate all data from across Google
| services. It's an easy win for product managers looking for
| projects.
| olah_1 wrote:
| I really look forward to interfaces that let me use my own index
| of data from _my_ network.
|
| Manyverse[1] and Iris[2] are good examples of apps that will
| enable this more in the future.
|
| I just want to search "harry potter" and see everything my
| friends have written about it. If I follow some institutions or
| encyclopedias, I should also see what _they_ write about it. And
| I should be able to choose which sources I want to rank higher in
| search results.
|
| 1: https://manyver.se
|
| 2: https://iris.to
| zozbot234 wrote:
| We need to recreate the DMOZ web directory - probably in a
| federated variety with multiple competing "editors" for any given
| topic area - before we can hope to really do better than
| Google/Bing/DDG web search. Human curation is the best and most
| resilient alternative to SEO spam.
| dekhn wrote:
| akebono.stanford.edu will never die
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| johnmarcus wrote:
| I love how they say "We used to do X on some non-Google sight, it
| was so fun; but I can't do that on Google - so GoOgLe hAs FaIlEd
| anD iS BaD."
|
| Why not just use another site, that you know, isn't Google? Like
| they suggested, you can search Reddit, or you can search Tumbler,
| or you can find a Facebook group, or where we found this article:
| Hacker news.
|
| I miss the yesteryear when people didn't expect Google to somehow
| be the answer to everything on the web. Here's an idea: your fan
| sights can co-exist as well as Google.
|
| And the irony is, the authors own blog home page uses a dark
| pattern to try and convince you to subscribe to their newsletter!
| Talk about ruining the web for commercial purposes!
| binbag wrote:
| DDG is fine. They addressed the fuss over them using Yandex as
| one of many sources particularly for Russian language results. I
| think we should be a bit more careful to not tar everyone with
| the same brush. I'd take DDG over Google any day.
| throwaway2056 wrote:
| No one. Nerds/geeks do not need one.
|
| BTW, all nerds/geeks note that Google is not exclusively for you.
| Just walk to a cafe (not the one near FAANG campus). See those
| people with smartphone? They use Google. There are 100000x more
| such people compared to people that use substack.
|
| > is impossible to contact a human
|
| TBH, no one cares. I had friend that lost google account due to
| 2FA. But did they regret. No. It is only geeks/nerds that want to
| preserve their first email, photo for ever.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > Who is going to replace Google for us?
|
| No one.
|
| The only thing that could happen is Google is broken up like
| Standard Oil.
|
| And frankly, Google over the last decade has made moves under the
| assumption they will be broken up (i.e., making each division a
| standalone business and Alphabet as a holding company - when
| structured this way, it makes a forced breakup _much_ easier).
| aftbit wrote:
| >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.
|
| It sounds like rather than a news search engine & aggregator, the
| poster would rather use a curated news service (e.g. CNN) that
| gives them a single particular viewpoint. Or at the very least,
| would like their sources to be vetted or editorialized in some
| way, as opposed to the original Google mission "to organize the
| world's information and make it universally accessible and
| useful".
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| 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: Downvote away! Karma is useless and you can't kill the
| messenger! Kids: misinformation is not information. They people
| that use it are sociopaths and will lie like hell and gaslight
| you to keep up their scam. If you think the Washington Post,
| the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, et al
| are on par with Jordan Peterson, Breitbart, or Infowars then
| you have been really poorly served in your life. You are in a
| disinformation bubble and you don't even realize it. Escape
| now, model-based targeting is not going to make it easier.
| dekhn wrote:
| WaPo isn't really great, either.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| On what basis do you say that? I doubt there are more
| unbiased and reliable sources of information out there.
| Since every source of information has bias and will contain
| mistakes, I am just interested if they are 1) interested in
| telling me the truth or an agenda or 2) if they are as
| correct as possible and issue corrections when they are
| not. WaPo is world class.
| briandear wrote:
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| And religious organizations in America shouldn't be tax
| exempt. If you don't like misinformation then don't
| legitimize psychology since it doesn't treat most religious
| beliefs as a psychological disorder.
| cs137 wrote:
| 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 absolute dominion over
| human usage of time and space, and anything they don't value (or
| that might represent opposition to them, now or later) dies.
| convolvatron wrote:
| we didn't have to let them get between us
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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 that is Facebook -- which couldn't be indexed,
| searched, and presented openly. (Naturally this was
| hypocritical [in addition to being a failure] but that was one
| of the motivations given for the project)
|
| Overall I think all of this had a lot to do not only with
| Google's positioning as an advertising company, but with the
| rise of mobile computing and mobile apps. The writing was on
| the wall when mobile use started to surpass desktop browser
| use. "The web" as we traditionally knew it ceased to be the
| primary interaction mechanism people were having with the
| Internet, and Google (and others) had to pivot quickly or they
| would lose the advantage they had.
|
| Google from 2000-2015 or so seemed to innovate on "the web";
| from search to gmail to news to reader (and even arguably to
| g+) it was about pushing the limits of the tech and excelling
| at making WWW products. Then it became about making... nice
| apps. I guess?
|
| Story time: I worked on the Google (then "Nest") Home Hub. The
| original UI for it was written in HTML/CSS/JS and it was very
| well done by some super talented front end developers. My
| teammates were responsible for optimizing the Chromium
| rendering engine for that platform, to make it perform nicely
| on the bargain basement SoC we were using. We shipped this to
| millions of people and it was a success.
|
| A few quarters later the whole thing was ripped out and
| replaced with Dart & Flutter. The UI was identical, but bias
| and and ideology dictated that that was what the UI had to be
| built in (they said it'd be faster: it wasn't, it was more
| about making it so the same apps could be built for Android and
| Fuchsia as the same time). Multiple quarters were spent on a
| transition plan to rewrite this whole UI and hack up the
| firmware on the system to make this possible, throwing out 2+
| years of work.
|
| So, yeah, you're right. Google was the "web" company. Now
| they're... I don't even know, but it's a lot about Android and
| mobile and also constantly chasing after what Apple, Amazon,
| and Facebook are doing. To the point that management was
| willing to throw out thousands of hours of engineering work
| done on a web app to replace it with a non-web version. That
| whole process left a bad taste in my mouth.
| clairity wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I would never deny a bias. But an organization like google
| doesn't have a singular mind or objective. it's full of a
| bunch of contradictory tendencies and opinions and
| motivations. And market forces aside, I think the bulk of
| the pre-Ruth/pre-Sundar leadership had a very pro "open
| web" _opinion_ at least. And I 'd say that even post-IPO
| they were able to _mostly_ keep their mission statement
| ("organize the world's information and make it universally
| accessible and useful") compatible with their advertising
| revenue stream and market forces as a whole.
|
| I just think that became untenable with the rise of
| Facebook and the rise of mobile. Or rather, they could not
| maintain the growth rate and long term security that
| investors demanded of them and at the same time do what
| they were doing. So they did what the market "demanded".
|
| I think they're kind of lost now, though. I think we saw
| "peak Google" a few years ago.
| clairity wrote:
| > "...investors demanded... So they did what the market
| 'demanded'."
|
| to be clear, the founders still had majority control, and
| so this was a proactive decision the leadership made to
| grow at all costs, to dominate the web. they weren't
| forced by investors or the market to do so, no matter the
| pressures surrounding them.
| cs137 wrote:
| 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.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| I stopped reading after the second paragraph. The author just
| started complaining about Breitbart and Epoch Times being in the
| news recommendations
|
| I'm not saying I endorse those news companies. It's just like...
| I thought this was going to be about google search or something
| that actually matters
| _eht wrote:
| > I stopped reading after the second paragraph...
|
| > ... I thought this was going to be about google search or
| something that actually matters
|
| That's what the other paragraphs were for. #itgetsbetter
| massysett wrote:
| Google News is worthless because most of the worthwhile news on
| the Internet has been paywalled. The equivalent to the old Google
| News is Apple News, which has a pay tier.
|
| The issue with Google is that people expect too much out of it.
| The author of this page, like many others, expects that there are
| many people out there putting great information on the Internet
| and doing it for free, and all Google needs to do is find that
| information. The problem is that getting good information is hard
| work. People aren't doing it for free.
|
| Google is like the old Yellow Pages, or Computer Shopper. You
| didn't pick up the Yellow Pages looking for enlightenment. You
| were looking for a plumber. Google is great for commerce, and for
| other odd things. The author pines for the old Yahoo directory,
| but one reason Google superseded it is that if I were looking for
| a link to, say, the University of Michigan, on Yahoo I had to
| drill through a directory to find it. Google surfaces this kind
| of thing instantly and this functionality is something people now
| take for granted - which is why I'll bet most of the Google
| gripers still use it multiple times daily.
|
| The gripers are expecting Google is some portal to free world
| knowledge. Not going to happen, because knowledge is hard work
| and people don't like to work for free.
| visarga wrote:
| Google is not a great tool for commerce. It wastes a great
| opportunity to close a sale by allowing garbage. They should
| just connect people to useful information.
| tyrfing wrote:
| Very accurate. I think the two big changes recently (10-15
| years) have been around monetizing content and distribution
| formats.
|
| For monetization, vast amounts of stuff moved behind paywalls
| and other walls. The obvious one, distribution platforms are
| walled and inaccessible to Google; probably their biggest
| existential risk. On smaller scales, many specialists started
| to monetize their knowledge. Instead of dumping it for free on
| forums or blogs, now it's on Substack or many other outlets.
| What remains free is increasingly free for strategic reasons,
| so it's either ad-monetized (with poor incentives for quality)
| or released entirely for branding/promotional reasons.
|
| Distribution format is another factor that I only recognized
| very recently. A lot of content/knowledge is now accessible
| only as videos, podcasts, or similar, where in the past there
| would usually be a text version. If you only want text, you
| will miss a lot - stuff is on YouTube now, instead of small
| forums.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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 dominant in several areas (most
| notably search) but I guarantee you somehow this era will come to
| an end.
|
| We've had tech dominance in the past. IBM is a good example.
| Microsoft is another. Even Oracle could count within its space.
|
| Dominance is a divergent state.
|
| It's also why I'm not particularly worried about wealth
| concentration in dynasties. In 100 years the descendants of Bezos
| won't be the ruling class in the same way the Vanderbilts,
| Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans aren't.
|
| Relax. These things have a way of working themselves out.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This is true to some extent, but also not a given.
|
| A stable society/economy works like a Monopoly game, after a
| few rounds the distribution of wealth becomes rigid.
|
| Perturbations are needed to trigger wealth redistribution.
|
| This is why we need revolutions, pandemics, wars and
| technological innovations to reset the game.
|
| Big money hates innovation because it is always associated with
| risk, and usually, for mega corps, innovating means killing the
| golden goose.
|
| The problem, in my opinion, is that there is an end-game to
| everything, including technology, we're not there yet,
| hopefully.
| m-i-l wrote:
| > _" In 100 years the descendants of Bezos won't be the ruling
| class in the same way the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers,
| Carnegies and Morgans aren't."_
|
| Andrew Carnegie believed in 100% inheritance tax, on the
| condition that the money raised was used to provide a level
| playing field for absolutely everyone to have the same
| opportunities. I can't imagine many/any of today's billionaires
| believing this, given that pretty much all of them have
| depended on the backing of generational wealth and the unequal
| opportunities that gave them to make their fortunes.
| achenet wrote:
| > I can't imagine many/any of today's billionaires believing
| this,
|
| Haven't they all signed the Giving Pledge?
|
| > given that pretty much all of them have depended on the
| backing of generational wealth and the unequal opportunities
| that gave them to make their fortunes.
|
| While it is true that most of them come from upper-middle
| class backgrounds, AFAIK the _vast_ majority of the fortunes
| of Page, Brin, Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes
| from their companies.
|
| Unless you mean generational wealth as in "they were rich
| enough to pay for a university that costs $80,000/year", at
| which point, yeah I could see that.
| m-i-l wrote:
| > _" Haven't they all signed the Giving Pledge?"_
|
| While choosing to give most of your money to various
| charities, generally of your choosing and while you are
| still alive to see the benefits, is all well and good, it
| is very different from favouring having _all_ your money
| being taken on death by a government you trust enough to
| use that money provide equal opportunities to all.
|
| > _" AFAIK the vast majority of the fortunes of Page, Brin,
| Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes from their
| companies."_
|
| For most of today's billionaires it isn't just an expensive
| education, it is family conenctions, e.g. Gates being set
| up with IBM via his mum, or family investments, e.g. Bezos,
| Zuckerberg, Page etc. having parents who gave or loaned
| them the money to start their companies (not to mention the
| safety net they'd have had should they have failed) - this
| isn't "self-made" in the traditional sense.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| Now language models are on the rise. They allow access to
| information (including verified information from trusted
| sources) in a more accessible and adaptive format. I think
| Google isn't happy for losing the ad space but the interface
| we use to search will improve a lot thanks to big language
| models. I think they are too expensive to deploy now but will
| be everywhere soon. LM's will be the new "operating system".
| [deleted]
| goldenkey wrote:
| 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...
| ericmcer wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > They do work themselves out, but sometimes the timeline for
| that can be 50+ years.
|
| So if Google ends up being dominant for 50+ years does it
| really matter? I mean, does that somehow materially impact
| your life?
|
| > 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.
|
| That's a completely separate issue and one I agree with you
| on. But the US in particularly has too many brain-broken
| temporarily embarrassed millionaires who will die on the hill
| to avoid Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in tax to pay for th
| esociety that made his wealth possible and continues to make
| it possible.
|
| This is late-stage capitalism. Some argue it's the beginning
| of neo-feudalism. I'm not quite that pessimistic whiele
| agreeing the situation sucks.
|
| What people in power need to realize is the ultimate valve
| for extreme wealth inequality is violence. War or revolution
| is the ultimate form of wealth redistribution.
|
| But the political landscape in the US is one where just
| arguing that trans people shouldn't be murdered gets you
| labelled as "far left". America is not ready to have the
| conversation that a capitalist organization of the economy is
| screwing them over.
|
| Personally if I was 22 and just graduating college with huge
| debt, no prospect of owning a house and income that means
| living paycheck to paycheck I would just... leave [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.studentloanplanner.com/flee-country-student-
| loan...
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > 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.
| elromulous wrote:
| 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.
| cudgy wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Wealth inequality is a separate issue to the dominance of
| Google.
|
| I agree there should be universal health care and a social
| safety net. I think shelter in the form of housing should be
| considered a human right. A budget shortfall is built into
| your existence. This is to keep you a compliant worker.
|
| But Americans aren't ready to have that conversation so my
| perspective is you're wasting your breath by having it. Half
| the country will die on the hill of stopping Jeff Bezos
| paying slightly more in taxes.
|
| The only solution to this is labor organization. The
| government won't help you. Republicans are psychotic.
| Democrats are just the less terrible, feckless alternative
| who aren't actually interested in doing anything. Remember
| when Obama had a Senate supermajority and could've codified
| Roe v. Wade?
|
| But I'm just not holding my breath that anything will
| materially change anytime soon and it's our fault.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Wealth isn't sucked out of anything. If I build a product and
| sell if for $20, but it creates $100 in value (Let's say some
| software that saves a person 4 hours a day of manual labor) I
| created $80 worth of value, for <$20 worth of profit, minus
| my costs.
|
| When people who have benefitted from those productivity
| benefits then turn around and whine about how they aren't
| getting "their share" of the <$20, or complain how it is
| somehow wrong that the wealthy can spend or transfer wealth
| however they like, I can't help but cringe. The real societal
| problem is the modern education system is failing to educate
| people in basic economics.
| claytongulick wrote:
| This way of looking at things assumes that wealth is a finite
| resource, and that by some people having a lot it is
| depriving others.
|
| Wealth doesn't work like that, though. It's not a zero sum
| game.
|
| Wealth is infinite, and can be created from nothing by
| providing a good or service that people need.
|
| I had a friend who was a multimillionaire, got there by
| building stone walls.
|
| Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million,
| got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
|
| I have a friend who's worth over a million, got there by
| working hard and saving his whole life.
|
| Another friend who's worth over thirty million, got there by
| making web sites for auto dealerships.
|
| Another one who's worth a bit over a million, got there by
| risking his life savings on opening up a winery.
|
| A former neighbor had a multi-million dollar home. Also an
| immigrant. Got there by cleaning restaurant grease traps.
|
| I could go on.
|
| Wealth can be created from nothing. From something as simple
| as an idea.
|
| The only qualifying factor is that you have to make something
| that other people want. It can be anything, a wall, a song, a
| good bottle of wine, an iron door, a NFT (ugh), ...anything.
|
| There's no limit to wealth.
|
| Our poorest today live like kings compared to those in
| poverty 100 years ago.
|
| Because we've created massive, overwhelming wealth in this
| country.
|
| And there's no end in sight. All we need is the willingness
| to do it.
|
| To spend our time building up rather than tearing down.
|
| Looking at someone's wealth and saying "that's not fair, we
| should destroy that and give it to others" is a juvenile
| solution that destroys societies.
|
| I understand the temptation though. It's harder to create
| than to destroy.
|
| It takes more intellectual rigor. It takes a leap into self
| ownership and responsibility.
|
| That's hard to do when we've been taught from a young age
| that our situation is someone else's fault.
|
| Class warfare is a tool that's used by conmen to gain short
| term power.
|
| It ends up destroying everything.
| badRNG wrote:
| What the peasants didn't understand was that having a Monarch
| is fine. In fact, I bet in a few generations it will be a
| totally different royal family running the show.
| andi999 wrote:
| Na, just introduce a social safety net, like most of europe
| had for some time.
| cudgy wrote:
| 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?
| andi999 wrote:
| Lopsided economic system is not a problem, it is a
| feature.
| kvirani wrote:
| ... just maybe not in your lifespan, and that's okay too.
| croes wrote:
| 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.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Yeah, makes you wonder what is wrong with Britain?
| cardosof wrote:
| Wealth will always be very unequal, see the Mathew principle
| - just like a few songs have the most listeners and a few
| books the most readers. And it's hard to stay at the top too,
| so the elites are always changing.
|
| The real issue comes when the really powerful can inflate
| their and their friends assets at will.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| The fact that the wealthy can invest into assets at will
| doesn't seem problematic to me.
|
| Who would be better at "investing" assets into a new
| venture: Someone who is wealthy and has a track record of
| operating successful businesses? Or a government bureaucrat
| representing the "will of the people" who ultimately makes
| his salary off the backs of taxpayers?
| achenet wrote:
| Inequality fluctuates.
|
| Furthermore, I recall reading once that wealth inequality
| was positively correlated with mental illness, even in the
| rich of a society.
|
| As such, even if there is always some inequality, I think
| it is worthwhile to try to reduce it, although by boosting
| the lower part of scale. In other words, if you live in a
| world where only the rich have cars, you reduce inequality
| by making cars for the poor like Henry Ford, not by taking
| rich people's cars.
|
| In the modern US, I think this would entail making housing
| and education and healthcare more affordable/accessible.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > In other words, if you live in a world where only the
| rich have cars, you reduce inequality by making cars for
| the poor like Henry Ford, not by taking rich people's
| cars.
|
| Then Henry Ford displaces John Jacob Astor. You still
| have wealth inequality, in fact it might have even
| increased. But the poor now have on-demand mobility to
| any part of the country in a matter of days.
|
| I don't understand the focus on relative wealth. Why
| should someone not have, to borrow a phrase, more money
| than God, if it's not being stolen from others. Why
| should ability and capital be envied instead left to its
| own devices?
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| > In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to
| socialism, to nazism
|
| You have a few misconceptions there. 19th century Germany
| wasn't a democracy, it was a constitutional monarchy with a
| very strong monarch. It was never socialist, it was social
| democrat (SPD). The actual socialist and communist uprisings
| were defeated, by the SPD collaborating with everyone,
| including the far-right Freikorps.
| spicyusername wrote:
| > These things have a way of working themselves out.
|
| Yes, but how they work themselves out and where they work
| themselves out to matter quite a lot.
|
| Also, both of those things, the how and the where, are not
| random. They are influenced dramatically by the blood, sweat,
| and tears of people with ideals and the willingness put in the
| work.
|
| Those people putting in the work, are they people who share
| your vision of what the world should be like?
|
| If you don't participate in the process, you can't complain
| about the result.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| What on earth makes you think the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and
| Astors aren't part of the ruling class?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| > Upon her death, Vanderbilt left her son, Anderson Cooper,
| almost her entire estate, which was valued at less than $1.5
| million.
|
| Gloria Vanderbilt wasn't ultra wealthy by any means. Lots of
| retirees from modest backgrounds have $1.5 million upon
| death. My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of
| about a million dollars.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| You think the ruling class is only predicated on inherited
| wealth (at death, ignoring what could be given over a
| lifetime or via trusts)? Your example is that someone over
| a million people regularly listen to for an hour each work-
| night is _not_ part of the ruling class? And that one
| branch of the family tree that was embroiled in litigation
| from when she was a minor over her trust and had 4 failed
| marriages may have only left seven-figures is evidence of
| total decline?
|
| Meanwhile, the median estate is under $300k and the median
| bequest is under $100k. The top one percent have seven
| figure bequests.
|
| Also, she left her fancy NYC condo to someone else, which
| was probably worth more than the amount she left Anderson.
| Which actually does put her in line with most Americans, in
| that their wealth is primarily in a home.
|
| > My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of about
| a million dollars.
|
| Retirement or bequest when he died at age 95?
| TheBlight wrote:
| 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.
| polote wrote:
| Me. The initial web 3 (the semantic web) could have killed
| Google. But it never worked, for ux perspective but also for the
| offer point of view.
|
| The reality is that Google is trying to auto recognize things
| that humans could categorize themselves, and without a lot of
| work. And the owner of the information should not be the only one
| able to do that. We need more collaboration. The biggest pain is
| how to create a categorization system that works for everyone. I
| haven't seen any yet
| happythebob wrote:
| Social media is a much bigger problem than any Google mining
| because social media naturally promotes the already dangerous
| both sides fallacies. Among other reasons.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| 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 of interest for me.
|
| Why? Probably an update or some ongoing A/B test ongoing.
|
| I'll miss the good suggestions, as I miss the old Google, but my
| plan is simply to stop spending so much time there, probably for
| the better.
|
| I am curious if anyone else have experienced a similar change.
| bombela wrote:
| Same, YouTube recently started promoting a lot more low quality
| videos somewhat in the same genre as what I like. It also
| consistantly hides videos from channel I am subscribed on. It
| upsets me so much.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| I watched one damn video a few days ago on mark hammill and my
| feed was dominated by star wars drek... coincidence?
| freyr wrote:
| 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.
| capdiz wrote:
| Supposing it's just a youthful phase. Like the fashion industry
| for example. Where skinny jeans were popular in the 80's then
| baggy jeans in the 90's. Then skinny jeans are back in sync
| now. Don't you think personal blogs and forums will come in
| sync at some point in the future?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Big news old man: skinny jeans died a few years ago and now
| the mom jeans of the '90s are back in
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| I thought we moved on/back to baggy jeans
| Zak wrote:
| Much of that still exists. It's just harder to find than it
| used to be because the corporate stuff is so loud.
|
| There are a lot of little things that could make the non-
| corporate internet more appealing to the average person. Why,
| for example can't I have a shared identity across several
| independent forums? OpenID came out long ago.
| clairity wrote:
| > "...he corporate stuff is so loud."
|
| yah, money shouts, it doesn't merely talk. that's a
| consequence of (implicitly) deciding that money should have a
| voice in the first place. we explicitly sanction this via a
| gigantic industry, advertising, in which google has a
| prominent position. until we collectively decide to
| deemphasize this whole industry, at least in part by
| cultivating the small and interesting, the web and the
| internet at large will be dominated by money shouting.
| Zak wrote:
| I think we'll probably always have shouty corporate stuff
| on the internet, but perhaps we technologists can help
| bring the rest to a broader audience.
| lhnz wrote:
| > Maybe there's a way to restore the Web of old.
|
| Maybe search engines should also be able to link towards old
| cached content, internet archive style. Even if we can't
| rejuvenate the old internet without creating new economics to
| support it, we could keep the information alive.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| How old? The commercial aspect was already inseparable from the
| rise of the web in the mid-90s...countless startups of the dot-
| com boom scrambling to find a niche to turn a profit from. Many
| an interesting site shut down upon failing to do so, that's
| certainly unchanged to this day.
| jfim wrote:
| Google also has an outsized influence on the kind of content
| that's on the web.
|
| At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started
| ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources,
| hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering
| why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this
| recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the
| author of the freshness of summer produce, it's because that's
| the kind of content that Google will give a high ranking.
|
| The web was a better place when it was quirkier, and there's
| probably a ton of quirky content that still exists, but it
| won't get surfaced by search engines that much these days, and
| it's buried under tons of garbage.
| endemic wrote:
| Time to get back to curated lists of interesting websites.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| I unironically do that. Maybe I should publish? We could
| make a small project that just has interesting websites and
| reviews? Yelp for the interesting web?
| philistine wrote:
| And you could call it something quirky, like Yippee!
| fartcannon wrote:
| HN reminds me a lot of the old web.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| 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.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| 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.
| franklampard wrote:
| > the Web of old No
| stuu99 wrote:
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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.
| Zak wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think I agree with that but also I think it needs
| something like groups like Facebook has. I only want to see
| gardening stuff today, for example. I do like the whole
| mood though... it's not the battlefield that Twitter is.
| Zak wrote:
| It seems to me that use case is better served by forums,
| but it would be nice if I could use my Mastodon (or
| Diaspora, Frendica, Pixelfed, etc...) account as my
| identity on multiple forums. I don't think it's
| necessarily desirable for one piece of software to try to
| do everything, but it's great when different services can
| talk to each other.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yeah, that would work too but it's kind of hard to find
| forums since reddit dominates all search results... I've
| been trying to train myself to look for them specifically
| though.
| Zak wrote:
| I can imagine paths to improvement that don't rely on
| Google improving its behavior or something displacing it
| as a search engine. For example, what if forum software
| spoke Activitypub so people could follow threads and
| boost insightful comments from Mastodon?
| blippage wrote:
| Many moons ago, someone on Reddit said "Facebook requires
| registration in order to view content, which tells you all
| you need to know."
|
| I never forgot that remark. So that's a thing that I'd
| recommend to Mastadon: make it viewable by anyone, even if
| they don't have an account. Nothing smells quite like "you
| are the product" than requiring an account.
| Zak wrote:
| You do not need an account to view content on Mastodon.
| Posts can be set followers-only, but most people don't do
| that for most content.
|
| Here's the profile directory on the biggest instance, for
| example: https://mastodon.social/explore
| beej71 wrote:
| I miss the non-commercial web of old. It's got into the point
| where I think my ultimate search engine is one that ranks pages
| by fewest ads.
|
| And I get that people make a living by putting advertising on
| their pages. I'm not really against that. (Though I don't do
| that myself for my own reasons, I wouldn't presume to tell
| other people what to do with their websites.) But it's been
| abused to the point where number of ads on a page is a decent
| proxy for how crappy the content is.
|
| When people decide to put ads on their content, the temptation
| is there to produce content to carry the ads. Before ads in the
| old days, you just produced content to produce content. Again,
| I'm not saying that ads are bad. But the purity of the old web
| is lost.
|
| I don't think there's really a way to bring it back. I think
| the answer is that we just have to get better filtering on our
| ends to get the specific information that we want.
| ThalesX wrote:
| I can't for the life of me understand why people don't put
| static ads that are relevant to the consumers of their
| content. I was close to doing this once for a product I was
| CTO of, but I couldn't push it all the way through. We were
| so niche, and knowing exactly who our audience was. It's mind
| boggling to me that we chose to darkly monetize their data
| instead of showing them relevant domain ads.
| jfim wrote:
| > I can't for the life of me understand why people don't
| put static ads that are relevant to the consumers of their
| content.
|
| It's kind of a matching and scaling problem. The ad
| publisher wants to have a well targeted audience that will
| convert well, while the website wants to generate ad
| revenue that won't drive people away.
|
| The problem is that the ad publisher probably doesn't want
| to deal with the hassle of negotiating with dozens of niche
| websites for their audience, while the websites don't
| really want to do the same either. Hence, the rise of ad
| exchanges, which offers benefits for the ad publishers
| (deal with only a handful of exchanges, all kind of ad
| targeting criteria) and the websites (deal with only the
| exchange, add an ad snippet to generate revenue almost
| immediately).
|
| The catch is that to extract the most money from ads, the
| exchanges do all kinds of tracking to figure out the most
| optimal ads to serve and we end up with the current adtech
| industry, instead of manually targeted static ads.
| analyte123 wrote:
| If you think of the web as Google search's "content", they have
| let it rot. If Google had spent 1% of their AdWords payouts on
| encouraging people to post quality content on the web through
| e.g. better web authoring tools and protocols, they would have
| way less of a problem now. Perhaps the walled garden (that they
| did partially achieve with Youtube) is too alluring. They could
| have even tried to pay more for _engaging_ web content that had
| lower bounce rates and that users came back repeatedly for,
| instead of just raw views from clickbait SEO. Obviously having
| turned the entire web into blogspam for ad money is no good for
| Google search and they are already having to turn it into
| "Youtube, Google ML content, and Google Maps user content"
| search.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > about how the best way to use Google was to use it to search
| Reddit, but those are just random internet strangers, so that's
| not super useful for finding the answer to anything.
|
| > I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where
| things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit.
|
| Wait, weren't those humans cultivating the Yahoo directory also
| just random internet strangers?
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Nobody is going to replace Google, the web that Google crawls
| will simply be replaced by something better (just as open and
| interoperable, but better in other ways). Google will have a less
| relevant, even non-existent role, in this better web. This is how
| powerful companys with moats eventually lose in the end. A
| structural change makes the land they are defending less valuable
| jeff3dx wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is still better than Google. I haven't used Google
| search at home in years. I recommend Protonmail for email. You
| have to pay a subscription but the reward is encryption, no ads,
| and they don't sell your data.
| Avtomatk wrote:
| regarding search engines, i find andisearch.com as better option
| for some cases (working as a software engineer)
| ImpulseGuided wrote:
| >better option for some cases
|
| Can you tell us more about the kind of problems for which you
| receive better search results via andisearch.com?
| Avtomatk wrote:
| For general search, andisearch and google gives you the same
| results... in andysearch i don't need to try 10 different
| combinations of the same sentence to get the expected results
| like in google, in andisearch i get the expected results
| almost at the first try (sometimes at the second one) for
| very specific searches.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Can we even describe a compelling vision for what the replacement
| google would look like?
|
| Trying to get my investors interested in a "non-shit google"
| requires a bit more color around the edges.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Fair enough. I think the issue is we need to get people
| involved in making it open, decentralized, fast and easy to
| use. We need DevOps people to make it easy to do things like
| host your own mail with CalDav and CardDav, email labels, nice
| interface, etc.
|
| Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting.
| Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers
| that don't sacrifice security and privacy.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where
| things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit. We had a
| lot of fun pages, fan pages, and so on. We need that again, our
| souls need that again.
|
| The "directory of the web" approach was already hitting its
| limits in 2000. I'm pretty sure you could find a "directory of
| the weird stuff" page somewhere, if you looked for it.
| amelius wrote:
| OpenAI will.
| tehsauce wrote:
| Sadly openai has fallen behind google at their own game. Google
| was able to invest heavily and optimize it's hardware and
| infrastructure down to the silicon, which has turned out to be
| the critical competitive advantage in AI. Openai is really
| struggling to compete with google because of this.
| leereeves wrote:
| Are they struggling to compete? OpenAI's GPT-3 and DALL-E 2
| are much better known than Google's competing models LaMDA,
| PaLM, and Imagen.
| leereeves wrote:
| Interesting. What do you mean?
|
| I know they compete in AI research, but has (no longer quite
| so) OpenAI shown any sign of competing for Google's cash cows?
| amelius wrote:
| They made great progress in NLP, which is a big part of what
| Google Search is about. Also, they have the compute
| infrastructure for it.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The problem with taking on Google Search is that of taking
| on the document corpus they build and the spidering /
| crawling work they do. Google and Bing are permitted by
| hosts to crawl, but new entrants effectively barred by most
| site's robots.txt. The barrier to entry is massive on that
| front alone.
|
| We really need a web infrastructure where the index (or the
| indexer) is somehow public and neutral, not owned by any
| particular corporate entity. This should have been built
| into WWW architecture from day one. But legislation could
| attempt to make it happen now. Companies should be free to
| innovate on top of it, but we're effectively in a state now
| where monopoly power has been granted to the people who got
| there first (well, close to it, anyways).
|
| EDIT: to be clearer, imagine a crawling infrastructure run
| by industry consortium. You pay a membership fee and usage
| / traffic fees and you get to upload a WebAssembly program
| that is called with the contents of pages every time the
| crawler hits them. What you do with them from that point on
| is up to you, but would presumably be something like
| building your own corpus for a search engine, etc.
| Moderation and regulatory oversight on the usages of this
| data would obviously have to be put in place. But to me it
| seems preferable to the status quo now.
| amelius wrote:
| How does DDG do it?
| dekhn wrote:
| they use bing. See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo and
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Why is this comment downvoted?
|
| Factual.
| ac130kz wrote:
| 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
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > 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?
| ok123456 wrote:
| Yandex gives good results.
| ljlolel wrote:
| You.com
| mas-ev wrote:
| It kinda sucks now but I agree.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| It used to be the case that people could simply pick which news
| sources they wish to subscribe to. At which point did we become
| complacent with subsisting on our corporate overlords'
| algorithmic curated crap?
|
| I will never forgive Google for killing Reader.
| jeff3dx wrote:
| I can't believe people are still using Google for anything. Use
| DuckDuckGo for search and Protonmail for encrypted private email.
| Use Proton VPN for everything else.
| midislack wrote:
| Google sucks, what do they even offer? Why replace it?
| jsnell wrote:
| 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.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| 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
| kernal wrote:
| >And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads
|
| I've yet to ever see an add in any of my Gmail accounts.
| sofixa wrote:
| > 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.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Yea I thought the same. Sounded more like fragile "milennial"
| complaint than an actual good article with solid facts. You
| could find 100 solid ways to distrust google. Didnt think the
| author hit a single credible point.
| dixego wrote:
| If you don't think "Breitbart is not a credible news source"
| is not a valid point then oof, yikes, etc.
| kernal wrote:
| So left wing "news" sources that reported on hoaxes such as
| Russia collusion for 3 years, Russian bounties for dead
| U.S. troops, the Fine People hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop
| was disinformation as noted by 51 "Intelligence" experts,
| that Trump built the cages, when it was really Obama.
|
| The funny part is that some of these fake news
| "journalists" even won Pulitzer prizes for their
| propaganda. The even funnier part is that a large
| percentage of left wing loyalists still believe these lies.
| dixego wrote:
| Who mentioned left wing news sources?
| timapplesauce wrote:
| I'm curious, what is a "credible" news source these days?
|
| I don't think any of the major news networks have much
| credibility any more, it's just that some may seem better
| than others simply because they align more with your
| particular personal opinions and biases.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| I think that is not true in the EU at least. There are
| many credible news sources in the Northern European
| countries, that I follow, and they have different
| political leanings.
| timapplesauce wrote:
| Unfortunately, in the United States all of our major news
| outlets are extremely biased and have been caught red-
| handed manipulating or outright lying about the news.
|
| The only approach I've found is to consume a few news
| sources through the lens of their known biases in an
| attempt to get something resembling the whole picture.
| Pv9KKy3 wrote:
| It's interesting, breitbart did articles of the
| "misinformation / false news / russian disinformation plot"
| related to hunter biden as did many right wing outlets. NY
| Post got banned from twitter for this. The mainstream media
| repeatedly noted the claims were not true, not support or
| likely misinformation or disinformation.
|
| But when you dig a bit deeper, here is a guy, with no real
| discernable skills, a past drug problem, who is getting
| absolutely parachuted into high level company jobs with
| Chinese and Eastern European affiliated businesses.
|
| We of course are told by biden that he is going to have the
| cleanest administration.
|
| ""No one in my family will have an office in the White
| House, will sit in on meetings as if they are a cabinet
| member, will, in fact, have any business relationship with
| anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign
| country. Period. Period. End of story" Biden in Iowa
|
| This is just one of a fair number of examples where we are
| being told, repeatedly that something is a lie - but if you
| do your own digging and thinking, this seems totally shaddy
| by Biden's family. I'm also curious about the tax angle,
| because overseas income is easy to hide.
|
| In terms of crime and brietbart having a section on black
| crime - we are told that blacks do not commit crime at
| higher rates than others. I'm always glad to hear this. A
| commission on a local police department determined there
| was "rampant racism" because the police had more traffic
| stops of black drivers on a per capita basis than white
| drivers for things like stolen cars. I don't doubt the
| racism claim, but it's interesting that no one even asked
| the question - are cars stolen in a demographically
| distributed manner? Most news is pretty scrupulous in not
| mentioning the race of suspects of various crimes where I
| am. So I'm just curious how accurate all the information we
| get is from the establishment.
|
| Heads up, there are people on the right who go "oof, yikes"
| when they think about credibility of various leftwing news
| outlets. The google news system let's you tune / block
| various sources yourself. Are folks like this offer so
| helpless they can't send the machine the signal they are
| not interested? What's ironic is that the system is
| actually telling the author that based on how they click -
| they might be interested in breitbart!
| Pv9KKy3 wrote:
| The shopping links to SEO spammers and shopping comparison
| sites is in part because the govt has said google CAN NOT
| discriminate against these sites.
| addicted wrote:
| 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 about the same things I see on YouTube.
|
| Outside the main 2-3 stories of the day (which is invariably the
| top political news from the U.S. which one already knows about
| through the zeitgeist) everything else is personalized stories
| and hardly News.
| [deleted]
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Use google news in an incognito window?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| You would need incognito, VPN'd, and non-JS tab to not be
| tracked by websites.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| In my anecdotal experience, FB is using non-logged in
| google search results to select which ad to show you. I
| assume google sells those to FB, based on IP address.
|
| But, my YouTube and Google search and ads, whole logged in,
| are based on what I do while logged in only. I might be
| naive but I have not seen correlation between my logged-in
| and my non-logged-in life within google products.
| LeonTheremin wrote:
| Another hypothesis: Silicon Valley is using your inner
| speech - obtained with electromagnetic surveillance and
| machine learning.
|
| People try to explain it away as Big Tech's blackbox AIs
| being good of making inferences from "public" data, but
| fail to consider that their body betrays their mind by
| leaking information under the skin, which can be picked
| up silently with microwaves.
| grumbel wrote:
| 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.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| 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)
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| This is where Firefox Containers[1] rules. Just open all these
| sites in new containers and you can keep them siloed and apart
| (either not logged in, or under separate accounts). You can
| have as many as you want and have them auto-assigned based on
| the website.
|
| It's actually an official Firefox project, although it comes as
| an extension. Though I think it should be a first class feature
| in the base install.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
| account...
| metroholografix wrote:
| 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
| dmitriid wrote:
| Google is so big now that handling each and everyone of its
| properties is likely to have not one, not two, but multiple
| conflicts of interest.
|
| I'm not sure if even a government attempt to split it up can
| realistically work in any shape, sense, or form.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| My guess at what happened at Google. Stupid tech guys high up in
| the hierarchy with too much power that overrides what the
| marketing people are saying. One of the most amateurish things
| you can do is thinking that the data from product A is relevant
| for product B.
| justinclift wrote:
| Another bad source of ideas is sometimes business people
| without ethics (or just plain short term thinking), who don't
| understand or care about the technology, and override the
| people who do care and/or understand how things work.
| [deleted]
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I should try to keep track of how often I use search engines.
| Because it certainly feels like I use them less and less.
|
| I more or less know where to go for what I am looking for these
| days.
|
| At the same time I get less and less interesting/useful results
| from Google.
| al_borland wrote:
| Usually when I want to use a search engine it is to find
| quality products in an area I know nothing about. However,
| Google has become useless for this, as the results are flooded
| with "top 10" lists that are seemingly auto-generated and full
| of affiliate links to garbage on Amazon.
|
| Neva tends to surface better results on these kinds of things,
| but I'm currently trying Kagi, which groups all the "top n"
| posts into a section instead of polluting the entire results
| with them, which is nice.
|
| More and more I'm just giving up, going to a store I have a
| reasonable amount of trust in, because they care about their
| reputation, and pick something off the shelf... trusting their
| buyers did some work. It's a lot faster and easier and avoids a
| lot of the paradox of choice issues.
| cudgy wrote:
| Is this a good thing? How does one discover where to go in the
| first place? Word of mouth?
| night-rider wrote:
| Kagi & Brave's new search engine look promising. And there are
| many other alternatives like Marginalia, Yacy, Swisscows, Ecosia,
| Bing, DDG, Mojeek, Qwant, Startpage, etc
| dhc02 wrote:
| +1 Kagi. I expected to get bored and go back to old habits but
| it's been very impressive and has "stuck" as my default for
| quite a while now.
| permo-w wrote:
| 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
| Snoozle wrote:
| 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?
| permo-w wrote:
| 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
| markers wrote:
| Started paying for Kagi.com recently and is very satisfied with
| the results. Visiting Google again after being used to Kagi is an
| interesting and uncomfortable experience, it's very easy to
| become accustomed to how much ads and irrelevant information
| Google actually displays.
|
| The ability to boost your favorite sites is a really nice
| feature, especially for developers. Also not having to sift
| through all the content-stealing websites and SEO scams is a huge
| plus. Recommended!
|
| (No connection to it, just happy user).
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