A couple points and devil's advocacy on a couple as well: Search is as bad as social, even if we give up social, it'll be hard to replace search (I read Wikime

A couple points and devil's advocacy on a couple as well: Search is as bad as social, even if we give up social, it'll be hard to replace search (I read Wikimedia is working on something... a nonprofit search would be a fantastic asset to the world.) Advertising generates a lot more than waste, in fact it may advertise to you a tool that you didn't know existed that prevents waste. Maybe rechargeable batteries or a water filter so you don't buy water bottles or who knows what, that sword cuts both ways. The ethics of advertisers and the lack of regulation in advertising though is easy to attack. That stuff is a mess. As for Google being a net negative, I lean to your side of the argument but I think it'd be difficult and both sides would have a lot of merit; other search engines are just less efficient; think of all the man-hours of wasted research Google has saved by giving you the right result the first time, it must be billions of hours annually, maybe more. A lot of time and money has been spent competing, and the competition hasn't gotten much closer in terms of actual search results, so, if Google didn't exist, we may just be at a loss for that stuff.