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The Google Squeeze
- Despegar 7y agoThey heyday of Google were the years Eric Schmidt was CEO and the short time Larry Page was CEO before the ill-fated Google+ strategy. After that he seems to have burned out, spun a tale about being a capital allocator with the whole Alphabet charade, then retired. Sundar Pichai's mandate has been plainly obvious: generate profits (that mandate became more explicit with hiring Ruth Porat as CFO).
- mdorazio 7y agoFrom an outside perspective, it’s not even just “generate profits”, but also morphed into “focus only on high-margin, high-revenue products and kill everything else”. Which makes perfect sense for shareholders, but pretty much turned Google into just another soulless BigCo.
- wutbrodo 7y agoThe story is that, around the time Larry Page became CEO, he went to Jobs for advice, who gave him exactly this advice. Obviously Google never sunk as far as becoming Apple, but this fits the narrative of killing Google's soul to make it a little more like a place like Apple.
- pacala 7y agoWould you please elaborate what are the issues with Apple? From my limited perspective, they indeed focus on high margin products, and deliver them with a decent quality. I use a mid 2015 Macbook and an old iPhone 6S. Pretty reliable, both as hardware and as software. Given the 4+ years of continuous usage, they aren't even that expensive.
- scarface74 7y agoThere is nothing similar to Apple’s business model to Google’s. - Apple’s users are its customers. I give Apple money and they give me stuff. Google’s customers are advertisers and others trying to reach users. - Apple is mostly concerned with its own platform and doesn’t have services across platforms with a few exceptions (iTunes on Windows, Apple Music on Android, Apple TV+ everywhere). Google wants to be ubiquitous.
- 0xffff2 7y ago>Obviously Google never sunk as far as becoming Apple I too would like to hear more about this idea. I have an iPhone but don't otherwise buy into Apple's ecosystem at all. Nonetheless, I would rank Apple ahead of Google in any favorability comparison that I can think of.
- brenden2 7y agoIt's not just Google, I've noticed this across all the major ad platforms: Instagram, Twitter, FB, etc, have all cranked up the number of ads to prop up revenues. I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post. The value of the platform proportionally declined significantly and I no longer bother using them. Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads. It feels like ads are definitely a bubble, and I suspect the next big tech companies will not be ad based.
- haekjre 7y agoDo you even notice the instagram ads? I'm so blind to them while I flick through I can't even tell if they are for a bank or for clothes or whatever. > Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads. To be fair, "computer" is such a generic term, I can't even imagine what you expect to see when you search for it.
- brenden2 7y agoI don't actually use Instagram anymore but when I did I definitely noticed the ads. They were always irrelevant, annoying, and obnoxious.
- zwieback 7y agoIsn't that the idea? The Instagram ads are supposed to look like the posts you're looking at and hopefully your lizard brain stores the ad image as you scroll by.
- wutbrodo 7y agoI wonder to what extent this is a function of how one uses Instagram: ie, perhaps the parent comment's feed contains posts superficially similar to ads, while the composition of yours makes ads stand out in content and caption (my experience is closer to yours on Twitter and upon occasionally IG use). Tangentially, I find IG's place in the social media panoply to be fascinating. It's the only service that everyone seems to feel positively about: it doesn't inspire the loathing that Facebook and Twitter does or the mockery that Snapchat does (even by their users). But watching people use Instagram is the closest I see people coming to the popular addict/junkie metaphor and the stereotype of smartphones and social media turning us into slackjawed automatons in thrall to a colorful Skinner Box. It's really eerie.
- zwieback 7y agoWith travel booking it's hard to have sympathy for anyone, I don't really care if "evil" Google defeats or buys up the other brand. I pretty much feel ripped off no matter what service I use. I also call up the hotel directly most of the time to see if I can get a better rate or room, often works. With air travel I want the one with the best grid to win, if I have to launch a new search every time I try a new date or nearby airport it's a no-go for me.
- ryandrake 7y agoOnline air travel UX has been a dumpster fire since the very first booking sites 20 years ago. The major players mostly share the same flaws and try to mitigate them in the same crappy ways. It’s almost as if there is a single query system underlying them all, and their UIs are merely similar-looking wrappers around that same old clunky system :)
- iudqnolq 7y agoThankfully Google hasn't killed [ITA Matrix][0] yet. They bought the company to make Google flights, but their original site is so much better, even if it's a bit slow. To book flights you find from them, use the free [bookwithmatrix.com][1] [0] http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ [1] https://bookwithmatrix.com/ https://bookwithmatrix.com/
- kajecounterhack 7y agoCurious in what ways you find it better? I find google flights UI to be much better -- it's faster, has nice visualizations, easier to read, etc.
- iudqnolq 7y agoI like the UI it provides to find the solution for the problem "I want to travel from near City A to near City B some time around November, and I don't want to spend too much." Specifically, I like the "calendar of lowest fares" view. I also like the ease of inputting advanced search parameters. If you're going to use it to make a list of flights Google Flights is usually better.
- gwern 7y ago> By increasing the shard integrity check rate, we potentially moved failures that were going to be found in the future into Q3. While discovering potential problems earlier is a good thing, it is possible that the hard drive failures recorded in Q3 could then be artificially high as future failures were dragged forward into the quarter. Given that our Annualized Failure Rate calculation is based on Drive Days and Drive Failures, potentially moving up some number of failures into Q3 could cause an artificial spike in the Q3 Annualized Failure Rates. This is what we will be monitoring over the coming quarters. Wouldn't survival analysis on interval-censored data handle this problem automatically? All of your observations of failure presumably are actually interval data, where all you know is that the drive failed sometime in between the last good check and the first bad check. Then it doesn't matter if some time periods have large intervals and others have small intervals, that just affects the precision of estimates.
- Agustus 7y agoThe funny moment of all this is how Google is becoming the type of search browser that existed in 2000. Altavista, webcrawler, yahoo, and others were the default search engines, but then they started to let advertisers override the search results to be inserted in the search results. Initially, the results were clearly delineated, but over time, they fell in and the note of it being an “ad” fell away. To be fair, the internet is being conflated into a platform to drive people into walled gardens, and google is trying to deal with helping people into them. I wondered how long it would take for the site to descend into the dark patterns that caused google to ascend.
- whywhywhywhy 7y agoImage Search has also been completely ruined by their push for ML based results without even checking if it's better. Years ago I could Image Search a frame of a film and get the film title almost every time, now I get a generic "Street" or "Man" search term and then a bunch of photos that have streets in them with a similar color palette which are never from the film. They've got so excited by the tech that they can identify an object or setting that they've forgotten just finding the same image elsewhere online and using the context of the web page would give a better answer.
- rainburg 7y agoLuckily, there's an alternative: images.yandex.com It effortlessly does both reverse image search AND image objects search. Results are usually so good, it almost seems like Google decided to cripple their image search on purpose.
- wilkystyle 7y agoThe fact that Yandex includes the OCR'd text in any image you search from is awesome.
- buboard 7y agoI use yandex images so often that it triggers their bot filter. I think they 've found themselves a high-potential niche here.
- javajosh 7y agoGoogle being evil, yet again. In fact, while I understand the frustration of Expedia and Trip Advisor, I think it is a bit more complicated. I don't think so. I think that the hotels module may be useful, but it's also confusing. In particular, it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best results from the open web, and not give you a "module", particularly not one with paid placement. That is, IMHO, Google is overstepping its bounds as a search engine by providing (even useful) modules. And I think this has a negative cognitive impact on users (in particular, it ruins their intuition about what they are seeing, who's paying for what, and why).
- inapis 7y agoOnly for people like us, technically inclined and on this forum and probably those who saw Google being born and innovate its way to the top of the market. Most of the people I know find google's results insanely useful. It's no longer a search engine or an app. You want to find out something? You "google" it. They do not distinguish it as "just" a search engine. >it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best results from the open web, That expectation is no longer true. That probably died a decade ago when Android started gaining steam all over the world. And certainly not true for those who don't remember the world before smartphones or when gmail offering unlimited storage was "big" deal.
- buboard 7y agoNot only for "find something". Google is everyone's launchpad, people google 'facebook' to go there, or really any question that the cumbersome mobile interface does not make easy to answer.
- javajosh 7y agoUsers don't like it when you change context, the underlying assumption of the interaction. Usually they can't articulate what's bothering them. In this case, they are sub-consciously expecting "fair" results, e.g. something consistent with the "Google Bargain" back in the beginning, that Goog would give you great, fair, results, ranked by utility, and add only a few simple, mostly text ads that you are easy to tune out completely if you want to. The Bargain has changed in many significant ways over the years, and things like the Hotels Module certainly subvert the Bargain in a serious way, and I would argue it's unsettling to people (although I don't have hard data on that).
- dsalzman 7y agoI find it really refreshing how Ben reflects on his past writings and admits when he was wrong than explains why his initial thinking was false. Really makes him a powerful thinker and writer.
- the_duke 7y agoI feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose search engine. When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3. Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....). This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors. The interesting question is why! Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice? Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.
- dorkinspace 7y agoI'm so glad to see others having this same opinion. I was just chatting with a friend about google search results and how, recently, they have become much worse than they used to be. It seems that if you don't tailor your search terms perfectly all you get is ads, clickbait youtube videos, and review sites built to push a product.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoLook at the DDG hockey stick graph. No other search provider has that sort of growth. It's not just you that's tired of poor search results from Google.
- ronilan 7y agoA side note: for anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages pulled out of a db with keyword variations in mind, constantly refreshing content with user submissions, and, the killer, buying links to influence Google’s naive ranking methods (which quickly evolved this to buying entire sites for their SEO potential). The billion dollar public valuation is entirely the result of a decade long SEO play. (Source: was in online travel related business at the time. Was the first to buy links form Matt at SeatGuru, later acquired by TripAdvisor)
- runn1ng 7y agoI won’t cry for TripAdvisor and Expedia, their websites were awful. Booking Group websites (booking.com and agoda) are still doing great in 2019 as the article states, because they don’t suck
- arkades 7y agoWhat’s better than TripAdvisor for finding sights and experiences? Very much not a rhetorical question.
- dna_polymerase 7y agoGoogle Search becomes less and less usable/desirable. The pressure for growth by Wall Street and the lack of profitable products besides Search would be the existential threat to Google Search. Well, it would be in theory. The problem is mobile. Since both major OS are tightly controlled by Google and Apple, Google Search won't be challenged by any alternative. Apple won't give their search profits away to push DDG or any other company, and Google wouldn't even think about that. Any search engine that wants to cut into Google's market share has to start on the desktop web, buy the iOS integration for billions and would need to develop an alternative to Android, or call on regulators to force Google into showing a selection screen as they did to Microsoft.
- buboard 7y agoIt's still very cumbersome to type a search on mobile, and having to type a url first or launch another app is almost half a minute more. That alone drives people to google. The rest is just google taking advantage of users that have fallen in its trap. IMHO, if these major companies like expedia stopped going after mobile aggressively , that might inconvenience users enough so that they would switch to use a desktop for their travel searches of deals, where they have much more control
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoon a related note, is there anyone with a swardley map for this industry? Would be interested in seeing it next to Stratechary
- ryanmarsh 7y agoThis is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself: “The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the time to get reviews right.” It is hard not wonder just how much more popular Yelp’s product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its anti-Google arguments. If only it were that simple. Yelp does not personally review reviews. Nobody from Yelp has ever called me to make sure I got my review right and I wasn't being unreasonable. Ensuring that reviews aren't spam is an algorithmic problem. Yes Yelp has some features which provide hints to the algorithm but at the end of the day it's about ML. For every upvote from a fellow reviewer on Yelp, Google has 100 other data points on me as a reviewer. So who is going to get the algo right, Yelp, or Google? My personal experience has been that 4.2 stars on Google means the meal will be good, 5 stars on Yelp means it's a trendy trap with bad food and worse service which I will not enjoy. Go figure.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago> This is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself: “The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the time to get reviews right.” It is hard not wonder just how much more popular Yelp’s product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its anti-Google arguments. Probably because the blowback would be louder than the message. The heresay I've heard is that they hide the good reviews if you don't pay them, and hide the bad reviews if you do.
- tempsy 7y agoOof. I mistakenly shorted Yelp before their earnings release expecting the same results, but they ended up jumping 15%. Not that they've performed well YTD.
- sunstone 7y agoTwo things surprised me about this article. First, I thought Yelp had an abysmal reputation. Threatening businesses with a poor review if they didn't buy an ad. Taking money for boosting a businesses rating. Was this all just FUD from its competitors? And second, I find Amazon's product search to be almost complete crap. I can't count how many times I've moved back to Google to do a product search because I know the product is out there I just can't remember the name, Amazon comes up with nothing and google has it on the first page. Again, is this only me?
- kajecounterhack 7y agoYou're not alone. A friend rented out her place to a tenant who was a total nightmare and then he went and made a yelp page for her as a person, because she's a real estate agent, defaming her on yelp (not for real estate business, but for being his landlord). So there's now a yelp page with her face on it and angry "reviews" from this tenant and his partner, and she has no way to remove it. Yelp refuses to do anything. Amazon product search usually works for me but I often use google to make sure there isn't a better price somewhere else on the internet. So I end up repeating my search terms to Google anyway.
- ertemplin 7y agoCan't businesses opt-out of Yelp by sending a cease and desist letter or eventually suing Yelp? Restaurants can't opt-out because they would no longer be discoverable on the internet, but a real estate agent should be able to opt-out of Yelp and still be reasonably successful.
- 0xffff2 7y agoWhat exactly would Yelp be ceasing and desisting here? Surely things like the name, location and contact info for a business are public information that can be freely reproduced. Everything else on Yelp (primarily user reviews/photos) aren't the property of the business in the first place. If anything I'd expect the example in GP's case to be a rare instance where even US defamation law might be helpful to the landlord. I don't see that extending to businesses in general though.
- yRetsyM 7y agoMany people seem to complain about the low quality Google search but don't often offer any better alternatives. I can't help but feel like sometimes the quality of the Google search results reflect the quality of the web in general: stocked with a whole lot of spam content that people actually consume. How do we fix the web?
- zanny 7y agoSomeone suggests DuckDuckGo in practically every single post that even mentions Google.
- ebg13 7y agoIn my experience, DDG search results are worse, not better, and people who say otherwise are mental or lying. I discovered the other day that DDG uses Bing for image searching because without safe searching enabled it randomly returns tons of pornography for innocuous searches like "filled torus".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gregorygoc 7y ago> it randomly returns tons of pornography for innocuous searches like "filled torus" so I tried to search for that one, disabled safe searching and I'm coming back disappointed (no porn)
- sm4rk0 7y agoMy experience was very different: WARNING: NSFW! https://ibb.co/88Lx5yC https://ibb.co/88Lx5yC
- 0xffff2 7y agoDoesn't DDG rely pretty heavily on Bing period? I am under the impression that they are returning (maybe slightly augmented) Bing results for pretty much everything.
- csomar 7y ago> This seems like unequivocally a good thing, no? Booking knows it can’t depend on the Google channel, that its future is best secured by innovating and building a customer experience that convinces users to go to Booking directly. That is competition working to the benefit of customers! This is my impression too. I avoid Expedia like the plague. I only use TripAdvisor to read the forums. Booking doesn't even rely on SEO. They don't have a forum or don't make content. Booking has lots of dark patterns when booking but it just works and it has lots of choices at pretty good prices. The experience and the convenience is why I was booking at Booking.com in the last 5-6 years. I don't even use Airbnb. Booking has apartments too. Expedia and TripAdvisors are similar to tourist traps in the touristic hot spots. They leveraged their SEO positions to grab whatever money they can get. Now that Google has figured out they can get some of that money, they got in. It's very easy, just move the juice to the partners and charge them money for that. Expedia/TripAdvisor/Traditional-travel-agencies will need to turn their businesses around otherwise they are going the way of Thomas Cook.
- telltruth 7y agoOn a bigger picture, it is concerning that all big tech is now growing by squeezing their existing assets as opposed to by gaining more users. For example, Microsoft Windows used to cost me $20/yr in licensing cost, no wait coasts $100/yr. Similarly number of ads in FB, Twitter and Google has gone up by 5X. All these stunning quarterly results are mainly coming from squeeze. I wonder how long this can go on.
- grumpy-cowboy 7y agoTired of all this ads. I understand that some level of Ads is required (nothing's free!). But this becoming ridiculous (and I'm not talking about personal data mining). Instead of just whining about that, I decided to move away from this: - My email/calendar/contacts on paid Fastmail.com account using my own domain. I don't want to deal with all the work required to maintain an email server: spam filtering, prevent being falsely flagged as a spam server, .... And I use an alias per account I have. For example: amazon@mydomain.com, hn@mydomain.com, ... So if my email got spammed/stolen, first I'll advise the site and I'll just create a new one (ex: amazon2@mydomain.com). - Host my own federated servers like Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfeed, ... - Host my own Git "social server" with public and private repos. - ... I think we have to come back to what the Web/Internet was before: a federation of servers working together (ex: Usenet). When I talk about that to people, they don't understand. I then use a simple example of this: email servers. You can have an email account on any servers on the internet and send a message to anyone who have an email account on another server. You CAN'T do that with FB/Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, ... Big corps shoot themselves in the foot. People have limits and they are not that stupid. When you taste a new (old) way to exchange with other people without being flooded with Ads (Mastodon, Matrix, ... or simply emails), you can't come back. edit: formatting
- dreamcompiler 7y agoThere's a saying that lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math. Sounds like your thesis is that ads are a tax on people who don't know how to set up a server, and I agree.
- sm4rk0 7y agoSome people do have limits, but the crowd, on the opposite, is lazy and hypnotized. From their perspective, you're the one missing out all the fun and ease of digital life/world. It's you (a black sheep) who can't be reached via the most obvious communication channels (FB, WhatsApp, Viber, etc).
- smadurange 7y agoI was about to set up my own domain with a paid email account too. My reason was privacy. But then I was wondering even if I have my own encrypted email service, does it defeat the purpose if the sender is using Gmail? Since Google would still scan that email and figure out things about me. Any advice? Thanks.
- emsy 7y agoA year ago or so I was listening to podcasts on YouTube while falling asleep. I didn't mind an occasional ad. Then they ramped up the ads like crap. Easily every 5 minutes or so (the funniest ones were the "Troubles falling asleep?" ads that jolted me awake). I stopped almost completely ever since. The sad thing is that I would gladly pay for the service, but I'm not going to pay a company that uses my data AND my money. Plus I have to use it with an account at google. No thanks. I have no hopes for an ethical competitor to arise, there's simply no market for it.
- milkytron 7y agoWhy not listen to podcasts on a podcast app?
- gman83 7y agoThe person who uploaded the podcast to YouTube decides how many ads are on a video though: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006?hl=en The uploader specifically had to add "ad breaks" to the video for that to happen.
- wumms 7y agoI wonder if the number of possible ad breaks has an upper limit. Here's an episode of a show for kids with 21 ad breaks in 24 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbhdpLuYfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbhdpLuYfE Screenshot of the above video with yellow ad markers in the seek bar (youtube v14.31.50 on Android): https://ibb.co/gr8ZqjY https://ibb.co/gr8ZqjY
- Gusen 7y agoThis is audio of the President, Donald J. Trump, demanding a $4 billion dollar bribe from child rapists to “take a blind eye” on January 3, 2019. Trump becomes one on January 14, 2019. Also, here is the big reason the major networks do not report any of it. //Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Trump is on a call from with Henry Porter and Gigi Hadid. See page 63. Bribe demand at 10:18am: 3JanCh3_900-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... //President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, rapes and kills his first boy at 6:32am. Video link below: 14JanCh3_600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJNbqZW/view?usp=sharing 14JanCh2_600-700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJL-IZ_/view?usp=sharing //On January 18, 2019 at 8:31am (see page 8) Trump acknowledges the four billion dollar bribe and says: "Let's get it done and get to fucking some kids." Video link below: 18JanCh3_725-.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4TwoNmY1h/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4Two... //A big reason this has not been reported by the major news networks is right here. Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News, apparently a member of the Illuminati since the 1980's, along with ABC Nightly News lead anchor David Muir, stop over to the Porter studio in Buffalo on January 14th, 2019 at 5:00am. They both rape and kill about two dozen boys by 6:00am. Muir starts around 5:15am, then Holt about 5:38am. Multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp & Fox Corporation, takes his turn after Holt. Video links below: 14JanCh3_500-601.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX3o7UL/view?usp=sharing 14JanCh2_530-600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1RwidV/view?usp=sharing Adding to the reason this is not picked up by the media, CBS & Viacom owner Sumner Redstone and Leslie Moonves rape boys following the President. 14JanCh3_700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXaB4aI0/view?usp=sharing 14JanCh2_700-800.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWYKfRDp/view?usp=sharing //This is the tip of the iceberg. //Full 88 page PDF [updated 7Nov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... //This post will be censored when this account logs off, the posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ... \\@ Listen to Speaker of the House, Senator Nancy Pelosi, accept a $3 billion dollar bribe from wealthy high profile child rapists for safe passage to get Asian boys through the border at "Monterrey" on January 17, 2019. //Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Pelosi call starts at 10:31am. 17JanCh3_949-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1CZUvmE/view?usp=sharing Excerpts of the dialogue: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi returns to the Porter camera system at 1031 for a check-in. "Nancy Pelosi is here and she wants $3 billion to keep the border open at Monterrey. $3 billion dollars to keep that shit open do you believe that?" Matthew Porter commentates. Pelosi states 1034: "I think he [Brian Schlenker] needs to be removed. I think we need to get this guy out of here". Speaker Pelosi then agrees to call back at 7pm PST. Gigi Hadid at 1034: "Thanks for calling us. I've got you down for three minutes". Pelosi don't worry about that I've got 3 billion. 1031 Matthew Porter: Nancy Pelosi is on and she wants $3 billion dollars to keep the border open at Monterrey. Three billion dollars to keep that shit open do you believe that? 1033 Nancy Pelosi: I don't think that will be necessary unless you insist. 1033 Donald Reeves?: We insist. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Ok then I guess we have a deal. 1033 Matthew Porter: Thank you Mrs. Pelosi. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Please call me Speaker Pelosi. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: We want to make sure you have safe passage at Monterrey. 1033 Matthew Porter: We appreciate that Speaker Pelosi. 1033 Gigi Hadid: I think we may have to scale back a little bit though. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Gigi I think we'll be just fine. 1035 Nancy Pelosi: God damn it! I want Kamala to get a billion out of yours, not out of mine. 1035 Gigi Hadid: I think we can accommodate you but we need to find out if Monterrey will be open on the 30th of January. 1036 Nancy Pelosi: Of course it will Gigi. 1036 Nancy Pelosi: $3 billion goes a long way Peter. 1036 Peter Thiel: Excellent answer. 1043 Gigi Hadid: I think we need to give Kamala a billion dollars to keep her [happy]. 1043 Matthew Porter: I think we can do that but we need to get her to do something first. 1043 Gigi Hadid: She did. We got her fucking Rahm Emmanuel Monday morning [14Jan] at 235. 1043 Matthew Porter: Perfect, then we're all set. Send her the billion. 1043? Nancy Pelosi: She'll accept the money, I guarantee it. 1043? Gigi Hadid: Nancy thank you for everything. <ch4> 1036 Donald Reeves: Don't listen to her. She will close down the border if it's not there. Make sure she gets the $3 billion. This is the tip of the iceberg. Full 84 page document [updated 7Nov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... //*This post will be censored when this account logs off. Posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ... \\$ \\New York Senator Charles Schumer rapes and kills one boy looking for his two billion dollar payment from 1700-1730. Schumer at 17:01: "Let's get him out of there, and get to fucking some kids!” Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Just as a head’s up, there is a vacuum running intermittently in the beginning and some loud noises. \\Representative from New Orleans Steve Scalise rapes and kills three 1725+. Video links below. Each channel has different system users of varying importance, and one may be easier to hear than another. This is explained in better detail in the PDF. 17JanCh3_1644.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1caUbmhIf8z264w1MWeOzm0VQIG_h3rtA/view?usp=sharing 17JanCh4_1700-1800_redo.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Md911Z2vXJzJEmNAiJcOkHDKIl15GUmz/view?usp=sharing \\Back on January 13th, a deal to bring over the boys from China, 300 for $375 million through “Monterrey”, is discussed with Barack Obama, Charles Schumer, Henry Porter, and Donald Reeves. Jack Dorsey is there and also discusses possibilities for 500 boys over 300. See pages 37 and 38. You will hear the deal go down later that afternoon between 1:30pm and 3:00pm. Here are the links for the first discussion, which begins around 8:40 with an anxious Obama., the rest are in the PDF: 13JanCh2_700-900.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUr44-U3dpt0cBlhlOgM071HAtei-g6G/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUr44-U3dpt0cBlhlOgM071HAte... 13JanCh3_800-845.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m3bBVPra2BEgzmM2QNJsR-JA7rw__oOW/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m3bBVPra2BEgzmM2QNJsR-JA7rw... 13JanCh3_845-954.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XFCDABfGb10oAwCLt7gc4XbsOMxgpKPT/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XFCDABfGb10oAwCLt7gc4XbsOMx... These events were excerpts from this 88 page PDF . It keeps getting censored, but with enough public awareness, they will eventually have to face justice. Please help get this around [updated 7Nov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ...
- tinyhouse 7y agoI like the Booking.com approach of focusing on their product and website so that users come to it directly (I must say though that there are many things I don't like about their site, like all the "1 last room at this price book quickly!!"). Yelp shot itself in the foot by not letting mobile users read reviews without downloading the app. It's not worth most people to download the app for it. For travel I usually go to Kayak directly. Their site is simple and useful. But I must admit that seeing all the options on a map is pretty useful and I often use the hotel module in Maps. For me Maps is the best product Google ever made since their initial search engine.
- scarface74 7y agoThe first and most obvious way that Google showed users more ads was by literally inserting more ads into mobile search results So if it wasn’t already clear why Google never allowed any type of content blocking framework in Chrome for mobile and iOS has had it for five years, it should be clear now. So Google pays Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine while Apple still builds in a framework to block those very ads.
- johnward 7y agoI've seen 4 ads on Google SERPS but I've seen as many as the first 5 results being ads on Bing. This is getting out of hand.
- zpatel 7y agoI had identified the problem of google information dominance and inefficiency long time back and release a prototype micronest.com/searchly The solution would be very complex but i had the problem identified..Now working to release an enterprise version inspired by this.
- 40acres 7y agoA major antitrust issue is that too much competition is annoying for users. I'm not going to check every airline carrier when booking a flight, I will use an aggregator. Same thing for hotels, restaurants, etc. Look at the current streaming environment: it's becoming highly fragmented and I predict when the dust settles there will only be 3 major players, there's only so much content an individual can consume and is willing to pay. Google's role as the aggregator for queries will be incredibly difficult to disrupt as long as there is some friction to using another service.
- e_carra 7y agoThank you for this very informative piece. This is one of those articles that when you finish them you feel you have much more context than before.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoI thought the quote from the Yelp CEO was interesting. I mean, if Yelp was actually more skilled at helping the customer find the relevant data than Google, then that would be a compelling reason to use Yelp. But is his claim accurate? Is Google search optimizing for attention? It's hard to see how that could be, honestly. Nobody browses search result pages for fun. Whether they're succeeding or not, it's hard to picture Google optimizing result pages for anything other than "get the user on to their most relevant (and/or lucrative) destination as absolutely quickly as we can manage." If I were Yelp, I would not try Stratechery's arguments here. What they should be saying is, "Google's search results for restaurants are crap. If you use us, your valuable time and money will be better spent than if you trust Google." Honestly, this is what I always worry about first when I look at online reviews. Is it honest and is it an accurate predictor of how I will feel if I choose this product? I have to confess, Yelp has not done a much better job engendering that trust in me than Google has. Not that I trust either very much, especially about restaurants. But if Yelp were able to crack that nut, I would be hugely grateful, and a loyal fan for life.
- meh206 7y agoGoogle has many services that should become public services once they're identified as a monopoly.
- keenmaster 7y agoApple has to be mulling an entry into search. Apple Search would be the default search engine for iPhone users, the majority of whom conduct almost all searches on their phone. Being the one aggregator to rule them all has so many advantages. Google can extract outsized profits from almost every single industry because people are too myopic/lazy/indifferent to go directly to the source. Apple could change the game. It could use its war chest to build a search engine as good or better than Google. It would forsake some profit because Apple Search would, through deep iOS integration, improvement of Siri, and bolstering of upcoming AR offerings, create ever greater lock-in to the Apple ecosystem. Furthermore, Apple's entry would give bargaining power back to content providers, galvanizing content creation on the margins. There is an iron rule in business: competition will eventually erode profits. It's not a matter of if, but when. Will it be in 5 years, 10, 30, or 50?. GE used to be a seemingly unflappable industrial powerhouse. Look at it now. Google can stay way ahead of the competition if it continues to leapfrog on AI, but as soon as it becomes more iterative, or if the government decides that it's a monopoly, its decline would be non-linear. Apple faces another dilemma with a similar outcome. If some technological shift or government intervention opens up the App Store and iMessage to all mobile hardware, profits would drop precipitously. The only antidote is massive R&D and innovation.
- ninkendo 7y agoApple already has a search engine. Swipe down on the home screen and type some stuff, and you get “Siri suggested websites”. It also answers basic questions and gives previews of relevant parts of the sites.
- keenmaster 7y agoI meant whole-internet search, not local device search (Spotlight) and Siri suggestions.
- ninkendo 7y agoIt does whole-internet search. Give it a try!
- jaimex2 7y agoThe 'Peak Google' based on Peak Microsoft estimate I'd say missed it's mark because Google hasn't been smacked down with an anti-trust yet.
- blairanderson 7y agoAmazon Advertising is also squeezing the shit out of search result pages.
- dwoozle 7y agoWhy isn’t this antitrust? Google using its search monopoly to muscle into hotels and other markets?
- cavisne 7y agoThe quality of a product is subjective, but I dont see any example in this article of big tech squeezing out a competitor with an inferior product. Yelp (despite the glossy profile in buzzfeed news) has not really advanced the product in a long time. Their site was always extremely frustrating, forcing you into using the app. And they were super slow to add things like delivery. In comparison Google Maps is a search engine for the physical world. They’ve done all sorts of complex things like using street view to correctly place a business on the map, adding duplex for making reservations. Even for reviews, I trust the reviews from the meal delivery apps a lot more as they are based on real orders. If I want a detailed review, sites like Eater and local blogs are more useful (and are ranked higher than yelp now). These are all areas Yelp could have invested in, instead they kept the product largely the same. Likewise with Expedia, their website uses every dark pattern in the book, and they got completely blindsided by Booking.com with a superior agency business model (that also means it makes more sense to go straight to their website). I used to use yelp for reviews, now i use google. Likewise I used to use google for products, now I use Amazon. Flights and hotels I’m mostly using google. In all cases it’s because the product is better.
- uoaei 7y ago{$BIG_N_TECH_CO}'s customers are the advertisers. They are serving their customers, and they're doing it well.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoThis article doesn’t seem to directly address the overarching reason Google is sidestepping irrelevancy - the increasing value of data and AI analysis of it. As data becomes even more valuable than oil [1], few orgs are as well positioned to capitalize on it than Google. With their massive trove of user activity since almost the dawn of the Internet age, combined with the purchase of Deep Mind, the kind of business and strategic intelligence Google can deduct will be invaluable. Being more effective at selling ads, as the article addresses, is just the start of it. [1]: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most...
- kong75 7y agoWhen I click on the product ratings of some of the PLAs on Google, I am redirected to the landing page. But actually I am supposed to be redirected to a page aggregating the ratings from different sources hosted by Google. I think Google might be suffering from revenue pressure since navigating users to the advertisers' landing page will let the advertiser pay Google directly. And obviously it will harm the user experience since the ratings are actually aggregated from different sellers and will be incomplete on the landing page while the user wants to see all the ratings and reviews when he clicks on them.
- totorovirus 7y agoIf you really want ad free, non-capitalism polluted search results, why don't you ask the government to make better one? And we all know it's not the answer
- muddi900 7y ago>In this case the unique product is demand — users. And this is where I am tempted to defend Google: at the end of the day, the company has the dominant position in its value chain largely by providing a better product. This is the gist of it; Google, despite all the ads, and SEO spam, and other unscrupulous crap, still has the best tech. I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, atleast on desktop, but I still have to swithc to google 1/5ths of my critical info searches.