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In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few y

by mojuba 7y ago

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the decline of quality and coverage of Search (more spam and more older sites dropping out). Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort. Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the decline were apparent. Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google" is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results. I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI. I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon, but the time to challenge them could be now.

Ygg2 7y ago
I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google. To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS. However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.
- mojuba 7y ago
  True but I think the parallel between Google and MS (of the 2000s) is more interesting in terms of the vital signs in their organization rather than on the product level. Because Windows was only improving from release to release, while Search is getting shittier and shittier (sorry, can't find a better word for at least my own frustration with using it today). So Search may in fact die a quick and sudden death at this pace. Theoretically replacing Search can only take one browser update: offer a choice but rearrange the options, for example. However, what Google and pre-Nadella Microsoft share is let's say living in a bubble of a tremendous success of one product that's also the main source of revenue (MS Office, and Google Ads), plus inability to innovate. This is an institutional/organizational symptom more than anything else. Old HN'ers should remember PG's essay[1] so maybe now is the time to reassess Google's place in the world. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
  - Ygg2 7y ago
    Yeah, I noticed a trend in Google search just sucking (being less relevant) more and more, but tbh same happened to Windows as well. However I do find Google's lack of relevancy way (compared to itself few years ago) more stark.
  - riffraff 7y ago
    Isn't Google making more and more money from non-search products? e.g. Google cloud products, YouTube. It seems they are trying to differentiate, see also Google+, stadia etc, just not being very successful.
    - mojuba 7y ago
      Doesn't seem to be the case [1] The article that comments on this chart says other sources (non-ad ones) look promising but it more sounds like a speculation because I don't see real signs of that. [1] https://www.theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0 https://www.theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0
      - 7y ago
the_duke 7y ago
There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1]) I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that. Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era of low effort reposts, aggregators, optimizing for clicks and a large SEO industry. In addition, most of the user-generated content is now inside "walled gardens" like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, and is either impossible to index, or much harder to quantify and rank than websites linking to each other. There has to be something better out there, but it will be a difficult challenge. Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181
- ci5er 7y ago
  > Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Yahoo?
  - riffraff 7y ago
    More like the now defunct DMOZ, I'd say.
    - Hoasi 7y ago
      > More like the now defunct DMOZ DMOZ was a good idea, but the execution was biased because curated lists invite partiality. You might build something better only if you could mitigate this natural tendency.
  - mch82 7y ago
    Fun fact... This is how search engines started. One of the first steps in early SEO was to get your site listed on a manually curated web directory. VLIB, the first web directory, still operates at http://vlib.org/ http://vlib.org/. List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
Cougher 7y ago
Great points. The idea that Google was evil had been out there long before 2014 of course, and perhaps some of that tin foil hatism was prescient rather than ridiculous.
kgersen75 7y ago
"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do. There are nuances and shades of gray in life, as we all learn when we grow up. In the end, what matters is the silent majority not the chatty loud ones that have a personal grudge against some big corporation. That "Google is evil" is highly overrated and over hyped. I always question the agenda of people promoting this.
- roenxi 7y ago
  People who think carefully then call Google 'evil' may as well be the same people who used to call it 'good'. Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful. Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation that will. At best, there are stylistic differences around the edges that are simultaneously important but minor in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or later a corporation will be thinking primarily in terms of 'profitable' and 'not profitable'. Calling Google 'evil' is trying to articulate something else - Google are powerful and dangerous. Any entity harvesting and directing the flow of information at that scale is. They have an unprecedented capability to cause harm; and sooner or later it will get used by someone to do exactly that.
  - riffraff 7y ago
    But Google ten years ago seemed good, full stop. All of their behaviour seemed to be a net positive for the rest of the world, even when done in self interest. Now, it's easy to see some behaviour which are not. Even assuming there is a slide toward evil for corporations, and I'm not sure there is, it still seems correct to say that a company is at a given state of "goodness" in a certain time.
  - 7y ago
marcus_holmes 7y ago
I'm refusing to implement Google Analytics on my startup's product. Because it's slow, but mainly because I don't trust Google enough to let them put whatever code they like on my page. I'm running into serious flak from the marketing team because they don't know how to use any other tool. GA is the industry standard, apparently, and every site uses it, etc etc. They're even hinting that not using it could affect our SEO (I haven't seen any evidence for that, but if so it just reinforces my desire to not give Evil Google our traffic). Even a couple of years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem. I trusted them to do the right thing. Now. No. Google is the new M$
- faeyanpiraat 7y ago
  Oblivious marketing ppl bullying tech guys into doing stupid things. Such a classic. Unfortunately I have a hunch aswell that not adding GA does indeed negatively affects SEO. How would it be possible to prove/disprove this?
  - mojuba 7y ago
    Experiment with your own web sites? Create two of them with and without GA, possibly with different content because Google seems to be able to detect duplication, then try to promote both (this is the difficult part of course) and compare.
    - mmahemoff 7y ago
      It's hard to do any kind of objective comparison like this when it comes to SEO. It takes months to see any effect and even then you will have to speculate. You could try to remove GA from half the pages on an existing site one day and see if those subsequently drop more, if you have enough pages to experiment with.
      - mojuba 7y ago
        There is some evidence that older pages (>10 years old) drop out if they don't use any of Google's plugins. I think it was Tim Bray who was one of the first who noticed [1] I also found another case of a lot of un-googleable reddit pages from only 5 years ago. They just don't exist on Google anymore even though they are linked from e.g. peoples profiles who commented there. Someone decided that Reddit is not important, or maybe there's some broader exclusion criteria in place. [1] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is...
dpflan 7y ago
> "I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI." There was a social search engine, Aardvark (circa 2008). Google acquired it in 2010, then discontinued it off in 2011. The design is discussed in their paper below. There was also ChaCha -- another social search engine. > Aardbark wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) > "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale, Social, Search Engine": https://web.archive.org/web/20110216155450/http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110216155450/http://vark.com/a... _ === Update === I've found some HN posts about Aardvark and the acquisition: > Aardvark: Now All Your Friends Are in the Answer Business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677178 > Aardvark Mulls Over A $30+ Million Offer From Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980607 > Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118132
daodedickinson 7y ago
The tech industry should not take it too personally / hard: any forces that earn prestige will soon become surrounded by similar challengers
ImprovedSilence 7y ago
>> In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. That’s not quite right. There are plenty of tech people who stopped admiring google much earlier (shuttering of google reader was probably what keys me into where they were ultimately heading, and I’m sure many others saw things much earlier). On the other front, G$ is neither entirely evil or good. It is a very large company. There is still good, field advancing work and valuable contributions to the open source community coming from them. One the other front, there are absolutely perverse motivations and capabilities to break the open internet coming from them. It’s a fine line to tread. They are like the Bell labs of our generation, for better or worse. Great tech came out of it, and breaking it up will kill that great tech R&D part. Then we will have to wait for the next disruption. I’m not in a position to say which is better, but this is how I see Google position currently.
jmmarco 7y ago
”unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon”. What about duckduckgo? I’ve been using it roughly for a year and i’m happy with it.
- mojuba 7y ago
  DDG mostly uses Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (anonymized). To be honest apart from some obviously spammy web sites that rank high only on Google, their search results don't seem to be significantly different. My impression anyway. And so we don't even know whether what we see via these search engines is the real Internet or we all live in a bubble created by them.
- infinitezest 7y ago
  I could be wrong but I think DDG is actually backed by Bing.
buboard 7y ago
> the window of opportunity may be now Google has secured a lot of top AI researchers. Depending on the dates when their options vest, we may see a lot of them leave.
stopads 7y ago
Back in 2015-7 or so yes, you'd be immediately dogpiled on here and reddit and most other sites for daring to criticize Google. I was trying to warn people about them and was always banned or downvoted to some shadowban realm immediately. Google isn't the actual problem though, advertising is. The backlash needs to be primarily about ads, not the companies that just lie repeatedly in order to bend all tech infrastructure towards the needs of advertisers.
- dang 7y ago
  We've never banned people for "daring to criticize $bigco". That's half of HN. If we banned you, it was likely because there was something else abusive about your posts.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Ads are the worst, but aren't the only issue. Apple and (older?) Microsoft are problematic too without being advertising businesses.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
> there's no competition to Search on the horizon This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com. What are you searching for? Programming-related questions? Then go to stackoverflow.com directly (where you'll end up in 99% of cases when you search with DDG or Google anyway on these topics). Tip: to search SO, I've found it works best to create (but not submit) a new question with as much info in the headline as possible; the results that SO brings up to check for duplicate questions are excellent search results (btw have they changed it recently? I don't remember working it as good as it's now). Requires a StackExchange account though. Are your searching for review of tech gadgets or christmas gifts? Then many people on HN admit to include "reddit" in their search terms. Then why not go directly to reddit.com for your search. Are you searching on YouTube? Then indeed Google (YouTube itself) works best, but the real solution is to quit your media consumption habbit of spending your waking hours on monopolists video streaming sites that don't benefit creators. For just music without pointless and data-intensive video and ad noise, there are several alternatives. Maybe it's time for new topic-related meta search engines and link aggregation sites. In the end there isn't much new content worth searching for, thanks to Google and Facebook extracting almost all (70% in 2018) ad revenue, and the demise of the federated web in favour of 2010's portals such as github. I can assure you that the modest amount of new content worth reading can be easily summarized and searched by basic, non-personalized search algorithms; no ML required. Going to Google to search things is really asking for the site with the most ads and trackers on them, is something that no self-respecting "Hacker" should be doing, and is a habbit you can quit at the turn of the decade if you haven't already. Because it's literally equivalent to asking "Ok Google, fill my feeble mind with shit".
- harimau777 7y ago
  Can you explain your feelings on YouTube in more detail? I find that I am often looking for information in video form (generally because I am trying to learn how to do some physical skill or to learn about something that is innately movement based such as dance). Although I often use Bing's video search in order to not just get YouTube results, the majority of them end up being on YouTube anyways. In general I haven't found a good way to search for video content so it seems whether irrelevant whether its on YouTube or not since I cannot find it either way. Am I misunderstanding you?
andrepd 7y ago
"Google is evil" has been a given for close to a decade now, and certainly since Snowden.
capableweb 7y ago
> a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched I wholeheartedly agree! In order to fuel the brainstorming with some divergent ideas: - Queries answered/improved by real people (you didn't find what you wanted with "X", now people can suggest alternative search terms to help you find it. Whoever helps, gets a reward) - Reputation-based search based on reviews (can be networked [as in social network] as well to put "trusted" reviews/hits at the top) - Expose the query-language for your search engine, allow anyone to build a UI around it, link them together somehow so it's easy to jump between views - Highly curated search engine, have a team of people insert pages manually after review - Adjustable ranking. Some people might prefer links to are used a lot on Twitter, or from a special blog they like Mix/match the above ideas, add/remove some, experiment and deploy prototypes for people to try. I'm sure there are better ways of doing search than what Google has right now. (if you feel like contributing and adding more ideas, please use your lateral thinking, instead of convergent to disprove the ideas above)
- mojuba 7y ago
  Everything you mentioned is possible but needs a lot of product management level refinement. Also I'd be wary of all kinds of adjustable and adaptive stuff since they create a bubble that may be difficult to escape should you become curious about things you don't know. Adaptive stuff discourages curiosity and it's one of the things I started disliking about Google Search among other things. There may be some room for thinking about bringing unique content above non-unique one. Chit-chat on myriads of forums is probably not interesting unless you are looking for something very specific in which case you'd use the query language. It would also de-rank all non-unique marketing fluff that can be seen everywhere. Of course this might open an opportunity for spammers to de-rank good sites by copying them or to boost others by adding artificially unique content, but then combined with the human review process it might yield net positive results. Voting... I don't know, Reddit's /all is a result of popular voting. Do we really want the Internet to become all kittens, memes and showerthoughts? :) But I'm thinking the stereotype of what a search engine UI should look like could also be reconsidered. Google has made a lot of interesting gradual improvements (Wikipedia, IMDB etc. snippets, maps, calculator, dictionary) while leaving the core UI almost intact. For example, when skimming through the search results, do you read the web page titles or the content with your search terms highlighted? Etc, I think there's some work to do for UX folks. Let alone that Google's highlighting functionality has declined considerably to the point of being almost useless most of the time.
bjornjaja 7y ago
What about DuckDuckGo or archive.org? Wikipedia?
octosphere 7y ago
> Google is not dying any time soon One way to kill it is blocking all their domains either in /etc/hosts or using pi-hole. But I imagine using the web would be slightly broken as Google host various font libraries and javascript libraries which if blocked, could break many sites.
- JBiserkov 7y ago
  Use https://decentraleyes.org https://decentraleyes.org "Protects you against tracking through "free", centralized, content delivery. It prevents a lot of requests from reaching networks like Google Hosted Libraries, and serves local files to keep sites from breaking. Complements regular content blockers."
  - octosphere 7y ago
    Thanks for recommending that :)
sametmax 7y ago
It worked for Microsoft. They started as liked hackers. Then they went full throttle with monopolistic practices, corruption, patent trolling, litterally and publically insulting the competition... And now, they just use a tiny fraction of the huge amount of money they made during that time to wash their image: better PR, involved in open source, etc. I'm not worried for Google. People will forgive and forget everything like they do with most politicians. They just have to keep accumulating benefits, and then hire poeple to "make the brand great again". Works everytime.
BillFranklin 7y ago
I think a good mobile version of Apple spotlight might do more damage to Google than Bing/DDG. Improving voice assistants in particular, like with Siri, could damage Google unless they’re not careful, since these assistants go beyond search and act as an operating system, to control IOT etc. Text search is valuable and so on, but I can imagine that voice becomes the primary mode of interacting with the world (internet, etc) in the future. In that world without screens as the gateway, where are the gateway ads?
chongli 7y ago
I’m no fan of Google these days (I use DuckDuckGo) but I’m not sure I can entirely fault them with the decline of search quality. Spamdexing is burying the web in mountains of garbage. Malicious SEO and fraud have exploded and continue to grow at an accelerating rate. What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but I’m too busy with school right now. I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web: a collection of information connected by hyperlinks. How we get a search engine to achieve that, I don’t know (it may take other tools as well), but I think it’s worth a try.
- doctor_m 7y ago
  I feel like Wikipedia is doing a pretty solid job of holding onto that dream: no shouty content, pure information that's maintained by those who are interested in it, and a fairly well outfitted battalion of bots that fend off adversarial edits
  - chongli 7y ago
    Wikipedia is pretty good for its specific purpose but it’s far from the promise of the open web. Wikipedia has a number of authoritarian moderators who will revert people’s changes for opaque and arbitrary reasons. Maybe if you took all wikis as a collective then you could get something a bit closer. There’s still the matter of finding them so it’s not ideal. Then there’s the matter of ads. Wikipedia doesn’t have them but other wikis are rife with them.
- ehonda 7y ago
  > I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web You might find wiby.me interesting then
scarface74 7y ago
I think geeks overestimate their influence. Google’s end user products were not successful because of a few nerds. 1. Chrome was successful because it was hawked on Google’s home page. 2. Android was successful because Apple never played in the lowend market. 3. Gmail was successful because it was better than the alternatives and had more storage space.

by mojuba 7y ago

Ygg2 7y ago

I like your parallel between Microsoft and Google. To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS. However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.

mojuba 7y ago
True but I think the parallel between Google and MS (of the 2000s) is more interesting in terms of the vital signs in their organization rather than on the product level. Because Windows was only improving from release to release, while Search is getting shittier and shittier (sorry, can't find a better word for at least my own frustration with using it today). So Search may in fact die a quick and sudden death at this pace. Theoretically replacing Search can only take one browser update: offer a choice but rearrange the options, for example. However, what Google and pre-Nadella Microsoft share is let's say living in a bubble of a tremendous success of one product that's also the main source of revenue (MS Office, and Google Ads), plus inability to innovate. This is an institutional/organizational symptom more than anything else. Old HN'ers should remember PG's essay[1] so maybe now is the time to reassess Google's place in the world. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
- Ygg2 7y ago
  Yeah, I noticed a trend in Google search just sucking (being less relevant) more and more, but tbh same happened to Windows as well. However I do find Google's lack of relevancy way (compared to itself few years ago) more stark.
- riffraff 7y ago
  Isn't Google making more and more money from non-search products? e.g. Google cloud products, YouTube. It seems they are trying to differentiate, see also Google+, stadia etc, just not being very successful.
  - mojuba 7y ago
    Doesn't seem to be the case [1] The article that comments on this chart says other sources (non-ad ones) look promising but it more sounds like a speculation because I don't see real signs of that. [1] https://www.theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0 https://www.theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0
    - 7y ago

the_duke 7y ago

There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1]) I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that. Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era of low effort reposts, aggregators, optimizing for clicks and a large SEO industry. In addition, most of the user-generated content is now inside "walled gardens" like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, and is either impossible to index, or much harder to quantify and rank than websites linking to each other. There has to be something better out there, but it will be a difficult challenge. Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181

ci5er 7y ago
> Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Yahoo?
- riffraff 7y ago
  More like the now defunct DMOZ, I'd say.
  - Hoasi 7y ago
    > More like the now defunct DMOZ DMOZ was a good idea, but the execution was biased because curated lists invite partiality. You might build something better only if you could mitigate this natural tendency.
- mch82 7y ago
  Fun fact... This is how search engines started. One of the first steps in early SEO was to get your site listed on a manually curated web directory. VLIB, the first web directory, still operates at http://vlib.org/ http://vlib.org/. List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

Cougher 7y ago

Great points. The idea that Google was evil had been out there long before 2014 of course, and perhaps some of that tin foil hatism was prescient rather than ridiculous.

kgersen75 7y ago

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do. There are nuances and shades of gray in life, as we all learn when we grow up. In the end, what matters is the silent majority not the chatty loud ones that have a personal grudge against some big corporation. That "Google is evil" is highly overrated and over hyped. I always question the agenda of people promoting this.

roenxi 7y ago
People who think carefully then call Google 'evil' may as well be the same people who used to call it 'good'. Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful. Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation that will. At best, there are stylistic differences around the edges that are simultaneously important but minor in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or later a corporation will be thinking primarily in terms of 'profitable' and 'not profitable'. Calling Google 'evil' is trying to articulate something else - Google are powerful and dangerous. Any entity harvesting and directing the flow of information at that scale is. They have an unprecedented capability to cause harm; and sooner or later it will get used by someone to do exactly that.
- riffraff 7y ago
  But Google ten years ago seemed good, full stop. All of their behaviour seemed to be a net positive for the rest of the world, even when done in self interest. Now, it's easy to see some behaviour which are not. Even assuming there is a slide toward evil for corporations, and I'm not sure there is, it still seems correct to say that a company is at a given state of "goodness" in a certain time.
- 7y ago

marcus_holmes 7y ago

I'm refusing to implement Google Analytics on my startup's product. Because it's slow, but mainly because I don't trust Google enough to let them put whatever code they like on my page. I'm running into serious flak from the marketing team because they don't know how to use any other tool. GA is the industry standard, apparently, and every site uses it, etc etc. They're even hinting that not using it could affect our SEO (I haven't seen any evidence for that, but if so it just reinforces my desire to not give Evil Google our traffic). Even a couple of years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem. I trusted them to do the right thing. Now. No. Google is the new M$

faeyanpiraat 7y ago
Oblivious marketing ppl bullying tech guys into doing stupid things. Such a classic. Unfortunately I have a hunch aswell that not adding GA does indeed negatively affects SEO. How would it be possible to prove/disprove this?
- mojuba 7y ago
  Experiment with your own web sites? Create two of them with and without GA, possibly with different content because Google seems to be able to detect duplication, then try to promote both (this is the difficult part of course) and compare.
  - mmahemoff 7y ago
    It's hard to do any kind of objective comparison like this when it comes to SEO. It takes months to see any effect and even then you will have to speculate. You could try to remove GA from half the pages on an existing site one day and see if those subsequently drop more, if you have enough pages to experiment with.
    - mojuba 7y ago
      There is some evidence that older pages (>10 years old) drop out if they don't use any of Google's plugins. I think it was Tim Bray who was one of the first who noticed [1] I also found another case of a lot of un-googleable reddit pages from only 5 years ago. They just don't exist on Google anymore even though they are linked from e.g. peoples profiles who commented there. Someone decided that Reddit is not important, or maybe there's some broader exclusion criteria in place. [1] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is...

dpflan 7y ago

> "I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI." There was a social search engine, Aardvark (circa 2008). Google acquired it in 2010, then discontinued it off in 2011. The design is discussed in their paper below. There was also ChaCha -- another social search engine. > Aardbark wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) > "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale, Social, Search Engine": https://web.archive.org/web/20110216155450/http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110216155450/http://vark.com/a... _ === Update === I've found some HN posts about Aardvark and the acquisition: > Aardvark: Now All Your Friends Are in the Answer Business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677178 > Aardvark Mulls Over A $30+ Million Offer From Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980607 > Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118132

daodedickinson 7y ago

The tech industry should not take it too personally / hard: any forces that earn prestige will soon become surrounded by similar challengers

ImprovedSilence 7y ago

>> In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. That’s not quite right. There are plenty of tech people who stopped admiring google much earlier (shuttering of google reader was probably what keys me into where they were ultimately heading, and I’m sure many others saw things much earlier). On the other front, G$ is neither entirely evil or good. It is a very large company. There is still good, field advancing work and valuable contributions to the open source community coming from them. One the other front, there are absolutely perverse motivations and capabilities to break the open internet coming from them. It’s a fine line to tread. They are like the Bell labs of our generation, for better or worse. Great tech came out of it, and breaking it up will kill that great tech R&D part. Then we will have to wait for the next disruption. I’m not in a position to say which is better, but this is how I see Google position currently.

jmmarco 7y ago

”unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon”. What about duckduckgo? I’ve been using it roughly for a year and i’m happy with it.

mojuba 7y ago
DDG mostly uses Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (anonymized). To be honest apart from some obviously spammy web sites that rank high only on Google, their search results don't seem to be significantly different. My impression anyway. And so we don't even know whether what we see via these search engines is the real Internet or we all live in a bubble created by them.
infinitezest 7y ago
I could be wrong but I think DDG is actually backed by Bing.

buboard 7y ago

> the window of opportunity may be now Google has secured a lot of top AI researchers. Depending on the dates when their options vest, we may see a lot of them leave.

stopads 7y ago

Back in 2015-7 or so yes, you'd be immediately dogpiled on here and reddit and most other sites for daring to criticize Google. I was trying to warn people about them and was always banned or downvoted to some shadowban realm immediately. Google isn't the actual problem though, advertising is. The backlash needs to be primarily about ads, not the companies that just lie repeatedly in order to bend all tech infrastructure towards the needs of advertisers.

dang 7y ago
We've never banned people for "daring to criticize $bigco". That's half of HN. If we banned you, it was likely because there was something else abusive about your posts.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Ads are the worst, but aren't the only issue. Apple and (older?) Microsoft are problematic too without being advertising businesses.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

> there's no competition to Search on the horizon This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com. What are you searching for? Programming-related questions? Then go to stackoverflow.com directly (where you'll end up in 99% of cases when you search with DDG or Google anyway on these topics). Tip: to search SO, I've found it works best to create (but not submit) a new question with as much info in the headline as possible; the results that SO brings up to check for duplicate questions are excellent search results (btw have they changed it recently? I don't remember working it as good as it's now). Requires a StackExchange account though. Are your searching for review of tech gadgets or christmas gifts? Then many people on HN admit to include "reddit" in their search terms. Then why not go directly to reddit.com for your search. Are you searching on YouTube? Then indeed Google (YouTube itself) works best, but the real solution is to quit your media consumption habbit of spending your waking hours on monopolists video streaming sites that don't benefit creators. For just music without pointless and data-intensive video and ad noise, there are several alternatives. Maybe it's time for new topic-related meta search engines and link aggregation sites. In the end there isn't much new content worth searching for, thanks to Google and Facebook extracting almost all (70% in 2018) ad revenue, and the demise of the federated web in favour of 2010's portals such as github. I can assure you that the modest amount of new content worth reading can be easily summarized and searched by basic, non-personalized search algorithms; no ML required. Going to Google to search things is really asking for the site with the most ads and trackers on them, is something that no self-respecting "Hacker" should be doing, and is a habbit you can quit at the turn of the decade if you haven't already. Because it's literally equivalent to asking "Ok Google, fill my feeble mind with shit".

harimau777 7y ago
Can you explain your feelings on YouTube in more detail? I find that I am often looking for information in video form (generally because I am trying to learn how to do some physical skill or to learn about something that is innately movement based such as dance). Although I often use Bing's video search in order to not just get YouTube results, the majority of them end up being on YouTube anyways. In general I haven't found a good way to search for video content so it seems whether irrelevant whether its on YouTube or not since I cannot find it either way. Am I misunderstanding you?

andrepd 7y ago

"Google is evil" has been a given for close to a decade now, and certainly since Snowden.

capableweb 7y ago

> a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched I wholeheartedly agree! In order to fuel the brainstorming with some divergent ideas: - Queries answered/improved by real people (you didn't find what you wanted with "X", now people can suggest alternative search terms to help you find it. Whoever helps, gets a reward) - Reputation-based search based on reviews (can be networked [as in social network] as well to put "trusted" reviews/hits at the top) - Expose the query-language for your search engine, allow anyone to build a UI around it, link them together somehow so it's easy to jump between views - Highly curated search engine, have a team of people insert pages manually after review - Adjustable ranking. Some people might prefer links to are used a lot on Twitter, or from a special blog they like Mix/match the above ideas, add/remove some, experiment and deploy prototypes for people to try. I'm sure there are better ways of doing search than what Google has right now. (if you feel like contributing and adding more ideas, please use your lateral thinking, instead of convergent to disprove the ideas above)

mojuba 7y ago
Everything you mentioned is possible but needs a lot of product management level refinement. Also I'd be wary of all kinds of adjustable and adaptive stuff since they create a bubble that may be difficult to escape should you become curious about things you don't know. Adaptive stuff discourages curiosity and it's one of the things I started disliking about Google Search among other things. There may be some room for thinking about bringing unique content above non-unique one. Chit-chat on myriads of forums is probably not interesting unless you are looking for something very specific in which case you'd use the query language. It would also de-rank all non-unique marketing fluff that can be seen everywhere. Of course this might open an opportunity for spammers to de-rank good sites by copying them or to boost others by adding artificially unique content, but then combined with the human review process it might yield net positive results. Voting... I don't know, Reddit's /all is a result of popular voting. Do we really want the Internet to become all kittens, memes and showerthoughts? :) But I'm thinking the stereotype of what a search engine UI should look like could also be reconsidered. Google has made a lot of interesting gradual improvements (Wikipedia, IMDB etc. snippets, maps, calculator, dictionary) while leaving the core UI almost intact. For example, when skimming through the search results, do you read the web page titles or the content with your search terms highlighted? Etc, I think there's some work to do for UX folks. Let alone that Google's highlighting functionality has declined considerably to the point of being almost useless most of the time.

bjornjaja 7y ago

What about DuckDuckGo or archive.org? Wikipedia?

octosphere 7y ago

> Google is not dying any time soon One way to kill it is blocking all their domains either in /etc/hosts or using pi-hole. But I imagine using the web would be slightly broken as Google host various font libraries and javascript libraries which if blocked, could break many sites.

JBiserkov 7y ago
Use https://decentraleyes.org https://decentraleyes.org "Protects you against tracking through "free", centralized, content delivery. It prevents a lot of requests from reaching networks like Google Hosted Libraries, and serves local files to keep sites from breaking. Complements regular content blockers."
- octosphere 7y ago
  Thanks for recommending that :)

sametmax 7y ago

It worked for Microsoft. They started as liked hackers. Then they went full throttle with monopolistic practices, corruption, patent trolling, litterally and publically insulting the competition... And now, they just use a tiny fraction of the huge amount of money they made during that time to wash their image: better PR, involved in open source, etc. I'm not worried for Google. People will forgive and forget everything like they do with most politicians. They just have to keep accumulating benefits, and then hire poeple to "make the brand great again". Works everytime.

BillFranklin 7y ago

I think a good mobile version of Apple spotlight might do more damage to Google than Bing/DDG. Improving voice assistants in particular, like with Siri, could damage Google unless they’re not careful, since these assistants go beyond search and act as an operating system, to control IOT etc. Text search is valuable and so on, but I can imagine that voice becomes the primary mode of interacting with the world (internet, etc) in the future. In that world without screens as the gateway, where are the gateway ads?

chongli 7y ago

I’m no fan of Google these days (I use DuckDuckGo) but I’m not sure I can entirely fault them with the decline of search quality. Spamdexing is burying the web in mountains of garbage. Malicious SEO and fraud have exploded and continue to grow at an accelerating rate. What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but I’m too busy with school right now. I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web: a collection of information connected by hyperlinks. How we get a search engine to achieve that, I don’t know (it may take other tools as well), but I think it’s worth a try.

doctor_m 7y ago
I feel like Wikipedia is doing a pretty solid job of holding onto that dream: no shouty content, pure information that's maintained by those who are interested in it, and a fairly well outfitted battalion of bots that fend off adversarial edits
- chongli 7y ago
  Wikipedia is pretty good for its specific purpose but it’s far from the promise of the open web. Wikipedia has a number of authoritarian moderators who will revert people’s changes for opaque and arbitrary reasons. Maybe if you took all wikis as a collective then you could get something a bit closer. There’s still the matter of finding them so it’s not ideal. Then there’s the matter of ads. Wikipedia doesn’t have them but other wikis are rife with them.
ehonda 7y ago
> I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web You might find wiby.me interesting then

scarface74 7y ago

I think geeks overestimate their influence. Google’s end user products were not successful because of a few nerds. 1. Chrome was successful because it was hawked on Google’s home page. 2. Android was successful because Apple never played in the lowend market. 3. Gmail was successful because it was better than the alternatives and had more storage space.