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This is a familiar refrain I've recently begun to hear about many of Google's products and I'm starting to see the point. Technology has evolved significantly i

by hliyan 6y ago

This is a familiar refrain I've recently begun to hear about many of Google's products and I'm starting to see the point. Technology has evolved significantly in the last ten years. It is now significantly easier to build a search engine with its own index and crawl the entirety of the Internet than it was ten years ago. Maps too, will go that way soon. It took IBM and Intel, who were regarded the same way Google is now, half a century to be dethroned. For Google, this might happen on a more accelerated schedule. I suspect there will be a swarm of startups biting at its heels within the next five years.

slezyr 6y ago
> It is now significantly easier to build a search engine with its own index and crawl the entirety of the Internet than it was ten years ago. ReCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, CloudFlare definitely don't make it easier to crawl the web than it was ten years ago
- echelon 6y ago
  Thankfully (1) there just aren't that many useful websites anymore. Most content lives in walled gardens. Negotiate a few deals to get around CloudFlare for those select few and you're set. [1] I'm being sarcastic.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    'Many a true word was said in jest' as the aphorism goes. IME useful information has become somewhat concentrated into nodes, instead of trawling blogs for info it's all on stackoverflow/Twitter/whatever (depending on subject).
    - echelon 6y ago
      For certain populations of data and authors, it's true that centralization aids in discovery, distribution, discourse, maintenance, etc. Unfortunately many of these channels are hooked up to hyper-growth valuation needs and this necessitates volume over quality. Look at Quora, Pinterest, Medium, and LinkedIn. And I haven't even mentioned the biggest offenders. I don't think I'm better served in 2020 than I was in 2008.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
I hope for the startups too, but I'm not as optimistic. While the HP/Intel/IBM/etc. dinosaurs are slowly being sapped of relevance, I don't think Google will fall victim to the same fate. Those dinosaurs largely saw their maturation before the rise of Internet, and as such still have a lot of pre-Internet culture in them, especially in the C-suite. Google (largely) doesn't have that. And they, along with the rest of the FAANG companies, just deal with menacing upstarts by buying them. They're public, they're starting to become too massive, but no one cares as long as they continue providing their core free services.
- hliyan 6y ago
  My thought on this is: while technology and circumstance changes, human beings and groups of human beings, are subject to the same fundamental forces of ascendance, consolidation, plateau and decline. The human beings that make up Google are fundamentally no different from those that made up IBM (or even the Roman Empire). They may have the knowledge of what happened to the previous generation of tech companies in their collective memories, but then again, one could argue that IBM too, had in their collective memories, the fate of the industries that they supplanted.

by hliyan 6y ago

slezyr 6y ago

> It is now significantly easier to build a search engine with its own index and crawl the entirety of the Internet than it was ten years ago. ReCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, CloudFlare definitely don't make it easier to crawl the web than it was ten years ago

echelon 6y ago
Thankfully (1) there just aren't that many useful websites anymore. Most content lives in walled gardens. Negotiate a few deals to get around CloudFlare for those select few and you're set. [1] I'm being sarcastic.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  'Many a true word was said in jest' as the aphorism goes. IME useful information has become somewhat concentrated into nodes, instead of trawling blogs for info it's all on stackoverflow/Twitter/whatever (depending on subject).
  - echelon 6y ago
    For certain populations of data and authors, it's true that centralization aids in discovery, distribution, discourse, maintenance, etc. Unfortunately many of these channels are hooked up to hyper-growth valuation needs and this necessitates volume over quality. Look at Quora, Pinterest, Medium, and LinkedIn. And I haven't even mentioned the biggest offenders. I don't think I'm better served in 2020 than I was in 2008.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

I hope for the startups too, but I'm not as optimistic. While the HP/Intel/IBM/etc. dinosaurs are slowly being sapped of relevance, I don't think Google will fall victim to the same fate. Those dinosaurs largely saw their maturation before the rise of Internet, and as such still have a lot of pre-Internet culture in them, especially in the C-suite. Google (largely) doesn't have that. And they, along with the rest of the FAANG companies, just deal with menacing upstarts by buying them. They're public, they're starting to become too massive, but no one cares as long as they continue providing their core free services.

hliyan 6y ago
My thought on this is: while technology and circumstance changes, human beings and groups of human beings, are subject to the same fundamental forces of ascendance, consolidation, plateau and decline. The human beings that make up Google are fundamentally no different from those that made up IBM (or even the Roman Empire). They may have the knowledge of what happened to the previous generation of tech companies in their collective memories, but then again, one could argue that IBM too, had in their collective memories, the fate of the industries that they supplanted.