16 ms·

Who is going to replace Google for us?

173 points by zdw 4y ago

dmitriid 4y ago
Google is so big now that handling each and everyone of its properties is likely to have not one, not two, but multiple conflicts of interest. I'm not sure if even a government attempt to split it up can realistically work in any shape, sense, or form.
Avtomatk 4y ago
regarding search engines, i find andisearch.com as better option for some cases (working as a software engineer)
- ImpulseGuided 4y ago
  >better option for some cases Can you tell us more about the kind of problems for which you receive better search results via andisearch.com?
  - Avtomatk 4y ago
    For general search, andisearch and google gives you the same results... in andysearch i don't need to try 10 different combinations of the same sentence to get the expected results like in google, in andisearch i get the expected results almost at the first try (sometimes at the second one) for very specific searches.
amelius 4y ago
OpenAI will.
- leereeves 4y ago
  Interesting. What do you mean? I know they compete in AI research, but has (no longer quite so) OpenAI shown any sign of competing for Google's cash cows?
  - amelius 4y ago
    They made great progress in NLP, which is a big part of what Google Search is about. Also, they have the compute infrastructure for it.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      The problem with taking on Google Search is that of taking on the document corpus they build and the spidering / crawling work they do. Google and Bing are permitted by hosts to crawl, but new entrants effectively barred by most site's robots.txt. The barrier to entry is massive on that front alone. We really need a web infrastructure where the index (or the indexer) is somehow public and neutral, not owned by any particular corporate entity. This should have been built into WWW architecture from day one. But legislation could attempt to make it happen now. Companies should be free to innovate on top of it, but we're effectively in a state now where monopoly power has been granted to the people who got there first (well, close to it, anyways). EDIT: to be clearer, imagine a crawling infrastructure run by industry consortium. You pay a membership fee and usage / traffic fees and you get to upload a WebAssembly program that is called with the contents of pages every time the crawler hits them. What you do with them from that point on is up to you, but would presumably be something like building your own corpus for a search engine, etc. Moderation and regulatory oversight on the usages of this data would obviously have to be put in place. But to me it seems preferable to the status quo now.
      - amelius 4y ago
        How does DDG do it?
        dekhn 4y ago
        they use bing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo and https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
- tehsauce 4y ago
  Sadly openai has fallen behind google at their own game. Google was able to invest heavily and optimize it's hardware and infrastructure down to the silicon, which has turned out to be the critical competitive advantage in AI. Openai is really struggling to compete with google because of this.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    Are they struggling to compete? OpenAI's GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 are much better known than Google's competing models LaMDA, PaLM, and Imagen.
    - tehsauce 4y ago
      Unless they are quietly sitting on some really big work (which isn't out of the question), openai seems to be getting substantially leapfrogged by google. In terms of how "well known" googles language models are, most of us already interact with googles models daily via search. This gives them a massive market head start in users, and an enormous amount of data that will be impossible to catch up with unless google completely shoots themselves in the foot on this stuff.
ljlolel 4y ago
You.com
- mas-ev 4y ago
  It kinda sucks now but I agree.
addicted 4y ago
Google News has become completely worthless for me. It takes my YouTube usage and promotes news stories based on that. But that makes absolutely no sense. I go to YouTube to relax and/or look at things that are not so important. Sudoku solving, gaming news, and/or chess stuff. I used to go to Google News to have an understanding of what’s happening in the world. But now my Google News feed is overridden by stories about the same things I see on YouTube. Outside the main 2-3 stories of the day (which is invariably the top political news from the U.S. which one already knows about through the zeitgeist) everything else is personalized stories and hardly News.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dorfsmay 4y ago
  Use google news in an incognito window?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    You would need incognito, VPN'd, and non-JS tab to not be tracked by websites.
    - dorfsmay 4y ago
      In my anecdotal experience, FB is using non-logged in google search results to select which ad to show you. I assume google sells those to FB, based on IP address. But, my YouTube and Google search and ads, whole logged in, are based on what I do while logged in only. I might be naive but I have not seen correlation between my logged-in and my non-logged-in life within google products.
      - LeonTheremin 4y ago
        Another hypothesis: Silicon Valley is using your inner speech - obtained with electromagnetic surveillance and machine learning. People try to explain it away as Big Tech's blackbox AIs being good of making inferences from "public" data, but fail to consider that their body betrays their mind by leaking information under the skin, which can be picked up silently with microwaves.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I should try to keep track of how often I use search engines. Because it certainly feels like I use them less and less. I more or less know where to go for what I am looking for these days. At the same time I get less and less interesting/useful results from Google.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Is this a good thing? How does one discover where to go in the first place? Word of mouth?
- al_borland 4y ago
  Usually when I want to use a search engine it is to find quality products in an area I know nothing about. However, Google has become useless for this, as the results are flooded with "top 10" lists that are seemingly auto-generated and full of affiliate links to garbage on Amazon. Neva tends to surface better results on these kinds of things, but I'm currently trying Kagi, which groups all the "top n" posts into a section instead of polluting the entire results with them, which is nice. More and more I'm just giving up, going to a store I have a reasonable amount of trust in, because they care about their reputation, and pick something off the shelf... trusting their buyers did some work. It's a lot faster and easier and avoids a lot of the paradox of choice issues.
night-rider 4y ago
Kagi & Brave’s new search engine look promising. And there are many other alternatives like Marginalia, Yacy, Swisscows, Ecosia, Bing, DDG, Mojeek, Qwant, Startpage, etc
- dhc02 4y ago
  +1 Kagi. I expected to get bored and go back to old habits but it's been very impressive and has "stuck" as my default for quite a while now.
honopu 4y ago
Apple will
- sedatk 4y ago
  like Maps?
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Maps has been consistently getting better. Don’t believe the meme.
    - sedatk 4y ago
      Last year it took me to a completely different spot for a popular restaurant in SF. That’s like the reddest of the flags.
      - falcolas 4y ago
        And last month Google Maps tried to convince me about 12 times to get off the highway and take back roads on a 900mi one-way trip because of hallucinated traffic. OSM needs more good apps.
        sedatk 4y ago
        Google Maps isn't great for navigation either, but I can easily vouch for Waze (also owned by Google now).
  - honopu 4y ago
    Yes but maybe they learned something. I know their crawler has been out a while
  - rvz 4y ago
    Not only that, Apple Search Engine powered by Siri.
  - 4y ago
geekamongus 4y ago
How can you write an article dissing Google and not mention YouTube?
sk8terboi 4y ago
Arnie0426 4y ago
Google should not be using the same data from different products it owns - or at least give users an option. I really don't want my YouTube Shorts to be impacted by what I saw on YouTube. I don't want my Google News (as @addicted mentioned) to be impacted by my reading habits on YouTube or even my recent search results. Personalization is everywhere but I really hope that Google also allows for customization by the user. Till then, I really have to diversify my product usage from different companies to have some illusion of control.
- axg11 4y ago
  Having worked for a different FAANG, I saw the immense pressure to incorporate data from other products. I imagine there’s a big internal push to aggregate all data from across Google services. It’s an easy win for product managers looking for projects.
olah_1 4y ago
I really look forward to interfaces that let me use my own index of data from my network. Manyverse[1] and Iris[2] are good examples of apps that will enable this more in the future. I just want to search “harry potter” and see everything my friends have written about it. If I follow some institutions or encyclopedias, I should also see what they write about it. And I should be able to choose which sources I want to rank higher in search results. 1: https://manyver.se https://manyver.se 2: https://iris.to https://iris.to
zozbot234 4y ago
We need to recreate the DMOZ web directory - probably in a federated variety with multiple competing "editors" for any given topic area - before we can hope to really do better than Google/Bing/DDG web search. Human curation is the best and most resilient alternative to SEO spam.
- dekhn 4y ago
  akebono.stanford.edu will never die
  - newaccount2021 4y ago
aftbit 4y ago
>Here’s the thing that made me write this - I used to load up Google News a lot, I’ve now switched to bookmarks. It’s one thing for promoting junk news sources, but recently I’ve seen them cary both Brietbart (known for historically running a “black crime” section!) and the Epoch Times (a disinformation site being run by an actual cult) spouting absolutely false covid denial. I can’t support this in any way. I’m done. It sounds like rather than a news search engine & aggregator, the poster would rather use a curated news service (e.g. CNN) that gives them a single particular viewpoint. Or at the very least, would like their sources to be vetted or editorialized in some way, as opposed to the original Google mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful".
- throwaway5752 4y ago
  Brietbart and Epoch Times are the opposite of information. Misinformation run by people maliciously trying to get people to believe falsehoods isn't the same as an information source. And the misinformation networks are quite expertly run, just like blackhat SEO was. Sputnik, Infowards, or NAMBLA shouldn't be on par with the BBC or WaPo and if you think otherwise you maybe should lower your redpill dosages! EDIT: Downvote away! Karma is useless and you can't kill the messenger! Kids: misinformation is not information. They people that use it are sociopaths and will lie like hell and gaslight you to keep up their scam. If you think the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, et al are on par with Jordan Peterson, Breitbart, or Infowars then you have been really poorly served in your life. You are in a disinformation bubble and you don't even realize it. Escape now, model-based targeting is not going to make it easier.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    WaPo isn't really great, either.
    - throwaway5752 4y ago
      On what basis do you say that? I doubt there are more unbiased and reliable sources of information out there. Since every source of information has bias and will contain mistakes, I am just interested if they are 1) interested in telling me the truth or an agenda or 2) if they are as correct as possible and issue corrections when they are not. WaPo is world class.
cs137 4y ago
Fifteen years ago, Google was "the web company". They weren't about walled gardens; they were about the future, which was the web. It turns out they only liked it so much because, back then, Microsoft was bad at it, giving them a comparative advantage. We're living through another tragedy of the commons, but the culprit isn't human nature itself, so much as it is capitalism. The corporates have made sure they have absolute dominion over human usage of time and space, and anything they don't value (or that might represent opposition to them, now or later) dies.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  we didn't have to let them get between us
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I think leadership at Google back then truly did like it. And they continued to "mostly" like it up to about 7-10 years ago. During the time I was there (10 years from 2012 until end of 2021) I feel like I saw the transition happen, slowly. It got really contradictory and messy. In fact, Google Plus (2011-2013ish) was justified (in part) as an attempt to "rescue" the web from the enclosing grasp of the walled garden that is Facebook -- which couldn't be indexed, searched, and presented openly. (Naturally this was hypocritical [in addition to being a failure] but that was one of the motivations given for the project) Overall I think all of this had a lot to do not only with Google's positioning as an advertising company, but with the rise of mobile computing and mobile apps. The writing was on the wall when mobile use started to surpass desktop browser use. "The web" as we traditionally knew it ceased to be the primary interaction mechanism people were having with the Internet, and Google (and others) had to pivot quickly or they would lose the advantage they had. Google from 2000-2015 or so seemed to innovate on "the web"; from search to gmail to news to reader (and even arguably to g+) it was about pushing the limits of the tech and excelling at making WWW products. Then it became about making... nice apps. I guess? Story time: I worked on the Google (then "Nest") Home Hub. The original UI for it was written in HTML/CSS/JS and it was very well done by some super talented front end developers. My teammates were responsible for optimizing the Chromium rendering engine for that platform, to make it perform nicely on the bargain basement SoC we were using. We shipped this to millions of people and it was a success. A few quarters later the whole thing was ripped out and replaced with Dart & Flutter. The UI was identical, but bias and and ideology dictated that that was what the UI had to be built in (they said it'd be faster: it wasn't, it was more about making it so the same apps could be built for Android and Fuchsia as the same time). Multiple quarters were spent on a transition plan to rewrite this whole UI and hack up the firmware on the system to make this possible, throwing out 2+ years of work. So, yeah, you're right. Google was the "web" company. Now they're... I don't even know, but it's a lot about Android and mobile and also constantly chasing after what Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are doing. To the point that management was willing to throw out thousands of hours of engineering work done on a web app to replace it with a non-web version. That whole process left a bad taste in my mouth.
massysett 4y ago
Google News is worthless because most of the worthwhile news on the Internet has been paywalled. The equivalent to the old Google News is Apple News, which has a pay tier. The issue with Google is that people expect too much out of it. The author of this page, like many others, expects that there are many people out there putting great information on the Internet and doing it for free, and all Google needs to do is find that information. The problem is that getting good information is hard work. People aren't doing it for free. Google is like the old Yellow Pages, or Computer Shopper. You didn't pick up the Yellow Pages looking for enlightenment. You were looking for a plumber. Google is great for commerce, and for other odd things. The author pines for the old Yahoo directory, but one reason Google superseded it is that if I were looking for a link to, say, the University of Michigan, on Yahoo I had to drill through a directory to find it. Google surfaces this kind of thing instantly and this functionality is something people now take for granted - which is why I'll bet most of the Google gripers still use it multiple times daily. The gripers are expecting Google is some portal to free world knowledge. Not going to happen, because knowledge is hard work and people don't like to work for free.
- tyrfing 4y ago
  Very accurate. I think the two big changes recently (10-15 years) have been around monetizing content and distribution formats. For monetization, vast amounts of stuff moved behind paywalls and other walls. The obvious one, distribution platforms are walled and inaccessible to Google; probably their biggest existential risk. On smaller scales, many specialists started to monetize their knowledge. Instead of dumping it for free on forums or blogs, now it's on Substack or many other outlets. What remains free is increasingly free for strategic reasons, so it's either ad-monetized (with poor incentives for quality) or released entirely for branding/promotional reasons. Distribution format is another factor that I only recognized very recently. A lot of content/knowledge is now accessible only as videos, podcasts, or similar, where in the past there would usually be a text version. If you only want text, you will miss a lot - stuff is on YouTube now, instead of small forums.
- visarga 4y ago
  Google is not a great tool for commerce. It wastes a great opportunity to close a sale by allowing garbage. They should just connect people to useful information.
jmyeet 4y ago
The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will. I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be dominant in several areas (most notably search) but I guarantee you somehow this era will come to an end. We've had tech dominance in the past. IBM is a good example. Microsoft is another. Even Oracle could count within its space. Dominance is a divergent state. It's also why I'm not particularly worried about wealth concentration in dynasties. In 100 years the descendants of Bezos won't be the ruling class in the same way the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans aren't. Relax. These things have a way of working themselves out.
- cudgy 4y ago
  So, don’t worry, it all work out? Vast wealth being sucked up by a few people while huge swaths of society have little to no ability to handle a $1000 financial hit? Passing the big ball of wealth between a few select people and families over history is acceptable? The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.
  - badRNG 4y ago
    What the peasants didn't understand was that having a Monarch is fine. In fact, I bet in a few generations it will be a totally different royal family running the show.
  - andi999 4y ago
    Na, just introduce a social safety net, like most of europe had for some time.
    - cudgy 4y ago
      So, put “those people” in the Matrix, so they won’t be a problem instead of addressing the real problem of a lopsided economic system is the answer?
happythebob 4y ago
Social media is a much bigger problem than any Google mining because social media naturally promotes the already dangerous both sides fallacies. Among other reasons.
stephc_int13 4y ago
I stopped using Gmail and Facebook about three years ago I stopped using Google a bit later (without any good alternative, Bing and DDG are almost as bad) But I still used Youtube a lot, I found interesting content there, and the algorithm mostly managed to keep me interested, even if many of the suggestions were crap. But for some reason it suddenly changed a few days ago, the suggestions are all crap now. Nothing of interest for me. Why? Probably an update or some ongoing A/B test ongoing. I'll miss the good suggestions, as I miss the old Google, but my plan is simply to stop spending so much time there, probably for the better. I am curious if anyone else have experienced a similar change.
- chillingeffect 4y ago
  I watched one damn video a few days ago on mark hammill and my feed was dominated by star wars drek... coincidence?
- bombela 4y ago
  Same, YouTube recently started promoting a lot more low quality videos somewhat in the same genre as what I like. It also consistantly hides videos from channel I am subscribed on. It upsets me so much.
analyte123 4y ago
If you think of the web as Google search's "content", they have let it rot. If Google had spent 1% of their AdWords payouts on encouraging people to post quality content on the web through e.g. better web authoring tools and protocols, they would have way less of a problem now. Perhaps the walled garden (that they did partially achieve with Youtube) is too alluring. They could have even tried to pay more for engaging web content that had lower bounce rates and that users came back repeatedly for, instead of just raw views from clickbait SEO. Obviously having turned the entire web into blogspam for ad money is no good for Google search and they are already having to turn it into "Youtube, Google ML content, and Google Maps user content" search.
bob1029 4y ago
Can we even describe a compelling vision for what the replacement google would look like? Trying to get my investors interested in a "non-shit google" requires a bit more color around the edges.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Fair enough. I think the issue is we need to get people involved in making it open, decentralized, fast and easy to use. We need DevOps people to make it easy to do things like host your own mail with CalDav and CardDav, email labels, nice interface, etc. Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting. Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers that don't sacrifice security and privacy.
UIUC_06 4y ago
> I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit. We had a lot of fun pages, fan pages, and so on. We need that again, our souls need that again. The "directory of the web" approach was already hitting its limits in 2000. I'm pretty sure you could find a "directory of the weird stuff" page somewhere, if you looked for it.
ac130kz 4y ago
Google killed itself with the switch from good ol' finely tuned PageRank to blackbox neural networks with messy loss functions. It's still light years ahead of the competition
- hitpointdrew 4y ago
  They killed them selves when they dropped “Don’t do evil.” And when they started working with foreign governments to provide censored versions of Google.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > It's still light years ahead of the competition How do you figure? I never use Google and get through my searches just fine. What am I missing?
  - ac130kz 4y ago
    Bing, Yandex and DDG just don't achieve the same level of relevancy for me. Their indexes are missing many good results that Google gives out straightaway
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Still not sure what I’m missing though since I find everything I’m looking for with those engines. Marginally better results (an opinion) doesn’t seem like “light years” better to me.
      - ac130kz 4y ago
        Maybe it is the way I search, but, as I've said, many websites are missing from their indexes. Yandex, the second best out of these, is also pretty bad at decoding the context of a search, seems like plain text search
- ok123456 4y ago
  Yandex gives good results.
jsnell 4y ago
The most concrete complaints in this piece appear to be: - Google News includes stories from a source that the author doesn't want anyone else to be able to see. (If they just didn't want to see those stories themselves, then there's an easily accessible "hide sources from XXX" entry in the context menu). - Generic complaints about shopping searches returning links to Amazon, or pages having referral links to Amazon. Might be true, but the case would be a lot stronger with some example queries that show this failure, with suggestions on the good content that is not being surfaced. Without the latter, how can we know that the results weren't actually the best that existed. - An insinuation that Gmail and Drive are "treating the user as the product". (Seems basically untrue; Gmail has incredibly few ads, Drive I think none, and data from neither is used for ad targeting.) - The author couldn't get individual customer support for "being the target of a really weird scheme". No details on the scheme. The person they didn't know whose contact details they got from somewhere wasn't enthusiastic about helping them either.
- xkbarkar 4y ago
  Yea I thought the same. Sounded more like fragile “milennial” complaint than an actual good article with solid facts. You could find 100 solid ways to distrust google. Didnt think the author hit a single credible point.
  - dixego 4y ago
    If you don't think "Breitbart is not a credible news source" is not a valid point then oof, yikes, etc.
    - timapplesauce 4y ago
      I'm curious, what is a "credible" news source these days? I don't think any of the major news networks have much credibility any more, it's just that some may seem better than others simply because they align more with your particular personal opinions and biases.
      - 4y ago
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
My guess at what happened at Google. Stupid tech guys high up in the hierarchy with too much power that overrides what the marketing people are saying. One of the most amateurish things you can do is thinking that the data from product A is relevant for product B.
- justinclift 4y ago
  Another bad source of ideas is sometimes business people without ethics (or just plain short term thinking), who don't understand or care about the technology, and override the people who do care and/or understand how things work.
  - AtNightWeCode 4y ago
    Yeah, very true, my naive view of G though is that they overvalue tech.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      I get the feeling they more just undervalue "everyday" humans.
permo-w 4y ago
in any reasonable society, these problems would be absolute cause for public intervention in the industry, possibly even as far as a publicly owned search engine. but somewhere along the way, corporatism has wormed its way into everything. the left, the right, academia, media, everything. and the message they've left is: criticise corporations all you want, but don't you dare suggest an alternative
- Snoozle 4y ago
  The thing I fail to understand about socialism and government as a form of alternative to corporations is this: Corporations are groups of people focused on a given goal. Your solution to a group of people making what you consider to be bad decisions or morally wrong decisions is to involve more people? People are the problem. It doesn't matter what they call themselves - a country, a government, a corporation, it's all people all the way down. Why will one of those supposedly be a benefit and somehow make better and more ethical decisions?
  - permo-w 4y ago
    not to be all "this is what they want you to think", but this is the very message I'm talking about if this was the 50s or 60s, they would have made this search engine publicly-owned, and today it would be a cherished part of society being threatened and/or deliberately sabotaged by the corporate right of politics, a la the BBC, or the NHS, or Medicare/aid, or libraries, or youth centres, or public schools, or whatever equivalent you have of those in your country
spencerchubb 4y ago
I stopped reading after the second paragraph. The author just started complaining about Breitbart and Epoch Times being in the news recommendations I'm not saying I endorse those news companies. It's just like... I thought this was going to be about google search or something that actually matters
- _eht 4y ago
  > I stopped reading after the second paragraph… > … I thought this was going to be about google search or something that actually matters That’s what the other paragraphs were for. #itgetsbetter
freyr 4y ago
Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became subreddits, blogs became tweets, homepages became Facebook profiles. And we’ve hyper-optimized the attention economy to keep us hooked on clickbait headlines and 30 second videos. The Web just bears no resemblance to what it was 10-20 years ago, and web search results are a reflection of that. Maybe there’s a way to restore the Web of old. But that seems like putting the genie back in the bottle. More likely, IMO, something will eventually replace the Web, and Web search along with it.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? Yeah, I wish I knew how to get back to it, but I think that's impossible without a big enough movement. Yes, I know about tildeverse and some other things but the countervailing network effect is just too big for it to be sustaining right now. The closest is Mastadon but it's not really that great.
  - Zak 4y ago
    What would make Mastodon more appealing for you or the hypothetical user for whom you think it's not that great? The main thing that comes to mind for me would be more people I know in person using it.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      I think I agree with that but also I think it needs something like groups like Facebook has. I only want to see gardening stuff today, for example. I do like the whole mood though... it's not the battlefield that Twitter is.
      - Zak 4y ago
jeff3dx 4y ago
DuckDuckGo is still better than Google. I haven’t used Google search at home in years. I recommend Protonmail for email. You have to pay a subscription but the reward is encryption, no ads, and they don’t sell your data.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
It used to be the case that people could simply pick which news sources they wish to subscribe to. At which point did we become complacent with subsisting on our corporate overlords’ algorithmic curated crap? I will never forgive Google for killing Reader.
jeff3dx 4y ago
I can’t believe people are still using Google for anything. Use DuckDuckGo for search and Protonmail for encrypted private email. Use Proton VPN for everything else.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
markers 4y ago
Started paying for Kagi.com recently and is very satisfied with the results. Visiting Google again after being used to Kagi is an interesting and uncomfortable experience, it's very easy to become accustomed to how much ads and irrelevant information Google actually displays. The ability to boost your favorite sites is a really nice feature, especially for developers. Also not having to sift through all the content-stealing websites and SEO scams is a huge plus. Recommended! (No connection to it, just happy user).
- FunnyBadger 4y ago
  Doesn't work with a VPN.
TheBlight 4y ago
I don't think Google search not performing as many people would prefer is due to technological short-comings of the platform. I wonder if a co-op model, for at least search functionality, is realizable in the near term. What I mean is using cloud resources to spin up an indexing/search interface with minimal management that can be used by any number of shared participants for a fraction of the total compute/storage costs. It wouldn't be purely decentralized in the blockchain/p2p sense but "decentralized-enough" perhaps to function much better for results people actually want to find. The costs would naturally scale with the desired level of decentralization.
johnmarcus 4y ago
I love how they say "We used to do X on some non-Google sight, it was so fun; but I can't do that on Google - so GoOgLe hAs FaIlEd anD iS BaD." Why not just use another site, that you know, isn't Google? Like they suggested, you can search Reddit, or you can search Tumbler, or you can find a Facebook group, or where we found this article: Hacker news. I miss the yesteryear when people didn't expect Google to somehow be the answer to everything on the web. Here's an idea: your fan sights can co-exist as well as Google. And the irony is, the authors own blog home page uses a dark pattern to try and convince you to subscribe to their newsletter! Talk about ruining the web for commercial purposes!
binbag 4y ago
DDG is fine. They addressed the fuss over them using Yandex as one of many sources particularly for Russian language results. I think we should be a bit more careful to not tar everyone with the same brush. I'd take DDG over Google any day.
enos_feedler 4y ago
Nobody is going to replace Google, the web that Google crawls will simply be replaced by something better (just as open and interoperable, but better in other ways). Google will have a less relevant, even non-existent role, in this better web. This is how powerful companys with moats eventually lose in the end. A structural change makes the land they are defending less valuable
midislack 4y ago
Google sucks, what do they even offer? Why replace it?
throwaway2056 4y ago
No one. Nerds/geeks do not need one. BTW, all nerds/geeks note that Google is not exclusively for you. Just walk to a cafe (not the one near FAANG campus). See those people with smartphone? They use Google. There are 100000x more such people compared to people that use substack. > is impossible to contact a human TBH, no one cares. I had friend that lost google account due to 2FA. But did they regret. No. It is only geeks/nerds that want to preserve their first email, photo for ever.
tiffanyh 4y ago
> Who is going to replace Google for us? No one. The only thing that could happen is Google is broken up like Standard Oil. And frankly, Google over the last decade has made moves under the assumption they will be broken up (i.e., making each division a standalone business and Alphabet as a holding company - when structured this way, it makes a forced breakup much easier).
polote 4y ago
Me. The initial web 3 (the semantic web) could have killed Google. But it never worked, for ux perspective but also for the offer point of view. The reality is that Google is trying to auto recognize things that humans could categorize themselves, and without a lot of work. And the owner of the information should not be the only one able to do that. We need more collaboration. The biggest pain is how to create a categorization system that works for everyone. I haven't seen any yet
LeonTheremin 4y ago
Eric Schmidt is working to ensure Google won't be replaced and by that he means he will disable the semiconductors of anyone who tries. You don't own your Intel/AMD/Apple/Qualcomm device. Only Russia and China have their own independent semiconductor fabs, so only they can, maybe, replace Google.
mancerayder 4y ago
Google became more and more of a narrow nightmare over time, to the point that people have started added reddit to their search keyword since the results have become so controlled away from the search and towards some paid content or authoritative source (which usually is outdated). But my question is why can't duckduckgo be the replacement? The worry is that Google implicitly rewards some content over other content with views, and therefore promotes some production over other production. As another user wrote intelligently in this thread: "At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources, hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the author of the freshness of summer produce, it's because that's the kind of content that Google will give a high ranking"
jrochkind1 4y ago
> about how the best way to use Google was to use it to search Reddit, but those are just random internet strangers, so that’s not super useful for finding the answer to anything. > I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit. Wait, weren't those humans cultivating the Yahoo directory also just random internet strangers?
BeautifulWorld 4y ago
There's nothing wrong with Epoch Times as a news source, certainly nothing more biased & skewed than the New York Times.
Einstant 4y ago
I’m intrigued. It looks open for tackling and there is already, a product that very few people know about. From what I have heard it was built at Netflix, was inspired by Sphinx’s-gravity, Mentat, and CQRS knowledge base software solutions I.e: JanusGraph/Galileo. A form of Senantic-Persistence with Hybrid Index Memory appending A secondary index via the FoundationDB HTAP tuplestore layer as a service. From what I heard, they broke PostcresQL and cosmos. Very similar to gremlin, but Gremlin, like this product they say it’s about to be bought by Tim Draco. It’s a search engine, I saw the snapshot I swear. QIt’s a Webflow meets OpenAI Erlang Web service with React front end and a Lucene layer for Prompt transpilation at the sink
bergenty 4y ago
Google is great, I don’t think it needs replacing.
zivkovicp 4y ago
The internet itself has changed vastly over the last 25 years, so it is expected that the biggest internet companies have adapted as well. There is no doubt that Google et al. are better than ever in terms of technology and operational excellence; and ever further from their original mission statements... but isn't that normal? I don't like Google. I was wary when they entered the blogsphere ~2004 with "Blogger", but for me it was the DoubleClick acquisition that solidified my mistrust of them, and everything else since has only added to that opinion. None of it matters though, they are in business to make money, not win our hearts. If you don't like them, don't use their products, that is the only way to make a difference. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
BurningPenguin 4y ago
Maybe that Google News thing is country specific? Here in Germany it's somewhat balanced. Yes, there is trash like the BILD, but there's also more reliable ones like Spiegel, NDR or Süddeutsche. What's more annoying are the comment and reactions features which Microsoft News started to use. It's filled with angry faces and very questionable comments. From conspiracy nutjobs to the far right with their racist and inhuman nonsense. And of course absolutely no moderation whatsoever. But regardless of that, i also noticed the search quality on Google going down. On some occasions i have trouble finding things. That's when i switch over to alternatives.
gorbypark 4y ago
Are there any promising search algorithms/crawlers out there? Obviously one of Google's advantage is the size of their index, but I would like (and probably pay) for a search engine that was as good as Google used to be, but only indexed a small portion of the internet that interests me. Maybe a business model of accepting payment to index certain domains could work.
- baggachipz 4y ago
  https://kagi.com https://kagi.com Feel free to thank me later.
FunnyBadger 4y ago
Well, corporations have finite lifespans just like all things biological. The average lifespan of an established corporation is only about 20 years. The average lifespan of a new company is only 10 years. So anything that lasts longer is living on borrowed time. It's like reaching your 50s-60s which when the 2nd derivative of death goes into overdrive. Only by surviving that period is there evidence as proof of life that you are doing something right or had good genes. The same for corporations and then 10-20 year period. So Google in exactly in this cusp. They may not survive it but "that will be that" without moral or ego judgement. If they die now, it's simply that they didn't not find the magic elixir of life or purpose or business model. I think the handwriting about that is already on the wall - they did NOT and we are merely watching its decline. It just happens. The best way to avoid the problems of dependency on an entity is to not become dependent in the first place. Just like allowing one to be coddled and never growing up is a bad long-term strategy because that person's parents won't live forever and they will survive parents alone. They will be ill-prepared to do without but nothing in this universe can undo that reality once it happens. The answer is always for a parent to make sure your children are independent and well-prepared enough to live without you. Not doing that is misparenting. In the economic sphere, blindly becoming dependent on only one technology or vendor is similarly an error on your part. Either create alternatives or find ways to live differently that do not require it in the first place.

173 points by zdw 4y ago

Google is so big now that handling each and everyone of its properties is likely to have not one, not two, but multiple conflicts of interest. I'm not sure if even a government attempt to split it up can realistically work in any shape, sense, or form.

Avtomatk 4y ago

regarding search engines, i find andisearch.com as better option for some cases (working as a software engineer)

ImpulseGuided 4y ago
>better option for some cases Can you tell us more about the kind of problems for which you receive better search results via andisearch.com?
- Avtomatk 4y ago
  For general search, andisearch and google gives you the same results... in andysearch i don't need to try 10 different combinations of the same sentence to get the expected results like in google, in andisearch i get the expected results almost at the first try (sometimes at the second one) for very specific searches.

amelius 4y ago

OpenAI will.

leereeves 4y ago
Interesting. What do you mean? I know they compete in AI research, but has (no longer quite so) OpenAI shown any sign of competing for Google's cash cows?
- amelius 4y ago
  They made great progress in NLP, which is a big part of what Google Search is about. Also, they have the compute infrastructure for it.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    The problem with taking on Google Search is that of taking on the document corpus they build and the spidering / crawling work they do. Google and Bing are permitted by hosts to crawl, but new entrants effectively barred by most site's robots.txt. The barrier to entry is massive on that front alone. We really need a web infrastructure where the index (or the indexer) is somehow public and neutral, not owned by any particular corporate entity. This should have been built into WWW architecture from day one. But legislation could attempt to make it happen now. Companies should be free to innovate on top of it, but we're effectively in a state now where monopoly power has been granted to the people who got there first (well, close to it, anyways). EDIT: to be clearer, imagine a crawling infrastructure run by industry consortium. You pay a membership fee and usage / traffic fees and you get to upload a WebAssembly program that is called with the contents of pages every time the crawler hits them. What you do with them from that point on is up to you, but would presumably be something like building your own corpus for a search engine, etc. Moderation and regulatory oversight on the usages of this data would obviously have to be put in place. But to me it seems preferable to the status quo now.
    - amelius 4y ago
      How does DDG do it?
      - dekhn 4y ago
        they use bing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo and https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
tehsauce 4y ago
Sadly openai has fallen behind google at their own game. Google was able to invest heavily and optimize it's hardware and infrastructure down to the silicon, which has turned out to be the critical competitive advantage in AI. Openai is really struggling to compete with google because of this.
- leereeves 4y ago
  Are they struggling to compete? OpenAI's GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 are much better known than Google's competing models LaMDA, PaLM, and Imagen.
  - tehsauce 4y ago
    Unless they are quietly sitting on some really big work (which isn't out of the question), openai seems to be getting substantially leapfrogged by google. In terms of how "well known" googles language models are, most of us already interact with googles models daily via search. This gives them a massive market head start in users, and an enormous amount of data that will be impossible to catch up with unless google completely shoots themselves in the foot on this stuff.

ljlolel 4y ago

You.com

mas-ev 4y ago
It kinda sucks now but I agree.

addicted 4y ago

Google News has become completely worthless for me. It takes my YouTube usage and promotes news stories based on that. But that makes absolutely no sense. I go to YouTube to relax and/or look at things that are not so important. Sudoku solving, gaming news, and/or chess stuff. I used to go to Google News to have an understanding of what’s happening in the world. But now my Google News feed is overridden by stories about the same things I see on YouTube. Outside the main 2-3 stories of the day (which is invariably the top political news from the U.S. which one already knows about through the zeitgeist) everything else is personalized stories and hardly News.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dorfsmay 4y ago
Use google news in an incognito window?
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  You would need incognito, VPN'd, and non-JS tab to not be tracked by websites.
  - dorfsmay 4y ago
    In my anecdotal experience, FB is using non-logged in google search results to select which ad to show you. I assume google sells those to FB, based on IP address. But, my YouTube and Google search and ads, whole logged in, are based on what I do while logged in only. I might be naive but I have not seen correlation between my logged-in and my non-logged-in life within google products.
    - LeonTheremin 4y ago
      Another hypothesis: Silicon Valley is using your inner speech - obtained with electromagnetic surveillance and machine learning. People try to explain it away as Big Tech's blackbox AIs being good of making inferences from "public" data, but fail to consider that their body betrays their mind by leaking information under the skin, which can be picked up silently with microwaves.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I should try to keep track of how often I use search engines. Because it certainly feels like I use them less and less. I more or less know where to go for what I am looking for these days. At the same time I get less and less interesting/useful results from Google.

cudgy 4y ago
Is this a good thing? How does one discover where to go in the first place? Word of mouth?
al_borland 4y ago
Usually when I want to use a search engine it is to find quality products in an area I know nothing about. However, Google has become useless for this, as the results are flooded with "top 10" lists that are seemingly auto-generated and full of affiliate links to garbage on Amazon. Neva tends to surface better results on these kinds of things, but I'm currently trying Kagi, which groups all the "top n" posts into a section instead of polluting the entire results with them, which is nice. More and more I'm just giving up, going to a store I have a reasonable amount of trust in, because they care about their reputation, and pick something off the shelf... trusting their buyers did some work. It's a lot faster and easier and avoids a lot of the paradox of choice issues.

night-rider 4y ago

Kagi & Brave’s new search engine look promising. And there are many other alternatives like Marginalia, Yacy, Swisscows, Ecosia, Bing, DDG, Mojeek, Qwant, Startpage, etc

dhc02 4y ago
+1 Kagi. I expected to get bored and go back to old habits but it's been very impressive and has "stuck" as my default for quite a while now.

honopu 4y ago

Apple will

sedatk 4y ago
like Maps?
- falcolas 4y ago
  Maps has been consistently getting better. Don’t believe the meme.
  - sedatk 4y ago
    Last year it took me to a completely different spot for a popular restaurant in SF. That’s like the reddest of the flags.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      And last month Google Maps tried to convince me about 12 times to get off the highway and take back roads on a 900mi one-way trip because of hallucinated traffic. OSM needs more good apps.
      - sedatk 4y ago
        Google Maps isn't great for navigation either, but I can easily vouch for Waze (also owned by Google now).
- honopu 4y ago
  Yes but maybe they learned something. I know their crawler has been out a while
- rvz 4y ago
  Not only that, Apple Search Engine powered by Siri.
- 4y ago

geekamongus 4y ago

How can you write an article dissing Google and not mention YouTube?

sk8terboi 4y ago

Arnie0426 4y ago

Google should not be using the same data from different products it owns - or at least give users an option. I really don't want my YouTube Shorts to be impacted by what I saw on YouTube. I don't want my Google News (as @addicted mentioned) to be impacted by my reading habits on YouTube or even my recent search results. Personalization is everywhere but I really hope that Google also allows for customization by the user. Till then, I really have to diversify my product usage from different companies to have some illusion of control.

axg11 4y ago
Having worked for a different FAANG, I saw the immense pressure to incorporate data from other products. I imagine there’s a big internal push to aggregate all data from across Google services. It’s an easy win for product managers looking for projects.

olah_1 4y ago

I really look forward to interfaces that let me use my own index of data from my network. Manyverse[1] and Iris[2] are good examples of apps that will enable this more in the future. I just want to search “harry potter” and see everything my friends have written about it. If I follow some institutions or encyclopedias, I should also see what they write about it. And I should be able to choose which sources I want to rank higher in search results. 1: https://manyver.se https://manyver.se 2: https://iris.to https://iris.to

zozbot234 4y ago

We need to recreate the DMOZ web directory - probably in a federated variety with multiple competing "editors" for any given topic area - before we can hope to really do better than Google/Bing/DDG web search. Human curation is the best and most resilient alternative to SEO spam.

dekhn 4y ago
akebono.stanford.edu will never die
- newaccount2021 4y ago

aftbit 4y ago

>Here’s the thing that made me write this - I used to load up Google News a lot, I’ve now switched to bookmarks. It’s one thing for promoting junk news sources, but recently I’ve seen them cary both Brietbart (known for historically running a “black crime” section!) and the Epoch Times (a disinformation site being run by an actual cult) spouting absolutely false covid denial. I can’t support this in any way. I’m done. It sounds like rather than a news search engine & aggregator, the poster would rather use a curated news service (e.g. CNN) that gives them a single particular viewpoint. Or at the very least, would like their sources to be vetted or editorialized in some way, as opposed to the original Google mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful".

throwaway5752 4y ago
Brietbart and Epoch Times are the opposite of information. Misinformation run by people maliciously trying to get people to believe falsehoods isn't the same as an information source. And the misinformation networks are quite expertly run, just like blackhat SEO was. Sputnik, Infowards, or NAMBLA shouldn't be on par with the BBC or WaPo and if you think otherwise you maybe should lower your redpill dosages! EDIT: Downvote away! Karma is useless and you can't kill the messenger! Kids: misinformation is not information. They people that use it are sociopaths and will lie like hell and gaslight you to keep up their scam. If you think the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, et al are on par with Jordan Peterson, Breitbart, or Infowars then you have been really poorly served in your life. You are in a disinformation bubble and you don't even realize it. Escape now, model-based targeting is not going to make it easier.
- dekhn 4y ago
  WaPo isn't really great, either.
  - throwaway5752 4y ago
    On what basis do you say that? I doubt there are more unbiased and reliable sources of information out there. Since every source of information has bias and will contain mistakes, I am just interested if they are 1) interested in telling me the truth or an agenda or 2) if they are as correct as possible and issue corrections when they are not. WaPo is world class.

cs137 4y ago

Fifteen years ago, Google was "the web company". They weren't about walled gardens; they were about the future, which was the web. It turns out they only liked it so much because, back then, Microsoft was bad at it, giving them a comparative advantage. We're living through another tragedy of the commons, but the culprit isn't human nature itself, so much as it is capitalism. The corporates have made sure they have absolute dominion over human usage of time and space, and anything they don't value (or that might represent opposition to them, now or later) dies.

convolvatron 4y ago
we didn't have to let them get between us
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I think leadership at Google back then truly did like it. And they continued to "mostly" like it up to about 7-10 years ago. During the time I was there (10 years from 2012 until end of 2021) I feel like I saw the transition happen, slowly. It got really contradictory and messy. In fact, Google Plus (2011-2013ish) was justified (in part) as an attempt to "rescue" the web from the enclosing grasp of the walled garden that is Facebook -- which couldn't be indexed, searched, and presented openly. (Naturally this was hypocritical [in addition to being a failure] but that was one of the motivations given for the project) Overall I think all of this had a lot to do not only with Google's positioning as an advertising company, but with the rise of mobile computing and mobile apps. The writing was on the wall when mobile use started to surpass desktop browser use. "The web" as we traditionally knew it ceased to be the primary interaction mechanism people were having with the Internet, and Google (and others) had to pivot quickly or they would lose the advantage they had. Google from 2000-2015 or so seemed to innovate on "the web"; from search to gmail to news to reader (and even arguably to g+) it was about pushing the limits of the tech and excelling at making WWW products. Then it became about making... nice apps. I guess? Story time: I worked on the Google (then "Nest") Home Hub. The original UI for it was written in HTML/CSS/JS and it was very well done by some super talented front end developers. My teammates were responsible for optimizing the Chromium rendering engine for that platform, to make it perform nicely on the bargain basement SoC we were using. We shipped this to millions of people and it was a success. A few quarters later the whole thing was ripped out and replaced with Dart & Flutter. The UI was identical, but bias and and ideology dictated that that was what the UI had to be built in (they said it'd be faster: it wasn't, it was more about making it so the same apps could be built for Android and Fuchsia as the same time). Multiple quarters were spent on a transition plan to rewrite this whole UI and hack up the firmware on the system to make this possible, throwing out 2+ years of work. So, yeah, you're right. Google was the "web" company. Now they're... I don't even know, but it's a lot about Android and mobile and also constantly chasing after what Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are doing. To the point that management was willing to throw out thousands of hours of engineering work done on a web app to replace it with a non-web version. That whole process left a bad taste in my mouth.

massysett 4y ago

Google News is worthless because most of the worthwhile news on the Internet has been paywalled. The equivalent to the old Google News is Apple News, which has a pay tier. The issue with Google is that people expect too much out of it. The author of this page, like many others, expects that there are many people out there putting great information on the Internet and doing it for free, and all Google needs to do is find that information. The problem is that getting good information is hard work. People aren't doing it for free. Google is like the old Yellow Pages, or Computer Shopper. You didn't pick up the Yellow Pages looking for enlightenment. You were looking for a plumber. Google is great for commerce, and for other odd things. The author pines for the old Yahoo directory, but one reason Google superseded it is that if I were looking for a link to, say, the University of Michigan, on Yahoo I had to drill through a directory to find it. Google surfaces this kind of thing instantly and this functionality is something people now take for granted - which is why I'll bet most of the Google gripers still use it multiple times daily. The gripers are expecting Google is some portal to free world knowledge. Not going to happen, because knowledge is hard work and people don't like to work for free.

tyrfing 4y ago
Very accurate. I think the two big changes recently (10-15 years) have been around monetizing content and distribution formats. For monetization, vast amounts of stuff moved behind paywalls and other walls. The obvious one, distribution platforms are walled and inaccessible to Google; probably their biggest existential risk. On smaller scales, many specialists started to monetize their knowledge. Instead of dumping it for free on forums or blogs, now it's on Substack or many other outlets. What remains free is increasingly free for strategic reasons, so it's either ad-monetized (with poor incentives for quality) or released entirely for branding/promotional reasons. Distribution format is another factor that I only recognized very recently. A lot of content/knowledge is now accessible only as videos, podcasts, or similar, where in the past there would usually be a text version. If you only want text, you will miss a lot - stuff is on YouTube now, instead of small forums.
visarga 4y ago
Google is not a great tool for commerce. It wastes a great opportunity to close a sale by allowing garbage. They should just connect people to useful information.

jmyeet 4y ago

The fallacy of youth is that one of extremes. Things are never as bad as they seem. Likewise they're never really as good as they seem. The latter I think explains a lot of nostalgia and holding onto the first "past" we lived through. At the very least it's easy to view that as our baseline. What's "normal", if you will. I say this because as hard as can be to imagine how something like Google will cease to be dominant in several areas (most notably search) but I guarantee you somehow this era will come to an end. We've had tech dominance in the past. IBM is a good example. Microsoft is another. Even Oracle could count within its space. Dominance is a divergent state. It's also why I'm not particularly worried about wealth concentration in dynasties. In 100 years the descendants of Bezos won't be the ruling class in the same way the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans aren't. Relax. These things have a way of working themselves out.

cudgy 4y ago
So, don’t worry, it all work out? Vast wealth being sucked up by a few people while huge swaths of society have little to no ability to handle a $1000 financial hit? Passing the big ball of wealth between a few select people and families over history is acceptable? The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.
- badRNG 4y ago
  What the peasants didn't understand was that having a Monarch is fine. In fact, I bet in a few generations it will be a totally different royal family running the show.
- andi999 4y ago
  Na, just introduce a social safety net, like most of europe had for some time.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    So, put “those people” in the Matrix, so they won’t be a problem instead of addressing the real problem of a lopsided economic system is the answer?

happythebob 4y ago

Social media is a much bigger problem than any Google mining because social media naturally promotes the already dangerous both sides fallacies. Among other reasons.

stephc_int13 4y ago

I stopped using Gmail and Facebook about three years ago I stopped using Google a bit later (without any good alternative, Bing and DDG are almost as bad) But I still used Youtube a lot, I found interesting content there, and the algorithm mostly managed to keep me interested, even if many of the suggestions were crap. But for some reason it suddenly changed a few days ago, the suggestions are all crap now. Nothing of interest for me. Why? Probably an update or some ongoing A/B test ongoing. I'll miss the good suggestions, as I miss the old Google, but my plan is simply to stop spending so much time there, probably for the better. I am curious if anyone else have experienced a similar change.

chillingeffect 4y ago
I watched one damn video a few days ago on mark hammill and my feed was dominated by star wars drek... coincidence?
bombela 4y ago
Same, YouTube recently started promoting a lot more low quality videos somewhat in the same genre as what I like. It also consistantly hides videos from channel I am subscribed on. It upsets me so much.

analyte123 4y ago

If you think of the web as Google search's "content", they have let it rot. If Google had spent 1% of their AdWords payouts on encouraging people to post quality content on the web through e.g. better web authoring tools and protocols, they would have way less of a problem now. Perhaps the walled garden (that they did partially achieve with Youtube) is too alluring. They could have even tried to pay more for engaging web content that had lower bounce rates and that users came back repeatedly for, instead of just raw views from clickbait SEO. Obviously having turned the entire web into blogspam for ad money is no good for Google search and they are already having to turn it into "Youtube, Google ML content, and Google Maps user content" search.

bob1029 4y ago

Can we even describe a compelling vision for what the replacement google would look like? Trying to get my investors interested in a "non-shit google" requires a bit more color around the edges.

encryptluks2 4y ago
Fair enough. I think the issue is we need to get people involved in making it open, decentralized, fast and easy to use. We need DevOps people to make it easy to do things like host your own mail with CalDav and CardDav, email labels, nice interface, etc. Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting. Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers that don't sacrifice security and privacy.

UIUC_06 4y ago

> I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit. We had a lot of fun pages, fan pages, and so on. We need that again, our souls need that again. The "directory of the web" approach was already hitting its limits in 2000. I'm pretty sure you could find a "directory of the weird stuff" page somewhere, if you looked for it.

ac130kz 4y ago

Google killed itself with the switch from good ol' finely tuned PageRank to blackbox neural networks with messy loss functions. It's still light years ahead of the competition

hitpointdrew 4y ago
They killed them selves when they dropped “Don’t do evil.” And when they started working with foreign governments to provide censored versions of Google.
ModernMech 4y ago
> It's still light years ahead of the competition How do you figure? I never use Google and get through my searches just fine. What am I missing?
- ac130kz 4y ago
  Bing, Yandex and DDG just don't achieve the same level of relevancy for me. Their indexes are missing many good results that Google gives out straightaway
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Still not sure what I’m missing though since I find everything I’m looking for with those engines. Marginally better results (an opinion) doesn’t seem like “light years” better to me.
    - ac130kz 4y ago
      Maybe it is the way I search, but, as I've said, many websites are missing from their indexes. Yandex, the second best out of these, is also pretty bad at decoding the context of a search, seems like plain text search
ok123456 4y ago
Yandex gives good results.

jsnell 4y ago

The most concrete complaints in this piece appear to be: - Google News includes stories from a source that the author doesn't want anyone else to be able to see. (If they just didn't want to see those stories themselves, then there's an easily accessible "hide sources from XXX" entry in the context menu). - Generic complaints about shopping searches returning links to Amazon, or pages having referral links to Amazon. Might be true, but the case would be a lot stronger with some example queries that show this failure, with suggestions on the good content that is not being surfaced. Without the latter, how can we know that the results weren't actually the best that existed. - An insinuation that Gmail and Drive are "treating the user as the product". (Seems basically untrue; Gmail has incredibly few ads, Drive I think none, and data from neither is used for ad targeting.) - The author couldn't get individual customer support for "being the target of a really weird scheme". No details on the scheme. The person they didn't know whose contact details they got from somewhere wasn't enthusiastic about helping them either.

xkbarkar 4y ago
Yea I thought the same. Sounded more like fragile “milennial” complaint than an actual good article with solid facts. You could find 100 solid ways to distrust google. Didnt think the author hit a single credible point.
- dixego 4y ago
  If you don't think "Breitbart is not a credible news source" is not a valid point then oof, yikes, etc.
  - timapplesauce 4y ago
    I'm curious, what is a "credible" news source these days? I don't think any of the major news networks have much credibility any more, it's just that some may seem better than others simply because they align more with your particular personal opinions and biases.
    - 4y ago

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

My guess at what happened at Google. Stupid tech guys high up in the hierarchy with too much power that overrides what the marketing people are saying. One of the most amateurish things you can do is thinking that the data from product A is relevant for product B.

justinclift 4y ago
Another bad source of ideas is sometimes business people without ethics (or just plain short term thinking), who don't understand or care about the technology, and override the people who do care and/or understand how things work.
- AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  Yeah, very true, my naive view of G though is that they overvalue tech.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    I get the feeling they more just undervalue "everyday" humans.

permo-w 4y ago

in any reasonable society, these problems would be absolute cause for public intervention in the industry, possibly even as far as a publicly owned search engine. but somewhere along the way, corporatism has wormed its way into everything. the left, the right, academia, media, everything. and the message they've left is: criticise corporations all you want, but don't you dare suggest an alternative

Snoozle 4y ago
The thing I fail to understand about socialism and government as a form of alternative to corporations is this: Corporations are groups of people focused on a given goal. Your solution to a group of people making what you consider to be bad decisions or morally wrong decisions is to involve more people? People are the problem. It doesn't matter what they call themselves - a country, a government, a corporation, it's all people all the way down. Why will one of those supposedly be a benefit and somehow make better and more ethical decisions?
- permo-w 4y ago
  not to be all "this is what they want you to think", but this is the very message I'm talking about if this was the 50s or 60s, they would have made this search engine publicly-owned, and today it would be a cherished part of society being threatened and/or deliberately sabotaged by the corporate right of politics, a la the BBC, or the NHS, or Medicare/aid, or libraries, or youth centres, or public schools, or whatever equivalent you have of those in your country

spencerchubb 4y ago

I stopped reading after the second paragraph. The author just started complaining about Breitbart and Epoch Times being in the news recommendations I'm not saying I endorse those news companies. It's just like... I thought this was going to be about google search or something that actually matters

_eht 4y ago
> I stopped reading after the second paragraph… > … I thought this was going to be about google search or something that actually matters That’s what the other paragraphs were for. #itgetsbetter

freyr 4y ago

Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? The Web used to be very information dense. It was built from the ground up by specialists and enthusiasts, educational and governmental institutions, and groups of like-minded individuals. Then it became commercialized and commodified. Entire industries popped up to shovel mass-produced crap to masses of people through Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. Forums became subreddits, blogs became tweets, homepages became Facebook profiles. And we’ve hyper-optimized the attention economy to keep us hooked on clickbait headlines and 30 second videos. The Web just bears no resemblance to what it was 10-20 years ago, and web search results are a reflection of that. Maybe there’s a way to restore the Web of old. But that seems like putting the genie back in the bottle. More likely, IMO, something will eventually replace the Web, and Web search along with it.

guerrilla 4y ago
> Do people miss the Google of old, or the Web of old? Yeah, I wish I knew how to get back to it, but I think that's impossible without a big enough movement. Yes, I know about tildeverse and some other things but the countervailing network effect is just too big for it to be sustaining right now. The closest is Mastadon but it's not really that great.
- Zak 4y ago
  What would make Mastodon more appealing for you or the hypothetical user for whom you think it's not that great? The main thing that comes to mind for me would be more people I know in person using it.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I think I agree with that but also I think it needs something like groups like Facebook has. I only want to see gardening stuff today, for example. I do like the whole mood though... it's not the battlefield that Twitter is.
    - Zak 4y ago

jeff3dx 4y ago

DuckDuckGo is still better than Google. I haven’t used Google search at home in years. I recommend Protonmail for email. You have to pay a subscription but the reward is encryption, no ads, and they don’t sell your data.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

It used to be the case that people could simply pick which news sources they wish to subscribe to. At which point did we become complacent with subsisting on our corporate overlords’ algorithmic curated crap? I will never forgive Google for killing Reader.

jeff3dx 4y ago

I can’t believe people are still using Google for anything. Use DuckDuckGo for search and Protonmail for encrypted private email. Use Proton VPN for everything else.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

markers 4y ago

Started paying for Kagi.com recently and is very satisfied with the results. Visiting Google again after being used to Kagi is an interesting and uncomfortable experience, it's very easy to become accustomed to how much ads and irrelevant information Google actually displays. The ability to boost your favorite sites is a really nice feature, especially for developers. Also not having to sift through all the content-stealing websites and SEO scams is a huge plus. Recommended! (No connection to it, just happy user).

FunnyBadger 4y ago
Doesn't work with a VPN.

TheBlight 4y ago

I don't think Google search not performing as many people would prefer is due to technological short-comings of the platform. I wonder if a co-op model, for at least search functionality, is realizable in the near term. What I mean is using cloud resources to spin up an indexing/search interface with minimal management that can be used by any number of shared participants for a fraction of the total compute/storage costs. It wouldn't be purely decentralized in the blockchain/p2p sense but "decentralized-enough" perhaps to function much better for results people actually want to find. The costs would naturally scale with the desired level of decentralization.

johnmarcus 4y ago

I love how they say "We used to do X on some non-Google sight, it was so fun; but I can't do that on Google - so GoOgLe hAs FaIlEd anD iS BaD." Why not just use another site, that you know, isn't Google? Like they suggested, you can search Reddit, or you can search Tumbler, or you can find a Facebook group, or where we found this article: Hacker news. I miss the yesteryear when people didn't expect Google to somehow be the answer to everything on the web. Here's an idea: your fan sights can co-exist as well as Google. And the irony is, the authors own blog home page uses a dark pattern to try and convince you to subscribe to their newsletter! Talk about ruining the web for commercial purposes!

binbag 4y ago

DDG is fine. They addressed the fuss over them using Yandex as one of many sources particularly for Russian language results. I think we should be a bit more careful to not tar everyone with the same brush. I'd take DDG over Google any day.

enos_feedler 4y ago

Nobody is going to replace Google, the web that Google crawls will simply be replaced by something better (just as open and interoperable, but better in other ways). Google will have a less relevant, even non-existent role, in this better web. This is how powerful companys with moats eventually lose in the end. A structural change makes the land they are defending less valuable

midislack 4y ago

Google sucks, what do they even offer? Why replace it?

throwaway2056 4y ago

No one. Nerds/geeks do not need one. BTW, all nerds/geeks note that Google is not exclusively for you. Just walk to a cafe (not the one near FAANG campus). See those people with smartphone? They use Google. There are 100000x more such people compared to people that use substack. > is impossible to contact a human TBH, no one cares. I had friend that lost google account due to 2FA. But did they regret. No. It is only geeks/nerds that want to preserve their first email, photo for ever.

tiffanyh 4y ago

> Who is going to replace Google for us? No one. The only thing that could happen is Google is broken up like Standard Oil. And frankly, Google over the last decade has made moves under the assumption they will be broken up (i.e., making each division a standalone business and Alphabet as a holding company - when structured this way, it makes a forced breakup much easier).

polote 4y ago

Me. The initial web 3 (the semantic web) could have killed Google. But it never worked, for ux perspective but also for the offer point of view. The reality is that Google is trying to auto recognize things that humans could categorize themselves, and without a lot of work. And the owner of the information should not be the only one able to do that. We need more collaboration. The biggest pain is how to create a categorization system that works for everyone. I haven't seen any yet

LeonTheremin 4y ago

Eric Schmidt is working to ensure Google won't be replaced and by that he means he will disable the semiconductors of anyone who tries. You don't own your Intel/AMD/Apple/Qualcomm device. Only Russia and China have their own independent semiconductor fabs, so only they can, maybe, replace Google.

mancerayder 4y ago

Google became more and more of a narrow nightmare over time, to the point that people have started added reddit to their search keyword since the results have become so controlled away from the search and towards some paid content or authoritative source (which usually is outdated). But my question is why can't duckduckgo be the replacement? The worry is that Google implicitly rewards some content over other content with views, and therefore promotes some production over other production. As another user wrote intelligently in this thread: "At some point in the past, from what I remember, they started ranking blog content lower than more "authoritative" sources, hastening the decline of personal blogging. If you're wondering why every recipe on the internet has ten paragraphs on how this recipe is their grandmother's favorite and how it reminds the author of the freshness of summer produce, it's because that's the kind of content that Google will give a high ranking"

jrochkind1 4y ago

> about how the best way to use Google was to use it to search Reddit, but those are just random internet strangers, so that’s not super useful for finding the answer to anything. > I remember pretty fondly the era of the Yahoo directory, where things were cultivated by humans not looking for profit. Wait, weren't those humans cultivating the Yahoo directory also just random internet strangers?

BeautifulWorld 4y ago

There's nothing wrong with Epoch Times as a news source, certainly nothing more biased & skewed than the New York Times.

Einstant 4y ago

I’m intrigued. It looks open for tackling and there is already, a product that very few people know about. From what I have heard it was built at Netflix, was inspired by Sphinx’s-gravity, Mentat, and CQRS knowledge base software solutions I.e: JanusGraph/Galileo. A form of Senantic-Persistence with Hybrid Index Memory appending A secondary index via the FoundationDB HTAP tuplestore layer as a service. From what I heard, they broke PostcresQL and cosmos. Very similar to gremlin, but Gremlin, like this product they say it’s about to be bought by Tim Draco. It’s a search engine, I saw the snapshot I swear. QIt’s a Webflow meets OpenAI Erlang Web service with React front end and a Lucene layer for Prompt transpilation at the sink

bergenty 4y ago

Google is great, I don’t think it needs replacing.

zivkovicp 4y ago

The internet itself has changed vastly over the last 25 years, so it is expected that the biggest internet companies have adapted as well. There is no doubt that Google et al. are better than ever in terms of technology and operational excellence; and ever further from their original mission statements... but isn't that normal? I don't like Google. I was wary when they entered the blogsphere ~2004 with "Blogger", but for me it was the DoubleClick acquisition that solidified my mistrust of them, and everything else since has only added to that opinion. None of it matters though, they are in business to make money, not win our hearts. If you don't like them, don't use their products, that is the only way to make a difference. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BurningPenguin 4y ago

Maybe that Google News thing is country specific? Here in Germany it's somewhat balanced. Yes, there is trash like the BILD, but there's also more reliable ones like Spiegel, NDR or Süddeutsche. What's more annoying are the comment and reactions features which Microsoft News started to use. It's filled with angry faces and very questionable comments. From conspiracy nutjobs to the far right with their racist and inhuman nonsense. And of course absolutely no moderation whatsoever. But regardless of that, i also noticed the search quality on Google going down. On some occasions i have trouble finding things. That's when i switch over to alternatives.

gorbypark 4y ago

Are there any promising search algorithms/crawlers out there? Obviously one of Google's advantage is the size of their index, but I would like (and probably pay) for a search engine that was as good as Google used to be, but only indexed a small portion of the internet that interests me. Maybe a business model of accepting payment to index certain domains could work.

baggachipz 4y ago
https://kagi.com https://kagi.com Feel free to thank me later.

FunnyBadger 4y ago

Well, corporations have finite lifespans just like all things biological. The average lifespan of an established corporation is only about 20 years. The average lifespan of a new company is only 10 years. So anything that lasts longer is living on borrowed time. It's like reaching your 50s-60s which when the 2nd derivative of death goes into overdrive. Only by surviving that period is there evidence as proof of life that you are doing something right or had good genes. The same for corporations and then 10-20 year period. So Google in exactly in this cusp. They may not survive it but "that will be that" without moral or ego judgement. If they die now, it's simply that they didn't not find the magic elixir of life or purpose or business model. I think the handwriting about that is already on the wall - they did NOT and we are merely watching its decline. It just happens. The best way to avoid the problems of dependency on an entity is to not become dependent in the first place. Just like allowing one to be coddled and never growing up is a bad long-term strategy because that person's parents won't live forever and they will survive parents alone. They will be ill-prepared to do without but nothing in this universe can undo that reality once it happens. The answer is always for a parent to make sure your children are independent and well-prepared enough to live without you. Not doing that is misparenting. In the economic sphere, blindly becoming dependent on only one technology or vendor is similarly an error on your part. Either create alternatives or find ways to live differently that do not require it in the first place.