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I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.

• robertlagrant 3y ago
  Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites. I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.
  • Apocryphon 3y ago
    SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse standardization of web content to some extent. But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building. I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.