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$
It's FLOSS, comes both self-hosted and as a paid service and it's pretty good. Perhaps good enough for your use case?
1. Do you grab the country from the IP address before anonymising it? (I know VPN's are a thing, but we would like to know where our customers are coming from)
2. Why encrypt with a daily key instead of just hashing the IP address and storing the hash? Do you ever decrypt the IP address?
3. How have you found CloudWatch? I'm logging all requests to our own database, because it's so simple to do. What's the bonus for Cloudwatch?
Thank you for your questions.
Disclaimer: I also work on WTM from time to time, so I hope can answer these questions to some degree :)
1. WhoTracksMe is served via CloudFront, it only get's the IP that CF reports. To get the country, there are two ways that can be used. IP => Country mapping via a Database or additionally, because CF has multiple edge locations, if needed the you could see which edge location served the request, that will help you narrow down the location at a country level. Ofcourse, in both cases if the user is using VPN, you would only records the VPN location.
2. The problem we want to avoid is same IP with same hashing algorithm will produce same value. Which can then be used to co-relate user activity across days. Second, depending on what hashing scheme one is using, rainbow tables can be used to get back the original value. Therefore, to avoid, we used the approach of daily key. Now that I write, we could also use some hash + daily_salt. This should give the same guarantees. - Needs to be checked.
3. In this setup we are not using Cloudwatch but Cloudfront, which is the CDN provider from AWS.
2. Chances of a hash collision on IP address is pretty small (i.e. statistically insignificant). But adding a daily salt would decrease the odds, for sure.
3. Sorry, my bad, I meant Cloudfront, but it's Sunday night here and there has been wine ;) Same question: how has Cloud{{thing}} worked out for you? Is it worth the extra complexity?
The problem, as I understand GP, is not so much the fear that two different IPs might collide. The problem is that seeing the same hash, you know that it refers to the same IP, and as such you can correlate users/sites over time (a privacy invasion).
Now, everyone takes tracking for granted as if the option of not being tracked is some sort of unachievable goal.
That's the issue. It isn't tracking A as opposed to tracking B. It's tracking period.
I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product.
Why is this unethical?
And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?
The data in your server logs is data that people sent to you on purpose (by visiting a page on your site, or filling out a form on your site). If you collect data about people by sending them code to execute and send data back to you, they're not meaning to send you that data; you're doing it behind their back.
I'm glad you try to use data you collect responsibly, but if people aren't meaning to send you data, you're not entitled to it.
But I'd agree that letting the users use a public resource on a condition that they should allow arbitrary scripts to be executed on their side can be considered unethical.
If you walk into a shop, you have an expectation to be observed (both to check you're not shoplifting, and also to see how customers behave). They don't tell you that you'll be observed, it's just one of those things you expect when you walk into someone's shop.
We effectively have a notice on the front door that says we will be observing their behaviour while they're in our shop. They have every opportunity to walk away. I really don't see how this is unethical.
The problem is that this is a poor analogy to computer networking. I send you an HTTP request; you send me an HTTP response. I'm not visiting your shop; we're sending each other messages.
My expectation is that you won't follow me around, observing how long I look at certain parts of your message, gauging my reaction to different parts of your message. That this is the norm on the web is an unfortunate reality, but it doesn't make it okay.
I totally understand that that's what's happening behind the scenes, but that's like saying "I vibrated the air in specific harmonics" rather than "I said yes".
Could you please disclose the name of your company so I can be sure to avoid it like the plague?
If I were visiting your shop, it's totally reasonable for you to check to make sure I'm not stealing anything. But I can't steal anything of yours by sending you messages! (Setting aside the possibility of me hacking your server, but that's not what you're sending me javascript to check on.) Hopefully this expresses more clearly why I don't think the shop analogy holds water.
If "sending messages" is too primitive of an abstraction, we can imagine exchanging letters in the mail, or buying a newspaper, or something like that.
(BTW, I'm sorry for the unconstructive sister comment here - I definitely don't condone it.)
Maybe its time for shops to have EULA's covering the entire door before I open it.
That's not true: people have no idea what is sent and they're not choosing what's sent (with the exception of some forms.)
It's OK to collect display width, or estimate the time on a page even though people didn't send it to you on purpose.
all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product.
Then ask them. The same way companies did for hundreds of years before javascript tricks made people lazy.
These things can be achieved by simply talking to your customers. Why is that so hard to do?
Also, what makes you think that your interest in knowing your customer's behavior is more important than your customers' right to privacy?
Startup 101 "Mom Test" stuff. If you ask people what they think, you get their intentions. If you measure their behaviour, you get actual data. Talking to customers is excellent, but measuring what they actually do verifies that they're not lying to you because they're nice people.
>Also, what makes you think that your interest in knowing your customer's behavior is more important than your customers' right to privacy?
I don't understand this. If I ran a physical shop and watched my customers browse to understand their behaviour, no-one would think this was unethical, intrusive or violating their privacy. Why is it all of those things online?
Or is your objection just to the Javascript? If I "violate their privacy" by analysing server logs it's OK, but adding javascript to measure behaviour is "bad, hmmkay"?
> Or is your objection just to the Javascript? If I "violate their privacy" by analysing server logs it's OK, but adding javascript to measure behaviour is "bad, hmmkay"?
If you misuse any data you collect from anywhere, you're being a jerk. We're talking about collecting data in the first place. If you collect data by having a webpage visitor execute code on their own computer in the background and send data back to you, they clearly aren't meaning to send you that data, so you shouldn't do it.
> Startup 101 "Mom Test" stuff. If you ask people what they think, you get their intentions. If you measure their behaviour, you get actual data. Talking to customers is excellent, but measuring what they actually do verifies that they're not lying to you because they're nice people.
Startup 101 is anathema to treating people well. That some data about people could help you run your business better doesn't mean you're entitled to that data.
I respect that you have this point of view, though. In that I'm glad there are people out there fighting this fight. It needs to be fought, and we need to be questioning these boundaries.
Thank you for forcing me to question mine.
I'm purely talking about tracking your behaviour on our site. We want to know if you spent 20 mins reading our "about" page and then looked at our pricing page, and then vanished.
In terms of the rest... country is probably interesting, language preference is interesting (when do we need to translate from English because we have enough customers not speaking English), platform is probably interesting (purely so we can prioritise development to match our customer base). Where you got referred from is probably interesting, I guess.
But all of that we'll be getting from the http request and ip address rather than any malign tracking cookie nonsense.
I don't want you to know this sort of information. It's too invasive.
To folks saying to “Just use server logs”, it’s simply too hard to connect the dots unless you really know what you’re doing. Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majority of my users are dropping off at the second step of sending an invoice would be nearly impossible. Oh I could connect those logs to my api’s database, now I need a place to aggregate that data together. Maybe I could send all of that data together to elasticsearch and query with kibana. Now I need to learn how To set those things up.
Or I could use Matomo for some analytics real quick
GUI is nice, currently trying it out but not with php code but with embeded js like other tools use.
No it's not, just stop overarchitecting your stuff.
> Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majority of my users are dropping off at the second step of sending an invoice would be nearly impossible. Oh I could connect those logs to my api’s database, now I need a place to aggregate that data together. Maybe I could send all of that data together to elasticsearch and query with kibana. Now I need to learn how To set those things up.
You can log requests/responses however you want on your server, it doesn't have to be an nginx log. Just put whatever request data that matters to you into your database immediately after you send a response.
> Or I could use Matomo for some analytics real quick
"Not being a jerk to my website visitors is too hard."
You can still certainly be a jerk with data you collect in your server logs. (For example, I'd be pretty angry if you sold your log data to google or some other advertiser.) But your server is your computer, and the data in server logs is the data making up the HTTP requests that were explicitly sent to your server. That's your data, not mine.
Unfortunately I have a hunch aswell that not adding GA does indeed negatively affects SEO.
How would it be possible to prove/disprove this?
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.
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...
I suppose it's possible Google used GA stats and maybe even content fingerprinting to determine if certain pages should be indexed, or reminded from the index, and how often to crawl them if indexed.
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.
But by now, DDG is simply better. An important use case for search for me is to copy and paste URLs for discussions etc. Google will still show original URLs when I hover over their links, but when I COPY them, I don't get the URL, but some redirect link through Google.
At best, those are ugly and confusing when pasted into text. At worst, for e.g. image URLs, naïve processing may not longer recognize them as images because the suffix is buried deep in the redirect link.
DDG gives original URLs, As Sir Timothy Wanted Them.
Additionally, for image search, I get the impression that yandex gives more relevant results, although I don't have hard data to back that up.
Google is doing that for a very long time. I use this extension to get rid of it:
Yahoo?
List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
EDIT: He used to say to me: "[WhateverMyNameIs]! Nobody is going to pay a penny per newspaper article or a nickel for a song!". And I'd say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to pay to advertise on your personal curated bookmark list!". Turns out that one of us was right. And it wasn't me.
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.
Those are subject to the limitations of hierarchies [1]. They don't work well beyond a quite small data set. And for a directory curated by someone else, you would need it to be someone that organizes things in exactly the same way as you would. Tagging and faceting can help a bit with that in the early stages of growth, but ironically you ultimately need a way to search the contents of the hierarchy.
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.
The way I read statements that you replied to is with a silent prefix "based on the experience of folks I work/talk with". If one disagrees (i.e., sees different views prevalent), chime in and say so. There must be a way to express opinions that are between "that's my personal view" and "statistically significant, peer reviewed validation at this link".
As a personal data point, I see the same thing (around me) as the parent: opinions of Google tanked. 10 years ago an employee leaving for Google would be discussed with "wow" and "best of luck" feeling, while today it is mostly "well, at least he will be well paid" and " I am not yet ready to sell my soul". Just my 2c.
Every time I hear the contrarian anecdote in the form of: "well, I personally don't include myself in that generalization" my first question is whether that's intended merely as a report of a one-off experience, or if it's intended to be treated as evidence in favor of a different generalization. Virtually every time I see this type of Contrarian Comment, it's mute on this most important question and just confuses everybody.
But secondly I think the assessment of Google's reputation going negative is, by and large, a valid one. Though I might say the seeds of that started with the closure of Google Reader and the turn away from supporting RSS, which signaled turning away from open protocols more generally.
Similarly, I'm trying to eliminate the "I think" prefix from writing. It shouldn't be necessary to write "I think Google is evil". Of course the writer thinks that. They wouldn't have written it if they didn't. They can very safely just write "Google is evil".
If I write "Google is evil", I mean: "I think Google is evil, and I consider this an established fact that reasonable people shouldn't be disputing."
These are different propositions, and I might want to say either of them.
A policy of not using qualifiers like "I think" because of-course-it's-my-opinion makes it harder to make that distinction. I don't think the advantage of punchier prose is worth that loss.
(Note the "I don't think" at the end; other people might reasonably see the tradeoffs differently. Note the absence of "I think" elsewhere; I don't see much doubt that there is such a tradeoff being made.)
Like you, I think when someone saying 'Google is evil' he implies 'I think Google is evil'.
But someone saying 'back then Google was still admired by the tech people" or "Losing our support" is more ambiguous. Like if all 'tech people' or a majority of them think like him which or he represents the majority.
tl;dr: I'm fine with him saying 'Google is evil' but not with him saying 'the tech people think Google is evil'.
I don't know how to say this lightly, but taking personal affront to statements of opinion is not a sign of the insult of the opinion of the speaker, but a sign of the insecurity the listener has in their own opinions.
In other words, relax.
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.
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.
That meant to imply that google is neutral? The strong nuclear force is powerful that doesn’t mean anything on its own. It can be harvested for good electricity or bad bombs. Of course the consensus on this is almost universal, the consensus on google is much more ambivalent. Corporations may well be good or evil
I've switched to DDG about a year ago, and this just doesn't match my experience. Results are frequently worse. It's worth it to me but makes it hard to recommend to everyone still.
There's probably a wide range of how people use search; works for you doesn't mean works for everyone. As an example, your recommendation to use stackoverflow directly for programming queries works for you and is nonsense to me -- I basically never land on stackoverflow from my programming searches. The most privacy-conscious person I know continues to use google news search to his own dismay because he doesn't find anything else comes close for keeping tabs on what people are saying about products he works on. And my wife claims DDG is basically non-functional for her search needs, which have very little overlap with mine.
> I always question the agenda of people promoting this.
My only agenda is my growing frustration with using Google Search and the lack of competition. Web pages can be excluded now for not using any of Google's plugins for example. I see how Search is increasingly becoming a tool for plain old profit maximization. It is generally up to Google to do whatever they desire with their own products, however the belief that Search is fair and "democratic" is lost now. No matter how technically competent, Google is lost for me as a company I can trust.
So, where is my fair, convenient and comprehensive search of information on the Web? There's none on the horizon. This is very worrying.
Unfortunately, as long as it is a single economic entity, it is a single block. All of its parts strengthen and finance the same entity.
If the different parts want to be treated separately, they must become separated.
I consider it basic logic that if you do not want something to be under a control of a single entity, you shouldn't continue fuelling an entity whose growing power will ensure exactly that. Isn't this far less judging and more nuanced than "Google is evil"? The motto is basically just a catchy shorthand for that.
They weren't mature enough to do that for Microsoft or IBM back in their days of dominance, why would you expect that level of maturity now?
That's fine, but there also exist general sentiments in any group...
Imagine if they scrubbed search results for child immigrant detention camps, or My Lai, etc. in the US
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".
You might get a lot of gratification out of avoiding giving Google your data but the reality is most traffic is coming from people who will choose convenience.
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?
Perhaps. As I said, YouTube rules video and video search, there's no point arguing that. It just bothers me that as a consumer I have to go through ads the revenue of which doesn't benefit creators, and that lots of content apart from genuine video stuff such as memes, carpentry/hobby, and dance and niche content as you're saying, could be much better (and with incomparably more effective data use and accessibility) presented on a fsking web page rather than on 1960's linear TV shows with ad interstitials, noisy video suggestions, etc.
This is easiest to check by using the "-site:youtube.com" parameter, but they also show up for certain queries (try "news") or if you scroll far enough down the page.
You’ve clearly never tried to use the reddit search. It is almost guaranteed NOT to give you meaningful results.
The benefit of using a search engine is knowing that it will give you the results you want, and not having to rely upon the sites’ own search implementations.
That obviously does not imply that one needs to use Google specifically, but I commonly will add “reddit” to a search query on any search engine to get the results I’m looking for.
In the end there isn't much new content worth searching
True, and the old content that's actually worth reading seems to be getting more difficult to find.
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)
> "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale, Social, Search Engine": 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
> Aardvark Mulls Over A $30+ Million Offer From Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980607
> Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118132
That’s not quite right. There are plenty of tech people who stopped admiring google much earlier (shuttering of google reader was probably what keys me into where they were ultimately heading, and I’m sure many others saw things much earlier). On the other front, G$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
You might find wiby.me interesting then
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.
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.
However I do find Google's lack of relevancy way (compared to itself few years ago) more stark.
It seems they are trying to differentiate, see also Google+, stadia etc, just not being very successful.
Sure, it's less than the ad business but it's doubled in 3 years, surely that's a healthy rate of growth?
Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to use it when they are adults? Will Windows hold on to its OS crown?
Just look how many front-page carousel blockbusters on Steam still only support Windows.
I game on macOS and things are slowly getting better, but macOS is still mostly relegated to Aspyr ports. I'd be reluctant to claim that Windows is dying to youngsters until the state of gaming radically changes.
Haven’t tried desktop Linux in 20 years, hopefully it’s gotten better. Back then it was common to have to seek out and compile your own drivers to get network, audio, printer type drivers working lol.
At scale, Apple is too mercurial to be a sole source supplier. Chrome is interesting, but there isn’t a ton of adoption outside of schools.
At this point, all my heavy duty productivity work happens on Windows. The Macbook is mostly used only when I'm working away from my desk.
87.76 percent.
Not everyone is going to pay a massive premium for Macintosh no matter its alleged advantages.
What are the advantages anyway? I used it for a while and came away mystified. Is it all about the appearance? They spend so much effort on its appearance that I suspect that's a big part of it. It does look and feel much nicer than a typical laptop.
From a practical point of view, it felt like playing Candyland. Big silly icons bouncing around, stuff like that. The Unix shell is nice, but you can get that cheaper and better elsewhere.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-was-right-google-...
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.