Facebook scored the mortal wound on the web — they reinvented a bigger, badder AOL closed garden.
This statement is an oxymoron.
"Tech giants" hobble the open principles of the internet by their own existence, persistence and, by-definition, over-bearing influence.
Any entity genuinely concerned with preserving open principles would seek to limit its growth far-prior to where Google is now, and eliminate the pervasiveness of its influence, favouring and encouraging the results of diverse decentralisation over narrow centralisation.
Google and Facebook are the antithesis of everything the concept of an open internet stands for.
If anything Apple has does more harm than anyone to the Web by pushing the idea of native apps for everything served from a closed proprietary App Store that you can’t even side load around.
You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.
Good luck. The magic of the internet is that everything is public and interlinked.
Usually within a company the incentives are such that information is more tightly controlled. A software engineer doesn't see purchase orders and an HR specialist doesn't see software assignments. Usually a directory is more useful than a search within a company. Obviously there are exceptions.
A real hero knows when to resist the fear and borrow the power from the giants.
Just because it's what's "always" happened before, doesn't mean we can't do better.
This being the case is the very driving force of any innovation.
Your statement seems like defeatism wrapped in a pretty bow of faux-insight.
A tendency toward giants is also not necessarily a sustainable state of affairs.
Once technology becomes sufficiently advanced and pervasive, the window of time available for a giant to gestate, before the next giant-level disruption, inevitably shrinks to the point the system reaches an equilibrium of innovational equanimity and balance.
This is ordinary and expected, and parallels can be seen anywhere in nature.
The - relatively-brief - "time of giants" of human progress may soon be coming to a close.
I don't think we need a real hero here, we need end-user solidarity perhaps in the form of public policy and market regulation. Humans would have more freedom on the internet if corporate giants didn't.
Fixed it for you.
EDIT: typo
This. This right here.
It seems lately that Google has just become Yet Another Large Software Firm, with everything that that implies.
Most of my searches result in a wall of sales or product pages. Hardly 'open' when they turned it into glorified yellow pages
These companies -- all of them -- are fucking with each other. None of us matter in the end. It's all about which company can screw the other out of engagement and eyeballs.
Meanwhile Firefox, the open web, open source, right to repair, and digital ownership all wither away.
Well that is kind of how media companies compete against each other, but the key question is: is it beneficial or harmful to the public?
You could argue that Apple is acquiring users who they then lock in, sell to advertisers and developers (for a 30% cut on the App store) and monetize with service subscriptions, but you can also argue that half of Apple's profit is still from hardware sales, that apps and services are a big reason for buying that hardware, so Apple is still beholden to its hardware customers to some extent.
And Google has https://wellbeing.google as well as associated features in Android, and Apple has also implemented "screen time" tracking and limits.
> And, when I asked about whether the Chinese model of the internet - much more authoritarian, big on surveillance - is in the ascendant, Pichai said the free and open internet "is being attacked". Importantly, he didn't refer to China directly but he went on to say: "None of our major products and services are available in China."
Google does run at least one semi-independent group to tackle such censorship, disinformation, propaganda, and abuse https://jigsaw.google.com/
Throughout this report we use the term “toxicity,” defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion. We specifically use the term toxicity, as opposed to words like “abuse” or “hate speech” for both practical and scientific reasons.
Scientific reasons? There's nothing scientific about a term so undefined that every person can have their own custom definition.
Does this mean any article about Google that does not criticize Google deserves this snark? Fwiw the snark is annoying not because folks disagree with it, but that saying it again and again and doing nothing is a trite form of internet me-too-ing or signalling. That Google depends on an ethically dubious set of assumptions is obvious; now how do we fix it and why are we talking about this here?
This was literally an interview by a real reporter, edited into an article. You might not like that the interviewer wasn't antagonistic (let's be real — most aren't!), but this is not a "PR submarine piece" by any sane definition of the phrase.
Google would have a walled garden if they could afford to lose the users and manufacturers that would revolt against it.
They lose the most if the internet balkanizes.
By balkanising the internet they can have a monopoly over offering ads to certain target groups that fall within their walled garden.
Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around. When they do that they put up some fences to make the experience a bit more like walled gardens, but the open web is still just a few seconds and a click away.
That's why Google instead reshapes the web as Google sees fit.
> Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around
No. It subsumes the web and replaces it with all things Google. It dominates all web-related standards bodies, pushes through half-baked Chrome-only APIs as "standards" and then presents them as fait accompli through Google-controlled properties like web.dev.
Because they are so dominate they exercise outsized control, but there are still a few others.
Data behind paywalls/logins is useless to them.
Google makes money selling ads yes, but their core product is search. Like a newspaper, which does journalism, and also has an ad department, or a TV show, with ad breaks, or a sports broadcast.
Do people think Google makes their search worse to... sell fewer ads?
This explains user-hostile deprecations like newsgroup search (a literal search engine they bought and abandoned), RSS Reader, etc.
In addition, the ever-decreasing visual distinction between organic search results and ads on Google SERPs is well documented. As is the ever-increasing encroachment of data collection into all their products. Look at how Chrome works with Google accounts now vs 5 or 10 years ago.
Google went from a search engine company who runs ads so they can afford to keep building cool things, to an ad company that runs a search engine because it provides provide data and inventory for its ad network.
Its not search.
A newspaper’s primary purpose is to inform the public, and make money while doing so.
Googles primary purpose is not search, and to make money while doing so.
Googles primary purpose is collect and sell data, and make money while doing so.
If the primary purpose was ada, then it would stop all of the wasteful spending on engineering projects with no relation to, and no hope of, making ad money.
Google is in the business of collecting data and selling advertising using that data. For the purpose of making money.
Search hasn’t been part of their purpose in decades.
Let me ask you this, has search gotten better or worse in the last 5 - 10 years? Has their data collection gotten more invasive or less over the last 5 - 10 years?
I think we both know what kind of company Google is once those questions are answered.
But since you asked: Compare Google search engine results over nearly two decades and a trend emerges: Results are filled with advertising and non-Google results are lower down. https://wapo.st/3dHj2Xf
There are firms which evaluate search quality by employing a huge corpus of queries and human raters. I trust those more than someone running a single query for a commercial search.
The reality is, the Web didn't stay static. If Google 2020 used the same exact search algorithm as Google of 2000, the results would be worse, because of all of the massive amount of noise and spam that's been added to the web since then, to say nothing of adversarial attacks. Google of 2020 is doing a hell of a lot to maintain freshness, index an exponentially bigger web, and defeat pretty much an army of blackhat SEO adversaries from spoiling it.
It's like saying Email spam is worse in Gmail or other clients. Compared to what? 30 years ago, there wasn't much spam being sent and spammers were unsophisticated. The fact that you see almost none these days, but still a few slip through, compared to standard IMAP in 1993 is irrelevent, because the email population was tiny back then.
I'll admit that the product search category in queries has over-the-top ads. But then again, this is the one area where even going back to 2000 era, Sergey and Larry justified ads by saying say that serving up keyword based ads is in a way, satisfying query intent. If I type in "toyota cars" and I get ads for 3 toyota car dealerships nearby, why is this completely wrong? It's very likely a strong buy signal.
Personally, when I'm doing product search, I go straight to Amazon, or I use Shopping.google.com (or Froogle back in the old days)
I can do my own cherry picking. For example, when looking for actual information, especially long tail information, Google search is way better than it was in the early 2000s, and unmatched by things like DDG.
Compare long-tail search vs DuckDuckGo. Try for example "the movie where a robot kid flies a spy plane". Google returns D.A.R.Y.L as top item. DDG doesn't even have it in the top 10. This is way bette than it was in 2000.
"who wrote the c64 game mule". DDG just gives me Wikipedia. Google gives me the Answer + Wikipedia plus related games to explore.
Or try "what is the moment of inertia of a disk", on DDG the snippet displayed in the first result is far less useful than the snippet Google displays. Plus Google shows actual diagrams in the results too.
Look, I'll be the first to admit they increased the # of ads for some queries (mostly product search, real estate, travel, etc) and are using questionable dark patterns that make ads harder to discern from non-ad content. But quite obviously to me, the non-ad query results have gotten ALOT better from 20 years ago, and it's just false memory nostalgia about how queries use to work on a much smaller, and non-commercial web, that thinks they were better.
I've been on the internet/web since the 80s. It was a marvelous time in the old days before commercialization, but also in many ways, it was far less useful and worse.
I’ve only been on the web since the mid-late 90s, but it has changed so much for the worse, perhaps not in usefulness, but in… Idealsim? I remember reading the hacker manifesto and it moving me. That crappy little text inspired so much in me. I just hope that in todays overly commercial, algorithmically driven, ML curated world, there is room for life changing chance encounters.
Sites are often not behind a paywall if you reach them via google (and only google).
Look at the google vs duckduckgo search results for this: "How a Convicted Terrorist used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Website to Identify Targets"
Medical doctors can't discuss possible treatments for COVID.
Medical doctors can't discuss side effects from vaccines.
Senate testimony where an alleged Ukrainian whistleblower is named is banned. If you even say the name, not even in any relevant context, you will get banned.
The list goes on and on. There is nothing "open" about the Google web. But again, I don't believe there's anything I or anyone else could say that would change your mind.
Google isn’t big brother, Google is my little brother.
The end result: As the web Google stole from dies off, Google increasingly has worse, less accurate sources it has to draw from.
Journalists are at the forefront of this, and you can see several countries moving to charge Google for lifting news content to combat this. But there's a lot of other sources on the web that probably won't be so lucky.
Not everyone in the world has equal financial power as a US citizen.
All right, then, enlighten us with your top ten. And if you haven’t already, I’d like to see where on the top ten you’ve put regimes like the Chinese government and the US government.
Edit: two reasons:
1) Because adtech is destroying society. Surveillance is never good. Ads as funding smears absolutely everything with perverse incentives that act consistently against both the explicit wishes and implicit best-interests of the viewers, and (it seems moreso every year) society at large.
2) Google is doing everything it can to protect and defend their control over said adtech, using all mechanisms at its disposal including a monopoly on Search, almost a monopoly (and veto power) on what defines HTML (Blink not Chrome), and like 70% of mobile platform.