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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's why I switches to running multiple browser profiles, along with multiple Google accounts when necessary. It keeps all those recommendations isolated from each other.
Just run Firefox and the multi container plugin. I also use the temporary containers plug-in which will open a new container with every new tab you open.
If you’re really bout it, get a few proxies and use foxyproxy to randomly route your tabs. Try to avoid too many fingerprinting prevention plugins because that actually makes you even more unique (according to effs panopticlick)
I wrote [1] to create disposable profiles for browsing, cleanly instantiated from pre-configured (with optional extensions) "root" profiles.
It's also convenient when researching a particular topic, as I can keep a dedicated per-topic browser instance self-contained in its own directory, for as long as I need it.
It does a good job in bypassing backend "personalization".
This is where Firefox Containers[1] rules. Just open all these sites in new containers and you can keep them siloed and apart (either not logged in, or under separate accounts). You can have as many as you want and have them auto-assigned based on the website.
It's actually an official Firefox project, although it comes as an extension. Though I think it should be a first class feature in the base install.
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.
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
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.
While I still use Google Maps to look up businesses, I have long preferred Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation in the car. The timing of the queues is much better. Google often left me driving with no idea what my next move was until the last minute. Apple Maps tells you right after you make a turn what you need to do next, so you can prepare. It's much more relaxing for me to know what's going on.
Apple Maps is also great for transit, where it supports it. In Tokyo (several years ago) it would tell me how much money to put on the ticket for the trip I was taking, which would have been pretty confusing otherwise. Not sure if Google has made updates, but at the time I don't believe they had this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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".
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.
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.
And religious organizations in America shouldn't be tax exempt. If you don't like misinformation then don't legitimize psychology since it doesn't treat most religious beliefs as a psychological disorder.
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.
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.
This makes a lot of sense, and thanks for the insight. I was at Google very briefly, but I bet if I mentioned my real name, it would ring a bell.
It'll be interesting to see the evolution of all these companies that've invested in mobile, now that mobile is so crapflooded, no one wants to pay for apps anymore. I don't know what the future of consumer computing looks like; I do know that I'd prefer not to have any part in it.
consider that your perspective might be biased by your temporal affiliation.
for anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the direction google was headed was plainly evident by 2004 (when it went public and gmail launched). google clearly saw the web as both a threat and an opportunity (much like microsoft before it), and deigned to control it, not cultivate it as a public good. google never "pushed the web forward" magnanimously, even if the leadership "liked" it at some point. the strategy was always to dominate the web (search itself was the kernel from which this strategy took shape), and "don't be evil" was merely cover for that, right from the start.
I would never deny a bias. But an organization like google doesn't have a singular mind or objective. it's full of a bunch of contradictory tendencies and opinions and motivations. And market forces aside, I think the bulk of the pre-Ruth/pre-Sundar leadership had a very pro "open web" opinion at least. And I'd say that even post-IPO they were able to mostly keep their mission statement (“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) compatible with their advertising revenue stream and market forces as a whole.
I just think that became untenable with the rise of Facebook and the rise of mobile. Or rather, they could not maintain the growth rate and long term security that investors demanded of them and at the same time do what they were doing. So they did what the market "demanded".
I think they're kind of lost now, though. I think we saw "peak Google" a few years ago.
> "...investors demanded... So they did what the market 'demanded'."
to be clear, the founders still had majority control, and so this was a proactive decision the leadership made to grow at all costs, to dominate the web. they weren't forced by investors or the market to do so, no matter the pressures surrounding them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, the European system allows you to use that for studying for little money, learning a new job etc as well. It’s not perfect but (western) Europe hasn’t seen this huge inequality growth in the last decades AFAIK
Wealth inequality is a separate issue to the dominance of Google.
I agree there should be universal health care and a social safety net. I think shelter in the form of housing should be considered a human right. A budget shortfall is built into your existence. This is to keep you a compliant worker.
But Americans aren't ready to have that conversation so my perspective is you're wasting your breath by having it. Half the country will die on the hill of stopping Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in taxes.
The only solution to this is labor organization. The government won't help you. Republicans are psychotic. Democrats are just the less terrible, feckless alternative who aren't actually interested in doing anything. Remember when Obama had a Senate supermajority and could've codified Roe v. Wade?
But I'm just not holding my breath that anything will materially change anytime soon and it's our fault.
Wealth isn’t sucked out of anything. If I build a product and sell if for $20, but it creates $100 in value (Let’s say some software that saves a person 4 hours a day of manual labor) I created $80 worth of value, for <$20 worth of profit, minus my costs.
When people who have benefitted from those productivity benefits then turn around and whine about how they aren’t getting “their share” of the <$20, or complain how it is somehow wrong that the wealthy can spend or transfer wealth however they like, I can’t help but cringe. The real societal problem is the modern education system is failing to educate people in basic economics.
This way of looking at things assumes that wealth is a finite resource, and that by some people having a lot it is depriving others.
Wealth doesn't work like that, though. It's not a zero sum game.
Wealth is infinite, and can be created from nothing by providing a good or service that people need.
I had a friend who was a multimillionaire, got there by building stone walls.
Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million, got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
I have a friend who's worth over a million, got there by working hard and saving his whole life.
Another friend who's worth over thirty million, got there by making web sites for auto dealerships.
Another one who's worth a bit over a million, got there by risking his life savings on opening up a winery.
A former neighbor had a multi-million dollar home. Also an immigrant. Got there by cleaning restaurant grease traps.
I could go on.
Wealth can be created from nothing. From something as simple as an idea.
The only qualifying factor is that you have to make something that other people want. It can be anything, a wall, a song, a good bottle of wine, an iron door, a NFT (ugh), ...anything.
There's no limit to wealth.
Our poorest today live like kings compared to those in poverty 100 years ago.
Because we've created massive, overwhelming wealth in this country.
And there's no end in sight. All we need is the willingness to do it.
To spend our time building up rather than tearing down.
Looking at someone's wealth and saying "that's not fair, we should destroy that and give it to others" is a juvenile solution that destroys societies.
I understand the temptation though. It's harder to create than to destroy.
It takes more intellectual rigor. It takes a leap into self ownership and responsibility.
That's hard to do when we've been taught from a young age that our situation is someone else's fault.
Class warfare is a tool that's used by conmen to gain short term power.
> I had a friend who was a multimillionaire, got there by building stone walls.
Your friend did not make that much money building stone walls. Your friend made that money acting as a middleman hiring teams of low paid workers (likely undocumented migrants) to build the stone walls while he received a handsome cut for little effort.
> Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million, got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
Not sure why you mention them being an immigrant. Are immigrants less capable than non-immigrants? Anyway, same rule applies. Your friend did not do this work; they hired people (most likely undocumented immigrants) and paid them under the table. They simply act as a middleman too, extracting the vast majority of the wealth while paying peanuts to the workers.
I bet both of your friends got government loans to go to college and took advantage of the free government CARE loans and possibly even received huge tax breaks for his/her business; virtually all of this government money is unavailable to his workers.
You certainly are full of assumptions about people you have never met and have no information about.
> Not sure why you mention them being an immigrant
Illustrating the American Dream. They started from nothing, worked hard, and made it big.
There's a reason why people from around the world are flocking to this country.
With hard work, good ideas, and grit it's possible to achieve anything.
Anyone has the ability to change their stars in this country. I've seen tons of examples. I've listed just a few.
Instead of being inspired by these examples, you lash out, angrily. Accuse some very decent people of treating their employees badly (which is completely untrue, by the way).
You accuse strangers, who are friends of mine, of all sorts of abuse, with zero knowledge.
What sort of anger and disillusionment drives that?
I hope you can overcome it.
By the way, some of those folks I mentioned made millionaires of some of their employees too.
Wealth will always be very unequal, see the Mathew principle - just like a few songs have the most listeners and a few books the most readers. And it's hard to stay at the top too, so the elites are always changing.
The real issue comes when the really powerful can inflate their and their friends assets at will.
The fact that the wealthy can invest into assets at will doesn’t seem problematic to me.
Who would be better at “investing” assets into a new venture: Someone who is wealthy and has a track record of operating successful businesses? Or a government bureaucrat representing the “will of the people” who ultimately makes his salary off the backs of taxpayers?
Furthermore, I recall reading once that wealth inequality was positively correlated with mental illness, even in the rich of a society.
As such, even if there is always some inequality, I think it is worthwhile to try to reduce it, although by boosting the lower part of scale. In other words, if you live in a world where only the rich have cars, you reduce inequality by making cars for the poor like Henry Ford, not by taking rich people's cars.
In the modern US, I think this would entail making housing and education and healthcare more affordable/accessible.
> In other words, if you live in a world where only the rich have cars, you reduce inequality by making cars for the poor like Henry Ford, not by taking rich people's cars.
Then Henry Ford displaces John Jacob Astor. You still have wealth inequality, in fact it might have even increased. But the poor now have on-demand mobility to any part of the country in a matter of days.
I don't understand the focus on relative wealth. Why should someone not have, to borrow a phrase, more money than God, if it's not being stolen from others. Why should ability and capital be envied instead left to its own devices?
but nor does redistributing the kings' wealth help the peasants.
Bill Gates's fortune split up among everybody in the US would be about $500 a person. You can't seriously think that would make a wit of difference in people's lives, it would disappear in a blip without lifting anybody over the poverty line, and that's even if it was spent wisely, which it wouldn't be.
What the peasants need are ways they can earn money, because money comes from productivity and the peasants will quickly need more than $500 times the number of billionaires consumed by the revolution. BTW most of Bill Gates's wealth is actually tied up in productive assets that are producing things the peasants need, and providing them jobs.
> BTW most of Bill Gates's wealth is actually tied up in productive assets
That's the problem. It's tied up, and it doesn't need to be. Unlike institutional investors those who are in the Forbes 400 don't need to consult shareholders or basically anybody, they are already past that point. In fact a family office is essentially just the billionaire and a couple of accountants...people resent them for not going double or nothing on moonshots.
Bill Gates isn't getting any younger, so is Warren Buffet and Munger. When will they open the floodgates? The Rockefeller foundation is still standing and the founder died almost 100 years ago
The damage to democracy can last for generations, though.
In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism. What they had was a filter-bubble where the people were constantly told that the cause of their problems was some particular scapegoat and the solution was more state control.
Social media produces these filter-bubbles in a far more powerful fashion. Worse, it's setting up conditions for a civil war where one big bubble is told that the problem is "The System" and the other big bubble is told the problem is "those lefties" and both sides are told the solution is to stamp out the other side.
The Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Carnegies never built anything like that. They built infrastructure, and leveraged economies. Oil, railroad, finance... not the same thing as social connection engines.
> In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism
You have a few misconceptions there. 19th century Germany wasn't a democracy, it was a constitutional monarchy with a very strong monarch. It was never socialist, it was social democrat (SPD). The actual socialist and communist uprisings were defeated, by the SPD collaborating with everyone, including the far-right Freikorps.
> Upon her death, Vanderbilt left her son, Anderson Cooper, almost her entire estate, which was valued at less than $1.5 million.
Gloria Vanderbilt wasn’t ultra wealthy by any means. Lots of retirees from modest backgrounds have $1.5 million upon death. My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of about a million dollars.
You think the ruling class is only predicated on inherited wealth (at death, ignoring what could be given over a lifetime or via trusts)? Your example is that someone over a million people regularly listen to for an hour each work-night is not part of the ruling class? And that one branch of the family tree that was embroiled in litigation from when she was a minor over her trust and had 4 failed marriages may have only left seven-figures is evidence of total decline?
Meanwhile, the median estate is under $300k and the median bequest is under $100k. The top one percent have seven figure bequests.
Also, she left her fancy NYC condo to someone else, which was probably worth more than the amount she left Anderson. Which actually does put her in line with most Americans, in that their wealth is primarily in a home.
> My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of about a million dollars.
You are a fool if you think time will balance scales of inequality. [1]
Sure, Musk and Bezos are the richest men in the world, according to publicly available data. That doesn't mean these other families are all poor. Some have squandered their wealth. Others have magnified it. And all that still have it have become better at hiding it from the public, something that the "new" rich don't have much experience or capability in.
The poor still, well, are poor. New kings for old kings doesn't change shit. But alas we should wait out the neo-feudal age, that's your plan?
They do work themselves out, but sometimes the timeline for that can be 50+ years. Which is basically your entire youth and productive lifetime. It is pretty cold comfort to know that income inequality that makes home ownership an impossibility right now will work itself out in a few decades.
This comment is needlessly derisive / combative (and frankly has no place on HN). There are many reasons why one would choose to live in a more populated area.
> They do work themselves out, but sometimes the timeline for that can be 50+ years.
So if Google ends up being dominant for 50+ years does it really matter? I mean, does that somehow materially impact your life?
> It is pretty cold comfort to know that income inequality that makes home ownership an impossibility right now will work itself out in a few decades.
That's a completely separate issue and one I agree with you on. But the US in particularly has too many brain-broken temporarily embarrassed millionaires who will die on the hill to avoid Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in tax to pay for th esociety that made his wealth possible and continues to make it possible.
This is late-stage capitalism. Some argue it's the beginning of neo-feudalism. I'm not quite that pessimistic whiele agreeing the situation sucks.
What people in power need to realize is the ultimate valve for extreme wealth inequality is violence. War or revolution is the ultimate form of wealth redistribution.
But the political landscape in the US is one where just arguing that trans people shouldn't be murdered gets you labelled as "far left". America is not ready to have the conversation that a capitalist organization of the economy is screwing them over.
Personally if I was 22 and just graduating college with huge debt, no prospect of owning a house and income that means living paycheck to paycheck I would just... leave [1].
> These things have a way of working themselves out.
Yes, but how they work themselves out and where they work themselves out to matter quite a lot.
Also, both of those things, the how and the where, are not random. They are influenced dramatically by the blood, sweat, and tears of people with ideals and the willingness put in the work.
Those people putting in the work, are they people who share your vision of what the world should be like?
If you don't participate in the process, you can't complain about the result.
> "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."
Andrew Carnegie believed in 100% inheritance tax, on the condition that the money raised was used to provide a level playing field for absolutely everyone to have the same opportunities. I can't imagine many/any of today's billionaires believing this, given that pretty much all of them have depended on the backing of generational wealth and the unequal opportunities that gave them to make their fortunes.
> I can't imagine many/any of today's billionaires believing this,
Haven't they all signed the Giving Pledge?
> given that pretty much all of them have depended on the backing of generational wealth and the unequal opportunities that gave them to make their fortunes.
While it is true that most of them come from upper-middle class backgrounds, AFAIK the vast majority of the fortunes of Page, Brin, Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes from their companies.
Unless you mean generational wealth as in "they were rich enough to pay for a university that costs $80,000/year", at which point, yeah I could see that.
While choosing to give most of your money to various charities, generally of your choosing and while you are still alive to see the benefits, is all well and good, it is very different from favouring having all your money being taken on death by a government you trust enough to use that money provide equal opportunities to all.
> "AFAIK the vast majority of the fortunes of Page, Brin, Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes from their companies."
For most of today's billionaires it isn't just an expensive education, it is family conenctions, e.g. Gates being set up with IBM via his mum, or family investments, e.g. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page etc. having parents who gave or loaned them the money to start their companies (not to mention the safety net they'd have had should they have failed) - this isn't "self-made" in the traditional sense.
Honestly, I think the fallacy is to just believe that Google's dominance will magically end.
I have a different take, which is that tech leadership rarely changes in a particular technology, it's just that new technologies arrive that displace the old. Microsoft is still absolutely dominant in desktop operating systems. IBM has 90%+ marketshare in mainframes. Oracle is still the top enterprise database.
So we seem to see these posts periodically now on HN, about "who is going to displace Google in search?" Sorry, that ain't happening. First, despite HN missives, Google still tends to work better than all the competition. Second, the startup costs to have a viable generic Internet search engine are now astronomical, to the point that hardly any VC would invest in a startup whose approach would be "just be a better Google" WRT search.
So the question really is, "what new technology could displace Internet search?" And it's very, very difficult for me to come up with an answer to that looking out 50-75 years or so. In addition, companies now are much more aware of "disruption" theories and will actively try to acquire their disrupters (e.g. Google's acquisition of Android and Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were key to keep them from getting displaced in mobile).
I would easily make the bet that Google (or potentially their government-induced offspring) will continue to totally dominate search 50 years from now.
Now language models are on the rise. They allow access to information (including verified information from trusted sources) in a more accessible and adaptive format. I think Google isn't happy for losing the ad space but the interface we use to search will improve a lot thanks to big language models. I think they are too expensive to deploy now but will be everywhere soon. LM's will be the new "operating system".
>So we seem to see these posts periodically now on HN, about "who is going to displace Google in search?" Sorry, that ain't happening.
Google is no longer focused on its core business >Search. They have 99 other projects they are focused on.
For example there is no dedicated search for Audio content on Google Search like there is for Images and Videos. There is no way to search comments on YouTube and there is no way to search your own YouTube playlist! This are just few shameful examples on how Google no longer thinks and behaves like a Search company.
I really like Larry and Sergey but unfortunately for them and Google the current Google's approach is not good for the future of Web. Maybe the culprit is ad business model, maybe it is their de facto Internet Search monopoly or maybe both but if Google is how the future of Web is going to look like then we are all in a big trouble.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think that is not true in the EU at least. There are many credible news sources in the Northern European countries, that I follow, and they have different political leanings.
Unfortunately, in the United States all of our major news outlets are extremely biased and have been caught red-handed manipulating or outright lying about the news.
The only approach I've found is to consume a few news sources through the lens of their known biases in an attempt to get something resembling the whole picture.
The Epoch Times isn’t just a “source” that some people don’t want to see. And gmail etc has a shit ton of ads. This comment isn’t a reasonable critique of the article it’s denialism at best
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.
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.
228 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadCan you tell us more about the kind of problems for which you receive better search results via andisearch.com?
I know they compete in AI research, but has (no longer quite so) OpenAI shown any sign of competing for Google's cash cows?
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.
Factual.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have any sources or information I can look up to study this?
If you’re really bout it, get a few proxies and use foxyproxy to randomly route your tabs. Try to avoid too many fingerprinting prevention plugins because that actually makes you even more unique (according to effs panopticlick)
It's also convenient when researching a particular topic, as I can keep a dedicated per-topic browser instance self-contained in its own directory, for as long as I need it.
It does a good job in bypassing backend "personalization".
[1] https://github.com/atomontage/chrome-private
It's actually an official Firefox project, although it comes as an extension. Though I think it should be a first class feature in the base install.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
I'm not sure if even a government attempt to split it up can realistically work in any shape, sense, or form.
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.
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.
OSM needs more good apps.
Apple Maps is also great for transit, where it supports it. In Tokyo (several years ago) it would tell me how much money to put on the ticket for the trip I was taking, which would have been pretty confusing otherwise. Not sure if Google has made updates, but at the time I don't believe they had this.
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.
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
2: https://iris.to
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".
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.
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.
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.
It'll be interesting to see the evolution of all these companies that've invested in mobile, now that mobile is so crapflooded, no one wants to pay for apps anymore. I don't know what the future of consumer computing looks like; I do know that I'd prefer not to have any part in it.
for anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the direction google was headed was plainly evident by 2004 (when it went public and gmail launched). google clearly saw the web as both a threat and an opportunity (much like microsoft before it), and deigned to control it, not cultivate it as a public good. google never "pushed the web forward" magnanimously, even if the leadership "liked" it at some point. the strategy was always to dominate the web (search itself was the kernel from which this strategy took shape), and "don't be evil" was merely cover for that, right from the start.
I just think that became untenable with the rise of Facebook and the rise of mobile. Or rather, they could not maintain the growth rate and long term security that investors demanded of them and at the same time do what they were doing. So they did what the market "demanded".
I think they're kind of lost now, though. I think we saw "peak Google" a few years ago.
to be clear, the founders still had majority control, and so this was a proactive decision the leadership made to grow at all costs, to dominate the web. they weren't forced by investors or the market to do so, no matter the pressures surrounding them.
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.
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.
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.
The fallacy is in thinking that society will always be benevolent and never needs to be corrected or reconsidered.
I agree there should be universal health care and a social safety net. I think shelter in the form of housing should be considered a human right. A budget shortfall is built into your existence. This is to keep you a compliant worker.
But Americans aren't ready to have that conversation so my perspective is you're wasting your breath by having it. Half the country will die on the hill of stopping Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in taxes.
The only solution to this is labor organization. The government won't help you. Republicans are psychotic. Democrats are just the less terrible, feckless alternative who aren't actually interested in doing anything. Remember when Obama had a Senate supermajority and could've codified Roe v. Wade?
But I'm just not holding my breath that anything will materially change anytime soon and it's our fault.
When people who have benefitted from those productivity benefits then turn around and whine about how they aren’t getting “their share” of the <$20, or complain how it is somehow wrong that the wealthy can spend or transfer wealth however they like, I can’t help but cringe. The real societal problem is the modern education system is failing to educate people in basic economics.
Wealth doesn't work like that, though. It's not a zero sum game.
Wealth is infinite, and can be created from nothing by providing a good or service that people need.
I had a friend who was a multimillionaire, got there by building stone walls.
Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million, got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
I have a friend who's worth over a million, got there by working hard and saving his whole life.
Another friend who's worth over thirty million, got there by making web sites for auto dealerships.
Another one who's worth a bit over a million, got there by risking his life savings on opening up a winery.
A former neighbor had a multi-million dollar home. Also an immigrant. Got there by cleaning restaurant grease traps.
I could go on.
Wealth can be created from nothing. From something as simple as an idea.
The only qualifying factor is that you have to make something that other people want. It can be anything, a wall, a song, a good bottle of wine, an iron door, a NFT (ugh), ...anything.
There's no limit to wealth.
Our poorest today live like kings compared to those in poverty 100 years ago.
Because we've created massive, overwhelming wealth in this country.
And there's no end in sight. All we need is the willingness to do it.
To spend our time building up rather than tearing down.
Looking at someone's wealth and saying "that's not fair, we should destroy that and give it to others" is a juvenile solution that destroys societies.
I understand the temptation though. It's harder to create than to destroy.
It takes more intellectual rigor. It takes a leap into self ownership and responsibility.
That's hard to do when we've been taught from a young age that our situation is someone else's fault.
Class warfare is a tool that's used by conmen to gain short term power.
It ends up destroying everything.
Your friend did not make that much money building stone walls. Your friend made that money acting as a middleman hiring teams of low paid workers (likely undocumented migrants) to build the stone walls while he received a handsome cut for little effort.
> Another friend who's an immigrant, worth over ten million, got there by making custom iron and steel windows and doors.
Not sure why you mention them being an immigrant. Are immigrants less capable than non-immigrants? Anyway, same rule applies. Your friend did not do this work; they hired people (most likely undocumented immigrants) and paid them under the table. They simply act as a middleman too, extracting the vast majority of the wealth while paying peanuts to the workers.
I bet both of your friends got government loans to go to college and took advantage of the free government CARE loans and possibly even received huge tax breaks for his/her business; virtually all of this government money is unavailable to his workers.
> Not sure why you mention them being an immigrant
Illustrating the American Dream. They started from nothing, worked hard, and made it big.
There's a reason why people from around the world are flocking to this country.
With hard work, good ideas, and grit it's possible to achieve anything.
Anyone has the ability to change their stars in this country. I've seen tons of examples. I've listed just a few.
Instead of being inspired by these examples, you lash out, angrily. Accuse some very decent people of treating their employees badly (which is completely untrue, by the way).
You accuse strangers, who are friends of mine, of all sorts of abuse, with zero knowledge.
What sort of anger and disillusionment drives that?
I hope you can overcome it.
By the way, some of those folks I mentioned made millionaires of some of their employees too.
Slightly more than peanuts.
Just because a king dies and gets replaced by another king doesn't help the peasants.
The real issue comes when the really powerful can inflate their and their friends assets at will.
Who would be better at “investing” assets into a new venture: Someone who is wealthy and has a track record of operating successful businesses? Or a government bureaucrat representing the “will of the people” who ultimately makes his salary off the backs of taxpayers?
Furthermore, I recall reading once that wealth inequality was positively correlated with mental illness, even in the rich of a society.
As such, even if there is always some inequality, I think it is worthwhile to try to reduce it, although by boosting the lower part of scale. In other words, if you live in a world where only the rich have cars, you reduce inequality by making cars for the poor like Henry Ford, not by taking rich people's cars.
In the modern US, I think this would entail making housing and education and healthcare more affordable/accessible.
Then Henry Ford displaces John Jacob Astor. You still have wealth inequality, in fact it might have even increased. But the poor now have on-demand mobility to any part of the country in a matter of days.
I don't understand the focus on relative wealth. Why should someone not have, to borrow a phrase, more money than God, if it's not being stolen from others. Why should ability and capital be envied instead left to its own devices?
Bill Gates's fortune split up among everybody in the US would be about $500 a person. You can't seriously think that would make a wit of difference in people's lives, it would disappear in a blip without lifting anybody over the poverty line, and that's even if it was spent wisely, which it wouldn't be.
What the peasants need are ways they can earn money, because money comes from productivity and the peasants will quickly need more than $500 times the number of billionaires consumed by the revolution. BTW most of Bill Gates's wealth is actually tied up in productive assets that are producing things the peasants need, and providing them jobs.
That's the problem. It's tied up, and it doesn't need to be. Unlike institutional investors those who are in the Forbes 400 don't need to consult shareholders or basically anybody, they are already past that point. In fact a family office is essentially just the billionaire and a couple of accountants...people resent them for not going double or nothing on moonshots.
Bill Gates isn't getting any younger, so is Warren Buffet and Munger. When will they open the floodgates? The Rockefeller foundation is still standing and the founder died almost 100 years ago
In 30 years Germany went from 19th century democracy, to socialism, to nazism. What they had was a filter-bubble where the people were constantly told that the cause of their problems was some particular scapegoat and the solution was more state control.
Social media produces these filter-bubbles in a far more powerful fashion. Worse, it's setting up conditions for a civil war where one big bubble is told that the problem is "The System" and the other big bubble is told the problem is "those lefties" and both sides are told the solution is to stamp out the other side.
The Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Carnegies never built anything like that. They built infrastructure, and leveraged economies. Oil, railroad, finance... not the same thing as social connection engines.
You have a few misconceptions there. 19th century Germany wasn't a democracy, it was a constitutional monarchy with a very strong monarch. It was never socialist, it was social democrat (SPD). The actual socialist and communist uprisings were defeated, by the SPD collaborating with everyone, including the far-right Freikorps.
Gloria Vanderbilt wasn’t ultra wealthy by any means. Lots of retirees from modest backgrounds have $1.5 million upon death. My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of about a million dollars.
Meanwhile, the median estate is under $300k and the median bequest is under $100k. The top one percent have seven figure bequests.
Also, she left her fancy NYC condo to someone else, which was probably worth more than the amount she left Anderson. Which actually does put her in line with most Americans, in that their wealth is primarily in a home.
> My uncle is a cnc machinist and had a retirement of about a million dollars.
Retirement or bequest when he died at age 95?
A stable society/economy works like a Monopoly game, after a few rounds the distribution of wealth becomes rigid.
Perturbations are needed to trigger wealth redistribution.
This is why we need revolutions, pandemics, wars and technological innovations to reset the game.
Big money hates innovation because it is always associated with risk, and usually, for mega corps, innovating means killing the golden goose.
The problem, in my opinion, is that there is an end-game to everything, including technology, we're not there yet, hopefully.
Sure, Musk and Bezos are the richest men in the world, according to publicly available data. That doesn't mean these other families are all poor. Some have squandered their wealth. Others have magnified it. And all that still have it have become better at hiding it from the public, something that the "new" rich don't have much experience or capability in.
The poor still, well, are poor. New kings for old kings doesn't change shit. But alas we should wait out the neo-feudal age, that's your plan?
[1] https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
LOL. Maybe you need to move somewhere unfashionable. You know, be around all those yucky people who go to church & stuff.
So if Google ends up being dominant for 50+ years does it really matter? I mean, does that somehow materially impact your life?
> It is pretty cold comfort to know that income inequality that makes home ownership an impossibility right now will work itself out in a few decades.
That's a completely separate issue and one I agree with you on. But the US in particularly has too many brain-broken temporarily embarrassed millionaires who will die on the hill to avoid Jeff Bezos paying slightly more in tax to pay for th esociety that made his wealth possible and continues to make it possible.
This is late-stage capitalism. Some argue it's the beginning of neo-feudalism. I'm not quite that pessimistic whiele agreeing the situation sucks.
What people in power need to realize is the ultimate valve for extreme wealth inequality is violence. War or revolution is the ultimate form of wealth redistribution.
But the political landscape in the US is one where just arguing that trans people shouldn't be murdered gets you labelled as "far left". America is not ready to have the conversation that a capitalist organization of the economy is screwing them over.
Personally if I was 22 and just graduating college with huge debt, no prospect of owning a house and income that means living paycheck to paycheck I would just... leave [1].
[1]: https://www.studentloanplanner.com/flee-country-student-loan...
Yes, but how they work themselves out and where they work themselves out to matter quite a lot.
Also, both of those things, the how and the where, are not random. They are influenced dramatically by the blood, sweat, and tears of people with ideals and the willingness put in the work.
Those people putting in the work, are they people who share your vision of what the world should be like?
If you don't participate in the process, you can't complain about the result.
Andrew Carnegie believed in 100% inheritance tax, on the condition that the money raised was used to provide a level playing field for absolutely everyone to have the same opportunities. I can't imagine many/any of today's billionaires believing this, given that pretty much all of them have depended on the backing of generational wealth and the unequal opportunities that gave them to make their fortunes.
Haven't they all signed the Giving Pledge?
> given that pretty much all of them have depended on the backing of generational wealth and the unequal opportunities that gave them to make their fortunes.
While it is true that most of them come from upper-middle class backgrounds, AFAIK the vast majority of the fortunes of Page, Brin, Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes from their companies.
Unless you mean generational wealth as in "they were rich enough to pay for a university that costs $80,000/year", at which point, yeah I could see that.
While choosing to give most of your money to various charities, generally of your choosing and while you are still alive to see the benefits, is all well and good, it is very different from favouring having all your money being taken on death by a government you trust enough to use that money provide equal opportunities to all.
> "AFAIK the vast majority of the fortunes of Page, Brin, Zuck, Bezos et al. is "self-made" and comes from their companies."
For most of today's billionaires it isn't just an expensive education, it is family conenctions, e.g. Gates being set up with IBM via his mum, or family investments, e.g. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page etc. having parents who gave or loaned them the money to start their companies (not to mention the safety net they'd have had should they have failed) - this isn't "self-made" in the traditional sense.
I have a different take, which is that tech leadership rarely changes in a particular technology, it's just that new technologies arrive that displace the old. Microsoft is still absolutely dominant in desktop operating systems. IBM has 90%+ marketshare in mainframes. Oracle is still the top enterprise database.
So we seem to see these posts periodically now on HN, about "who is going to displace Google in search?" Sorry, that ain't happening. First, despite HN missives, Google still tends to work better than all the competition. Second, the startup costs to have a viable generic Internet search engine are now astronomical, to the point that hardly any VC would invest in a startup whose approach would be "just be a better Google" WRT search.
So the question really is, "what new technology could displace Internet search?" And it's very, very difficult for me to come up with an answer to that looking out 50-75 years or so. In addition, companies now are much more aware of "disruption" theories and will actively try to acquire their disrupters (e.g. Google's acquisition of Android and Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were key to keep them from getting displaced in mobile).
I would easily make the bet that Google (or potentially their government-induced offspring) will continue to totally dominate search 50 years from now.
Google is no longer focused on its core business >Search. They have 99 other projects they are focused on.
For example there is no dedicated search for Audio content on Google Search like there is for Images and Videos. There is no way to search comments on YouTube and there is no way to search your own YouTube playlist! This are just few shameful examples on how Google no longer thinks and behaves like a Search company.
I really like Larry and Sergey but unfortunately for them and Google the current Google's approach is not good for the future of Web. Maybe the culprit is ad business model, maybe it is their de facto Internet Search monopoly or maybe both but if Google is how the future of Web is going to look like then we are all in a big trouble.
Who told you they are not funding and ruling U.S. institutions anymore?
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.
Trying to get my investors interested in a "non-shit google" requires a bit more color around the edges.
Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting. Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers that don't sacrifice security and privacy.
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.
How do you figure? I never use Google and get through my searches just fine. What am I missing?
- 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.
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.
The only approach I've found is to consume a few news sources through the lens of their known biases in an attempt to get something resembling the whole picture.
Where? There are, sometimes, 1-2 ads in the "Promotions" tab, which i really wouldn't call "a shit ton".
Breitbart and Epoch Times shouldn't come up anywhere close to anything with "News" in the name.
I've yet to ever see an add in any of my Gmail accounts.
Huh? Looking in my gmail inbox, I see virtually nothing but ads.
I'm not the OP, however, being the service called News, one would expect it to contain actual news and not 100% biased opinion.