And how far they've strayed from the beginning. Don't be evil. Won't show ads inline with search results that look like organic links. Constant product churn, search results inundated by click farms, and one can't leave out WEI...
Funny how they introduced WEI using an unknown dev in the UK. It seems dirty. Like something that wouldn't be ethical to have a person do, even if that person agreed to do it. They still haven't gone and officially claimed it, months later it's under the developer with a rubber duck for an avatar and 26 followers on GitHub.
It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players.
I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
People used to pay hundreds of dollars for GPS units and hundreds more for annual maps updates before Google entered the picture. There may be alternatives now, but Google Maps absolutely revolutionized the space when it showed up and brought online maps/GPS to regular consumers for the first time.
You should thank Steve Jobs much more than Google for this revolution. Mapquest was the true pioneer. Apple and the iPhone then made maps and driving directions slightly more portable. Google iterated on their initial idea by integrating GPS, street view, and finally traffic data onto those driving directions.
I can assure you they were. I worked at Microsoft through the entire Windows Phone era and used the devices from the Samsung Focus through the Lumia 950.
They were WAY behind. Traffic data, road closure data, what lane you should be in to make your turn data. Street view, business hours, voice-guided turn by turn navigation - they were way behind in all those areas the entire time and it was heartbreaking. I loved Windows Phone the platform, but maps were at least as strong a reason as apps for me finally giving up.
They took a chance on mapping and photographing damn near every road on the planet. They had a huge number of business/restaurant locations marked on the map which you could search for.
They were the first to have great turn by turn directions that rerouted if you make a wrong turn (this existed but the user experience sucked and they had to be manually updated when roads changed).
They created Google Earth which was _mindblowing_ at the time.
They didn't invent it but they advanced it so much farther and faster that they might as well have.
I'll grant you those points, I was 13 or 14 when all this was happening so I wasn't aware of the finer points. Now that I think of it I remember all the trouble they went through to send physical mail to business addresses to allow the owners to update their own data. That was smart.
I wasn't sure of the details of acquisition vs invention so I went to Google Earth's wiki and found a pretty interesting timeline. iirc Google News was invented right after 9/11 because the news sites themselves were falling over from increased traffic, and Google Earth has its ties to the war as well:
>> During the [2003 Iraq] invasion, It was used extensively by Miles O'Brien and other on-air broadcasters, allowing CNN and millions of viewers to follow the progress of the war in a way that had never been seen before. Public interest in the software exploded and Keyhole servers were not able to keep up with demand. Keyhole was soon contacted by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for use with defense mapping databases, which gave Keyhole a much-needed cash infusion.
>> In October 2004, Google acquired Keyhole as part of a strategy to better serve its users.
Of course they haven't invented it. But it's the execution and scaling that's more difficult than ideas. Like Elon Musk says, Ideas are easy, Execution is difficult and scaling is excruciating. I find it amusing how much we as a civilization don't value execution, scaling and operations.
Navigating without a map or with a paper map is a basic skill somewhat smart and civilized people should have. Also a passive map on a screen would be intellectually OK, but the usability sucks in many cases, especially on phones.
GPS has made people dumber and lazier. I don't remember when I turned on GPS last time.
For maps I find Openstreetmap superiour to Google maps in many cases.
I fell in love with Google when I used their first Gmail beta version (Google search was the beginning of the affair). It was a fresh new outlook (pun?) to how email should be. And Google wave was a jaw dropper for me. It did not succeed but the tech was solid for its time. Eric Schmidt did an absolutely wonderful job. Then came Chrome and Android and YouTube. Their knack of creating/acquiring the best products and making them world class peaked in 2013 I feel. When Larry took over, I was overjoyed since he is the quintessential nerd. But alas it was Elon Musk and not Larry Page. The Google Glass demo was stellar too but again failed to commercialize. Their early thoughts on high altitude internet balloons and self driving cards enthralled the crap out of me. I always wanted to work with Google.
I hope it returns to "Don't be Evil" mantra and create/acquire some world class products again.
I’m surprised the first result today for “how to cut a pineapple” isn’t an SEO optimized recipe with a wall of nonsense to scroll past before the actual instructions
No need. Back in the days, as you can see in the video, you just needed a couple of sentences and a few images.
Interesting to see the big adsense block present on the page and the example being an exact match domain, which is clearly an MFA (Made for Adsense) website.
Just yesterday there was a story about how Judge Mehta caved to G's desire to keep everything secret. Consequently, the journalists have nothing to write.
Google has been a constant part of my life from early 2000's and I'm grateful to them for providing so many useful products. Most of them were awesome and worked fully without annoying ads or subscriptions. They will come with something new (usually unannounced) and I will be so excited to try it. Technically, they would almost work from day one. Needless to say, I was a Google fanboi during the first decade of the company. Google Search, GMail, Maps, News, Android, Chrome... thanks Google for all these great products. For a commercial company, they had high ethical standards and still seem better than most competition.
Thank you Google, you've made a dent in the universe!
I came here expecting to see this thread completely filled with the usual Google hate and was pleasantly surprised to find this here instead. Thank you!
I'm fully in agreement with most here that the modern Google is a danger to the internet, but it's pleasant to be reminded that this wasn't always the case. It's a bittersweet anniversary, so let's take the sweet with the bitter.
Google is amazing. I pay them money for multiple services, but the Google of 2000 would want to kick 2023 Google's ass, take it's lunch money and auction off g.2000's pens.
As much as I wish it, Google search is only the secondary focus. They multi-billion deal with Apple shows the massive cash stack developed from search, which would lead one to believe Google lives from search. I would have no problem with this co-dependant relationship, except it show the darker side of Google. Anything for installs. If Google was suddenly forced to be ONLY a search engine, I maintain they would fail - No gmail apps. No slides. No voice. A "nothing but search" Google would make unimaginable amounts of money, but it would only be clicks. Quick impressions, that don't generate the revenue Google stockholders now depends on.
The clicks themselves should be enough. My mind explodes at the concept of counting Google's click-thru revenue; thank god for 64-bit CPUs! As the world's finest data-mining corporation which {likely, obviously, as proven in court} funnels untold data to `todaysTLA {}` they have show time and time again, they care not for their free-tier customers, employees or paying "customers". The amount you pay pales in comparison to how much the revenue stream is from `{data mining data points for gmail, android etc}, of course they are going to monetize you. The massive income increase and the thankful government's soft-hand approach is the underlying motivator. The amazing ability of Google's lawyers to keep the vast majority of the current anti-trust trial relatively hidden screams of influence.
This being said, who do we turn to? Who's the stalwart, effective and visible protector of the internet now? Obviously not firefox, gnu, debian or mullvad. Where is their a major-league player that can take us back to the internet of old, the internet of a useful GeoCities page? I use Firefox on every device I own. I'd cross-compile before I go to Chrome, but they don't just own client-side-internet, do they?
The internet before capitalism was a wonderful thing, but we had a problem - someone eventually pays. Someone eventually pays for everything - email, www, gopher, newsgroups, ftp. Even today, at some point, you realize "the cloud" is just someone else's machine, which they pay for. Universities fronted the bill for years, but quickly bowed out.
Maybe one day we will reach a point that a `cloud_server {4-core arm cpu, 4GB ram, 40GB disk};` is so cheap as to be offered for free. Until that day, the internet is for those who pay in either money or information. I do not agree with the way TLAs work the system. I think the google tradeoff is bad. I understand that my ability to browse www.mario64speedruns.com depends greatly on if I trigger a captcha through Cloud{Flare,Front}, based mostly on my ad-blocking.
And even once we reach the promised land of free 4/4/40, it will only survive because of actual, paying, CC-on-file customers. The sooner we come to "horrible acceptance", where we realize the free-love-1972 isn't the world we live in, the better. It will quicken the people a thousand times smarter than me figuring out a way to keep 1% of the web free.
None sucks; better than none sucks less; therefore 1% is amazing,
Google Reader, it was Google Reader’s murdered that made me losing my trust. Before that I was exactly like you are. These days I avoid anything Google. Not even because they’re a data farm from my digital and personal life, but because I cannot trust any product of theirs to keep being around.
I have used Gmail since the invite-only beta, although I have never given out my gmail address. I only use it as the forwarding target for my hundreds of one-time addresses in use. Now I am ashamed that I still have not completed my migration away from it.
I have some 30 Google accounts, each for one service I used either once or sometimes for a couple of years. Although most of them are unusable now because I cannot proceed beyond the login without supplying a phone number. Well, they have recently sent out mails that they will delete them soon if they remain unused.
I did use Google search from when nobody knew it in the 1990s until 3-4 years ago when I switched to Duckduckgo.
20 years ago I would have applied to Google if they had only had a tech job in my country.
I have only one Android account. I keep that phone constantly in flight mode, except when I absolutely need to use a single app for work.
Today I am convinced that Google is a harmful company that the US government should split as they did with AT&T. And as a European we should not send any data to the US because of what Snowden have taught us and the US government does not grant data of foreigners any protection.
Advertising is 95% an unethical business. Using the computation power that Google wastes for it in the cloud and at the edge is just evil. Overconsumption is a fact for large parts of the planet. Trying to sell more is wrong, we need to live with less. Myself by my own choices I took a 30% salary cut twice in my career. And I am still on the overconsumption side, even if the phone I type this on is 9 years old and my main phone more than 5.
The minute a competitor appeared to challenge them, they threw all their initial goodwill away. It’s very unfortunate, so yeah. Thanks for destroying the internet Google.
The google that deserved much praise has been dead since not long after the DoubleClick acquisition. They’ve been DoubleClick/Google since. Ordering intentional.
That means they’ve been evil or rushing as fast as they can toward evil since… 2008.
I think I’ve seen someone here comment something similar before but I don’t know the back story. Did DS management infiltrate Google after the acquisition or something? I have never heard of anything like that. Would you mind filling me in?
What is the good of owning the leading ad and tracking network if you don't use it?
And besides think of all the good things one can do for the world with so much money... Only, like Mozilla they sold out the one thing they could do that no one else could (providing a free, independent browser in Mozillas case, having access to everyones thoughts without abusing it in Googles case).
I think there was a paradigm that prevailed for about 10 years, let's say 2008-2018 - and this by no means applies only to Google - under which the mass violation of user privacy and personal data collection was not just passed off as, but actual believed to be, something that would benefit the product and the user (even if there was also money to be made on the side by selling that data on). It wasn't yet fully weaponized to the point where every service got shittier unless and even if they extracted more money every year. Somewhere along the line, the game went from cataloging the internet to providing email for everyone to blackmailing anyone who didn't want to partake of their offerings or follow their rules.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. There's never been a case of a player with Google's degree of market leverage that hasn't become corrupted (or any government in a similar position, for that matter). It's not about handing out money. It's about having democratic checks in place to behead and dismember entities that do what Google has done. The vestiges of the US Govt and EU parliament are probably the last thing standing between info sector monstrosities and the end of free thought and speech in the world.
I honestly think the world is a poorer place for having had a single
US company dominate so many areas of digital technology for so long.
I hope that in another 25 years giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple
and so on are just small players in a globally inter-operable, open
and diverse technological world.
[1] I say "was", because companies like Google practically destroyed
it, leading the creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee to tragically denounce the
Web as having "failed humanity". (I disagree the Web did not fail
humanity, greedy companies did.)
> taxis have been cannibalized by Lyft/Uber - what's your argument here?
Once the market figured out how to sidestep government regulation of the ride-hailing industry, it got significantly cheaper, easier, and more accessible?
On the back of VC funding and operating at a loss? This isn't a great argument, TBH, and prices have increased to the point that they're generally in line with "real" taxis in places I've been -- and still without Uber and Lyft having become profitable.
I take it that your catalogue of the failures of modern "capitalism"
is not an argument in favour of it, but you concurring with me that
it's destructive. That we are in a catastrophic local minima in 5,000
years of human history isn't a great argument that "no such world ever
existed". That would be parochialism [0]
There is no period in recorded history where an economy was dominated with a number of small players of roughly equal status in competition for an extended duration.
5,000 years of human history is roughly as long as we have the concept of an economy. Before that, you had access to the people in your immediate vicinity and "competition" for services was not a concept.
They are dominated by the mindless calculus of Wall St, injected deep into their programming. If they deviate from what Wall St wants they loose. So they dont dominate. They are dominated.
Well, back to Podcast Addict I go, I suppose. I liked the clean, minimal interface of Google Podcasts and have no interest in a bloated music service app like YTM.
If I were Google I would celebrate by renting a car. It’s crazy to think that in ten years they’ll be old enough to run for president of the United States.
That was always a ripoff of Konfabulator widgets. The Widget paradigm of computing once again reigns supreme with deep first party support in Android launchers, iOS home and lock screens, and macOS support in the desktop and in overlays.
I hope someone makes a spoof animation / video that shows a timeline of the descent from “do no evil” to “evil” and showing how search used to be great up just an SEO optimized wall of ads.
I still have fond memories of being in high school and a librarian showing me this “Google page”. Back when it seemed like SV tech would be an enlightened realm for the betterment of humanity.
How many more years before search, the undisputed King of the Web, is dethroned? You can sense the end coming. Verbatim search stopped working years ago. AI returns false info in big bold font. Billions and trillions of results are only 9 or 10 pages deep, and then the links abruptly stop. Ads everywhere, but nothing has ever been remotely worth my click. I hope their downfall comes soon. Watching it slowly descend into an abyss of garbage is saddening.
102 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] thread> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Thank god for Kagi
For now. But I see they are working extremely hard to change that.
The amount of people that were empowered to explore and discover (or time saved from getting lost) is incredible by any measure
I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.
I can assure you they were. I worked at Microsoft through the entire Windows Phone era and used the devices from the Samsung Focus through the Lumia 950.
They were WAY behind. Traffic data, road closure data, what lane you should be in to make your turn data. Street view, business hours, voice-guided turn by turn navigation - they were way behind in all those areas the entire time and it was heartbreaking. I loved Windows Phone the platform, but maps were at least as strong a reason as apps for me finally giving up.
They created Google Earth which was _mindblowing_ at the time.
They didn't invent it but they advanced it so much farther and faster that they might as well have.
I wasn't sure of the details of acquisition vs invention so I went to Google Earth's wiki and found a pretty interesting timeline. iirc Google News was invented right after 9/11 because the news sites themselves were falling over from increased traffic, and Google Earth has its ties to the war as well:
>> During the [2003 Iraq] invasion, It was used extensively by Miles O'Brien and other on-air broadcasters, allowing CNN and millions of viewers to follow the progress of the war in a way that had never been seen before. Public interest in the software exploded and Keyhole servers were not able to keep up with demand. Keyhole was soon contacted by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for use with defense mapping databases, which gave Keyhole a much-needed cash infusion.
>> In October 2004, Google acquired Keyhole as part of a strategy to better serve its users.
"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"
GPS has made people dumber and lazier. I don't remember when I turned on GPS last time.
For maps I find Openstreetmap superiour to Google maps in many cases.
Calculators have made people dumber and lazier. I don't remember when I last multiplied two numbers using a calculator last time.
I hope it returns to "Don't be Evil" mantra and create/acquire some world class products again.
How much tuning did Google need to do for that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd0hwou8kSA
Interesting to see the big adsense block present on the page and the example being an exact match domain, which is clearly an MFA (Made for Adsense) website.
The FTC itself sues google every few years, last two were in 2019 and 2022 so give it a few more years.
Just yesterday there was a story about how Judge Mehta caved to G's desire to keep everything secret. Consequently, the journalists have nothing to write.
They should get some kind of an award.
Thank you Google, you've made a dent in the universe!
I'm fully in agreement with most here that the modern Google is a danger to the internet, but it's pleasant to be reminded that this wasn't always the case. It's a bittersweet anniversary, so let's take the sweet with the bitter.
As much as I wish it, Google search is only the secondary focus. They multi-billion deal with Apple shows the massive cash stack developed from search, which would lead one to believe Google lives from search. I would have no problem with this co-dependant relationship, except it show the darker side of Google. Anything for installs. If Google was suddenly forced to be ONLY a search engine, I maintain they would fail - No gmail apps. No slides. No voice. A "nothing but search" Google would make unimaginable amounts of money, but it would only be clicks. Quick impressions, that don't generate the revenue Google stockholders now depends on.
The clicks themselves should be enough. My mind explodes at the concept of counting Google's click-thru revenue; thank god for 64-bit CPUs! As the world's finest data-mining corporation which {likely, obviously, as proven in court} funnels untold data to `todaysTLA {}` they have show time and time again, they care not for their free-tier customers, employees or paying "customers". The amount you pay pales in comparison to how much the revenue stream is from `{data mining data points for gmail, android etc}, of course they are going to monetize you. The massive income increase and the thankful government's soft-hand approach is the underlying motivator. The amazing ability of Google's lawyers to keep the vast majority of the current anti-trust trial relatively hidden screams of influence.
This being said, who do we turn to? Who's the stalwart, effective and visible protector of the internet now? Obviously not firefox, gnu, debian or mullvad. Where is their a major-league player that can take us back to the internet of old, the internet of a useful GeoCities page? I use Firefox on every device I own. I'd cross-compile before I go to Chrome, but they don't just own client-side-internet, do they?
The internet before capitalism was a wonderful thing, but we had a problem - someone eventually pays. Someone eventually pays for everything - email, www, gopher, newsgroups, ftp. Even today, at some point, you realize "the cloud" is just someone else's machine, which they pay for. Universities fronted the bill for years, but quickly bowed out.
Maybe one day we will reach a point that a `cloud_server {4-core arm cpu, 4GB ram, 40GB disk};` is so cheap as to be offered for free. Until that day, the internet is for those who pay in either money or information. I do not agree with the way TLAs work the system. I think the google tradeoff is bad. I understand that my ability to browse www.mario64speedruns.com depends greatly on if I trigger a captcha through Cloud{Flare,Front}, based mostly on my ad-blocking.
And even once we reach the promised land of free 4/4/40, it will only survive because of actual, paying, CC-on-file customers. The sooner we come to "horrible acceptance", where we realize the free-love-1972 isn't the world we live in, the better. It will quicken the people a thousand times smarter than me figuring out a way to keep 1% of the web free.
None sucks; better than none sucks less; therefore 1% is amazing,
I have some 30 Google accounts, each for one service I used either once or sometimes for a couple of years. Although most of them are unusable now because I cannot proceed beyond the login without supplying a phone number. Well, they have recently sent out mails that they will delete them soon if they remain unused.
I did use Google search from when nobody knew it in the 1990s until 3-4 years ago when I switched to Duckduckgo.
20 years ago I would have applied to Google if they had only had a tech job in my country.
I have only one Android account. I keep that phone constantly in flight mode, except when I absolutely need to use a single app for work.
Today I am convinced that Google is a harmful company that the US government should split as they did with AT&T. And as a European we should not send any data to the US because of what Snowden have taught us and the US government does not grant data of foreigners any protection.
Advertising is 95% an unethical business. Using the computation power that Google wastes for it in the cloud and at the edge is just evil. Overconsumption is a fact for large parts of the planet. Trying to sell more is wrong, we need to live with less. Myself by my own choices I took a 30% salary cut twice in my career. And I am still on the overconsumption side, even if the phone I type this on is 9 years old and my main phone more than 5.
To paraphrase what the DOJ just said in their opening statement, the Google you're talking about is long gone.
That means they’ve been evil or rushing as fast as they can toward evil since… 2008.
Google died at about 10 years old.
What is the good of owning the leading ad and tracking network if you don't use it?
And besides think of all the good things one can do for the world with so much money... Only, like Mozilla they sold out the one thing they could do that no one else could (providing a free, independent browser in Mozillas case, having access to everyones thoughts without abusing it in Googles case).
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. There's never been a case of a player with Google's degree of market leverage that hasn't become corrupted (or any government in a similar position, for that matter). It's not about handing out money. It's about having democratic checks in place to behead and dismember entities that do what Google has done. The vestiges of the US Govt and EU parliament are probably the last thing standing between info sector monstrosities and the end of free thought and speech in the world.
I hope that in another 25 years giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on are just small players in a globally inter-operable, open and diverse technological world.
I would argue that a strong unified platform (Windows, the web, whatever) is good for user and developer experience.
Book publishing. Fine art. Music. Poetry. Travel and tourism. Food.... need I go on?
> Capitalism abhors competition
"One of the foundational blocks of capitalism is competition." [0]
> I would argue that a strong unified platform ... the web, whatever) is good for user and developer
"The Web" was [1] a standard, not a company or "platform".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
[1] I say "was", because companies like Google practically destroyed it, leading the creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee to tragically denounce the Web as having "failed humanity". (I disagree the Web did not fail humanity, greedy companies did.)
Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan combine for 77-91% of the market: https://www.statista.com/topics/9280/book-publishing/#topicO...
>Fine art.
This isn't an industry, just a tax evasion scheme for rich people
>Music.
3 players control 70% of recording: https://musically.com/2023/04/26/music-copyright-publishes-i...
>Poetry.
Not an industry, never has been
>Travel and tourism.
Airlines consolidate and consolidate, rail is nationalized, taxis have been cannibalized by Lyft/Uber - what's your argument here?
>Food....
https://www.good.is/Business/food-brands-owners-rp
Once the market figured out how to sidestep government regulation of the ride-hailing industry, it got significantly cheaper, easier, and more accessible?
On the back of VC funding and operating at a loss? This isn't a great argument, TBH, and prices have increased to the point that they're generally in line with "real" taxis in places I've been -- and still without Uber and Lyft having become profitable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parochialism
5,000 years of human history is roughly as long as we have the concept of an economy. Before that, you had access to the people in your immediate vicinity and "competition" for services was not a concept.
>>"One of the foundational blocks of capitalism is competition."
This is just unserious.
https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4
We need to push politicians to fix the antitrust law. It isn't just Google that is benefiting from this now toothless law.
Such a heart-warming story about Google wanting the green dress for itself, scraping a copy so the destination site didn't get the web traffic.
Lots of discussion here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37659482
If you were making a joke I applaud you and apologize for my whoosh.
These feel like epitaphs, to me:
"We're not a conventional company and we don't intend to become one."
"Do know evil."
I still have fond memories of being in high school and a librarian showing me this “Google page”. Back when it seemed like SV tech would be an enlightened realm for the betterment of humanity.