Ask HN: How would you feel if we nationalized Google?
Not enough space in the title, the actual scenario is this:
A hypothetical US gov't, benevolent and markedly less corrupt than the current one, passes a Constitutional amendment to nationalize Alphabet, with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend.
I guess what I'm really asking is what people would abide to have the internet back, via a search solution that actually works and whose usefulness hasn't been annihilated by ~15 years of cynical corporate marauding and product torture.
44 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] threadI think, if we're going to be heavy-hitting about this, the more proper thing to do is to force Google to split their search off as a separate, independent company.
That way anybody could build their own "old search", or innovate off the global dataset.
Otherwise you need to break Google up just to separate search from ads, lot of complexity in that and adversity from big tech.
There is absolutely no way I can ever go back to vanilla web search vs Gemini.
If we’re pretending this is taking place in another reality what are we hoping to learn from this hypothetical?
> with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend
It would be simpler for the US govt to build such a search engine like that today as google was a lot simpler back then, however it wouldn’t work because the internet has changed as much as Google has.
If the goal is to make the internet search better via intervention it might be simpler to force Google to share relevant patents for free with competitors and new market entrants, and doesn’t require a benevolent government to work either.
Even without that kagi exists and it’s fine
You're targeting the efficacy, not the means. Google reached almost every page, served dynamically or not, with metadata and cache freely viewable, and served a relevant slice based on the actual search query that was actually submitted. We can do that again. It would piss off a lot of platform owners. I don't care. I want it back. Fuck Zuck.
>Even without that kagi exists and it’s fine
No lol
It's suggestion not a instruction, and It's a certainly a more useful suggestion than a bunch of people make demands of google and the US govt that will never be realised.
> We can do that again. It would piss off a lot of platform owners
Fair, stuff is more locked down now, if we're talking intervention then you may as well entertain the idea that of google being required to provide metered API access to this archived data as well to train competitors. I do think that's still more reasonable than nationalising, since its closer inline to what anti trusts in the past have accomplished with AT&T, railroads, etc. The problem with nationalising google and making it free is, operating google for free just isn't feasible. Google provides a free service because it elevates their paid services and users on it provides value to their other services.
Even with a feature freeze google still crawls the web and collects information to improve its results which has an on going marginal cost. Say it happens, you nationalise Google Search. how long till the elected officals who just see the on going costs (and not costs avoided) starts complaining about how much keeping it operation costs? The political economy isn't feasible either.
If you want to improve search, I think its best to start with addressing entry barriers, which in this case is massive fixed costs.
Also, it's funny you brought up politics, as if the current political regime is the last corrupt one we'll ever have. If you have the incentives for corruption in place, you will have more corruption. If you give Google to the government, it will use Google to support that corruption. The Trump era is a great time to be asking, "would I want the government to have even more control?", because there will be another Trump eventually.
That sounds great, regardless of the Google stuff.
And the next one? And the one after that? How about the one after that?
Much of this is just about building out the index. (Yes yes, "just", I know folks at Google will yell at me that I have no idea what's required at scale, and they're absolutely right. I also know that Google REALLY do not like people building any kind of competition, no matter how tiny.) Some have done the work, Yep has a huge index they've built from their Ahrefs work. Obviously Brave is already there, it probably already powers the web search for your favorite LLM.
For everyday use, you often don't need the whole index though. You just need your corner of the web indexed, the tiny section that you use frequently.
Rather than nationalizing it, and being subject to whatever government decides... for the internet that you personally want, your own personal index is the most true answer. Only then will it find the information you want, with the rankings that you want.
But on the small local scale, that's what Hister is, it caches and indexes web pages as you browse the web in your browser. Going via the browser avoids all the problems of bot detection etc, since you are a human visitor. That gives your own search engine of the web that you've already visited, at least:
https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
That's where you're wrong. And I'd like to see a service that stops making these asinine decisions for me.
When you start chopping the web into pieces, the temptation to hide uncomfortable material rises exponentially, and the definition of "uncomfortable" slowly shambles from "the truly depraved or obnoxious" towards "Hays Code", or worse. Give us the firehose and maybe we'll develop the tools to filter it as we see fit.
I much prefer Google today than in 2010. I very rarely look at web pages (full of all kinds of bad design, unnecessary text, and ads) now. Google gives me the information directly.
Of course you can. But Google actually has to want to provide that. They don't.
>I much prefer Google today than in 2010
I don't believe that this is a genuine sentiment held by real people.
Sorry to disappoint you. Information retrieval has never been closer to the ideal of: "ask a question -> get the answer".
Again, for people who actually used the internet in 2010, I don't believe this is a real sentiment.
OR
It's never really been farther, either.
It is especially so the farther you stray from things the average person wants to know. The beauty of Old Internet and Old Google was that it connected you with niche experts, and quickly, instead of a hyper-compressed bag of guardrails quasi-possibility (if you have enough credits) over a grueling campaign of "placate the robot's idiosyncrasies".
Do you know what inspired this post? A 10-minute odyssey of asking Google Search's AI for help finding a particular option on a particular website. Every response after the first began with, "My mistake, you're right," and at the end, I still didn't have the answer.
If "the state" is indeed a tool used by "the people" to accomplish the will of the the people, then sure, I think nationalization of large, nation-wide or world-wide corporations is probably fine and good. But this requires a totally different world order. It's hard to imagine something called the USA as participating in such an arrangement.
I don't think a "less corrupt" USA government is one that should be taking over the likes of Google, however. Even the more polite version of the USA is one that dominates the world through military force and local communities through a surveillance apparatus (see Flock now, but basically every town in America gives half of its general budget to the police). The data that Google holds needs to be regulated by the government, not handed over to the government.
There's no particular reason why the USA government (or some other country) couldn't spin up its own new search engine service that provided something akin to 2010 Google search, with no advertising to boot. There's no political will to do something like that, but that seems much more imaginable than nationalizing Google/Alphabet, and I think perhaps still entertains your hypothetical.