The big story of the last five years is that Google has decided to let certain entities win permanently in certain areas. There used to be a lot of competition in review sites, some were good, some where bad, now Forbes dominates reviews in almost everything and they're atrocious
https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/
On one level SEO can just be a matter of search engine compatibility. So many sites are built without any thought about how they'll interact with web crawlers.
Most people are so accustomed to "free" services from google, that they don't even see it as transactional, but rather as exploitive. "I'm trying to watch my youtube videos, and google keeps shoving these ads in my face. Google, please fuck off!" or "I'm trying to organize my business expenses but Google sheets won't load. Where is your god damn support!?!"
Google put themselves in a position where they can only be evil, because the vast majority of people (the author here included), just will not be able to step back and see what google is, and weigh it against alternates. Google is bad for leeching off my right to a private gmail account, but they are not good for saving me $5/mo for email...e-mail is free. Everyone knows that.
Even worse, if Google were to turn into a paid services company, they would be even more evil for cutting off the millions, sorry, billions of poor users who don't have the money to pay for all that google offers. The backlash against youtube red was immense (that was its unfortunate launch name) and even today people still see youtube premium as an evil thing.
So sure, google does evil things, but it should be stated within the framework of their business model, rather than being unaware or ignoring it.
The data-collection felt very wrong. But, we kinda collectively sighed and allowed it, thinking ads are a necessary evil.
First of all, as engineers, this is a cop-out.
Even if we grant ads as a necessary evil, this should always have been stop-gap to a better - a less evil - business model.
As engineers, we again failed to stand up against this <i>continued</i> use - for decades now.
But,
nobody ever agreed for the data to be made available to the State.
This is a breach of trust!
If anyone says their hands were tied - I say they were tied with money.
Guess what? Apple, Microsoft, your credit card company, phone company, etc... all comply with government warrants.
At least Google stands up to dictatorships like Russia and China, unlike the others who still do business with them.
You can see it where companies like ProtonMail tout the country in which they're located as a competitive privacy advantage.
We have subscriptions, ads, and donations. 30 years into the internet, with the brightest minds of humanity trying to figure this out, no one has the better business model.
The cop out is saying "there has to be a better way."
What we really need is a reconciliation and recalibration of what it means to pay for something and why it needs to be done.
If big companies are giving stuff away for free for 5 years, or a decade, or more, it's hard for any business to develop selling that stuff. It's hard to even justify the idea of selling that stuff, or similar stuff, when someone else is giving it away for free. It's unlikely that any charity will develop, giving these things away for free, because no one recognizes that is even charity. It prevents governments from recognizing that there are niches for fundamental services that have developed that could reasonably be provided by the government or by a regulated utility.
I don't know what to do about companies giving things away for free and people and even society becoming dependent on it. It doesn't seem like it's going to stop on it's own.
What Google did was actually provide a better service at no added cost, so technically "free" competing with already "free" (you were paying for it in the internet subscription but since it is bundled, there was no way to offload the cost anyway). The reason I got my google account was bigger storage (1GB was a lot back then), bigger joint files support and just better webmail overall.
To get your Gmail there was even a waiting list if I'm not wrong, it was just that much better! Nowadays things are a bit different since email has become something everybody relies on instead of just a new cheaper way to communicate, so the case could be made that it should be paid for. But at this point everybody would go back to their provider supplied address.
The rest of Google stuff was built with ADS money but the thing is that they kind of stand on their own nowadays. Plenty of businesses use their suite and regular users having access for free is a nice side effect. I do agree that it's a kind of distorted competition since you can't really compete with all the "free" money Google is getting. But what are you going to do? I feel like most things in the world got there by not playing by the rules. I do wish it was a more even playing field, but at least Google is providing a lot of value unlike Apple that makes you pay for subpar stuff and still find a way to abuse the rules in a worse way. Some Google properties like Maps have no alternative that is on the same level and not even Apple with all its money has gotten close (today's Apple is seriously incompetent but that's another story).
The problem is at the core of internet economics, the network/scaling effects are so huge that it feels like it should basically be a public utility. Not unlike a national train network, it would be wasteful to build multiple parallel tracks and have them compete.
As for YouTube, I feel that's actually the thing that is the least legitimate. If it weren't "free", I wouldn't pay for much of the content on there, much of it being low quality entertainment and a lot of the good stuff competing for funding from other media businesses. The problem is that payment isn't really a solved problem on the internet, I can't buy a single video for say, 1€, as I would for a single baguette. So, the incentive is to bundle everything into a subscription indiscriminately. At least the deal is better for content producers than it is for music subscription services.
It feels like much of the web is being held back by the lack of true innovation in the financial sector, that are really happy to take a cut from every subscription and thus have no real incentive to provide micro transactions that could support another type of economy for the web.
> If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube.
It's interesting how the founding mythos gets compressed by time to omit key details: https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
This is also why the whole debate about Alphabet/Google profiling and spying on users is just an incidental detail and at best a distraction from the real mechanism, which is to incentivize everyone making as many network connections as possible all the time. The network itself is what does the analysis, like Room 641A and friends. It's all about that metadata. Contents don't really matter.
When the product people get things like “message-send causes notification on recipient's phone” to be realtime-enough, even a single type of metadata like “this IP address made a network connection at this time” will be enough to eventually filter a person's complete social network out of a large enough timespan of metadata collection.
I say this with full knowledge (courtesy of Wikipedia) that the author is a former Director of the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at the National Science Foundation.
> Once the federal government gets into the business of allowing free speech, it can define what’s allowable free speech. And you need only look at our northern neighbor or our friends across the Atlantic to see how that’s working out.
I had to scan the article for other clues that the author is, in fact, American, and was, in fact, referencing Canada and Europe as supposedly worse of in regarding to free speech than the US.
The US consistently ranks below Europe and Canada when rated on free speech metrics by third parties [1] -- and has been trending downwards.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Setting aside the specific case of Google, while I think the author makes a strong argument for the value of negation, particularly for institutions, there's also something enervating as an individual about trying to do nothing wrong, rather trying to do good. It's so easy to self criticize, to second guess oneself, and ultimately let anxiety and fear of "doing the wrong thing" take hold. I think most people would be better served by seeking to do the right thing, rather than merely not being evil.
Acton was wrong.
Robert Caro: Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
The article perpetuates the myth that Google retired the Don't Be Evil motto. Untrue. It was previously mentioned twice, now it's mentioned only once. The original click bait article was mistaken and people continue to fail to read Google's mission statement.
nine_k•6mo ago
(Added:) Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
mmmpetrichor•6mo ago
bediger4000•6mo ago
sweeter•6mo ago
PaulHoule•6mo ago
The most remarkable difference was that you can make incremental A/B styles on an Adsense campaign but you can't do that with SEO not least because Google has patented methods to cause your rankings to go haywire whenever you change anything about your site -- one reason why sites like Reddit can go a decade without a major design refresh, if you've got a site which does well you want to keep growing it but whatever you do don't change the link structure.
SEO is a matter of investing in content and link building to get traffic, since Google is in the business of selling traffic, they don't want you to invest in anything other than Adsense. It's like how Facebook doesn't give commercial entities a lot of visibility unless the pay up. I remember when Zynga games got huge with games that would spam you about everything your friends were doing so you'd want to play and back then Zynga was making big $$ and Facebook nothing but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg but a stop to that.