My biggest problem with Google is that in the 2010s they began flagging sites that had too many links as "link farms" - this discouraged bloggers from posting blogrolls and killed many directories. This really damaged the Open Web that the author is talking about. You saw a widespread abandonment of blogs during 2011-2015. (People stopped seeing traffic to their blogs and just assumed blogs had died due to lack of interest.)
In a way, yeah, they made the Web safer. And cleared it out almost completely in the process.
You can't really say "before Google" like they've been the same for twenty years. Google's search used to be really good. They would actually use what you typed in the search box to perform the search.
Then Google started adding more portal-like features and using NLP to perform searches on what they wished you had entered in the search field. They also started tailoring search results to your past search history and whatever profile they constructed about you.
Some people might want a natural language question answerer, others might want a search of only current events, but some definitely just want to search for content.
Google has catered to the former at the expense of the latter. They try to stuff all their different modes into a single text box and display them on a single results page. There's no segmentation to clearly different functional modes.
For me I'd love to see Google go back to actual web searches. Support Boolean operators and term quoting. Return me only search results without offering me shit they think I want to see.
I abandoned Google as my main search engine in favor of DuckDuckGo years ago. While not perfect they at least show me actual search results. If I want other modes of search like video or news I can click those tabs but they don't force that content on me.
I think Google is dipping below the standard of Altivista (adjusted for amount of content). It was out there you could find it but it it might take clever search strings. But it was a tool that worked for the user and priority was helping people find what they want. Vs helping people find what advertisers want now.
There is always the trade-off between higher quality through what is essentially regulation and standards and squeezing out those who don't comply (which disadvantages new entrants).
With drugs, we weight that trade-off heavily towards higher quality over new entrants. The question is, is that an acceptable trade off on the web?
Reading this, I now think I should go put AMP on my personal blog. Before that, I needed an HTTPS cert. Before that, I needed to confirm I owned the site to Google.
All things which may make the web better, but it certainly increases the operational burden and may discourage others from bothering in the first place.
Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free.
The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
I would not recommend AMP, but there are dozens of standards that are not part of what the public sees, low level enough they don't care to see. These are the important things Google has caused the world to adopt as best practices. You don't have to have http, but you are telling users you don't care about their security. This was largely pushed by green/red indicators in the URL bar.
> Push a static site to netlify for free and all of this is taken care of you for free. The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
This heavily pushes the web toward centralization, which I see as a really bad thing, in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. It's happening in so many ways (have you tried standing up your own email server?) and this sort of thing drives it the hardest.
I don't think Google is all bad, in fact I appreciate a lot of what they have done for the world (you mention some of these things). But as with nearly everything in life, it's complicated. I worry a lot that we're headed towards an internet where the individual is at the mercy of organizations to allow them to have a voice.
> The burden is necessary given the proliferation of bad actors
But the bad actors don't really abuse technical standards. They abuse links. The only part in Google's list of criteria that has largely remained untouched in the last two decades and is still the factor for ranking. So much so, that I'm confident that, if ranking factor relevance was a search result, the first page would just be the same result over and over: Links.
That's the reason for the centralization of power: those with more links will be ranked on the top, will have more visibility and, you guessed it, get more links. Guess what happens: they then start to sell either links or they rent out subdomains and folders on their website.
Google, as a company, does not care about bad actors. Some teams in Google do, but they are not the ones setting the policies.
But google isn't pushing, it's baiting. And what you get is all websites look and act the same. A lot of creativity is falling through the cracks. And it's not just google. Why did we need og: tags and twitter:cards when meta tags are already there
None. And I would not trust a service today that depends on any Google service either.
I'll visit YouTube for free entertainment sometimes, but I hardly depend on it for anything, and I really wish more creators posted their content elsewhere, even at a price.
The same type of question would be what have the Romans ever done for us in Europe and abroad except building all roads, aqueducts and Roman law legal system.
mhh___ types this while using chrome (open source) on android (open source), after reading their email in gmail and searching for the latest cat dancing videos on youtube. The sad reality
most of the folks who claim never to use google or google never makes something available - almost always hot air.
I do remember hotmail and MSN and AOL which preceded gmail, gmail was really pretty great when it came out.
I think microsoft may oddly be coming back a bit after the balmar years. I'm not a huge fan of facebook taking over (yuch).
Chrome isn't open source, and a large part of android isn't either (google play services). Gmail is quickly becoming a walled garden itself (anyone who runs their own email service can tell you that). And YouTube is a hot mess.
You must not remember the web before google and google funded firefox!! This whole "google has never done anything" meme just seems ridiculous on its face.
Google took on and basically CRUSHED some major market players and powers (Microsoft basically lost the entire web and handset markets from a monopoly position) as a result of google service offerings.
Check out how much money they pumped into firefox as well - that used to be a major part of their push vis a vis IE.
Regardless of how much google "sucks" - they seem to have at least some things that folks like.
Right, well given that they HAVE obviously done a lot of things, I would interpret them to mean “they haven’t done anything I’ve liked or wanted or expected”, which is certainly fine to express. I don’t see why this justifies brushing away google’s decline with “but their products have engagement”. It’s like arguing because people buy an iphone, the iphone is the smartphone people want—in reality it’s just necessary and mildly better in some subjective way than the competition.
I'd thought they were doomed (ie, no linux cloud offering expected, no multi-platform or open source offerings). Windows Mobile did crash and burn, but Azure actually has linux containers (most common type I think) and their other stuff is sometimes open source / linux friendly now - (SQL Server??) it's whiplash for those of us who were around for the EEE period.
Is this a bad thing?