Who Is Going To Replace Google For Us?
I didn’t think I’d say this, but I think Google is failing. Well, failing as best they can for making $68 billion dollars in revenue in a quarter. Failing at their mission.
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.
Is this just the failure of a really dumb algorithm mining social media, or was it intentional? I can only guess it was intentional, and we can perhaps infer that there are no checks and balances anywhere within Google because we start to see the decay of their search engine. What I mean here is either (1) no one is minding the ship or (2) the inmates are running the asylum.
Exhibit 1: The primary search product no longer works for many things, it is no longer adjusted to fight SEO. They have allowed shopping to be dominated by near 60% Amazon links and search results for any kind of product are consumed by semi-fake comparison pages Amazon referral clickbait. There was a pretty decent article in the Atlantic recently about how the best way to use Google was to use it to search Reddit, but those are just random internet strangers, so that’s not super useful for finding the answer to anything.
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.
What’s really left in Google search results when you try to find the answer to the question? People might hold up Wikipedia as a part of a “good internet”, but encyclopedias are known for having shallow information and they are supposed to! It’s a responsibility of a search engine to help surface that information - the random pages with actual depth and authority on a given topic. The modern internet - for which Google by virtue of it’s near-monopoly status is responsible - falls far short of what 20th century science fiction thought it would be. There’s not a lot of information. There’s a lot of crappy goods being sold and a lot of ads. I occasionally find some good things, like agricultural extension websites, but there’s not a lot of genuine content that rises to the top.
Mostly because they treat users as a product, I’ve long since left Gmail for a private email host (recommended) and don’t really use Google Drive or Docs anymore. Search is a bit of a hard one - DuckDuckGo is mining Russian Yandex and Bing was working with Yandex. Crypto-bros running Brave Search are arguably the worst of the bunch, removing ads and substituting their own, taking money away from the web sites users visit. Ecosia apparently uses Bing data and plants trees from ad revenue, so that seems like it may be worth trying out.
The theme still seems to echo that market consolidation - which feels like a kind of entropy - always leads to large corporations, and large corporations don’t typically care about quality or morals, because it’s too easy for sociopaths and the morally ambigious to rise to the top.
Google is an organization where it is impossible to contact a human - if you have a security problem with gmail or a bug to report, almost no one will answer. Once I was the target of some really weird scheme and I wanted to tell Google about it, and I had to try to reverse engineer a contact through a product manager I knew from Ansible things - and even then, the person on the other end didn’t really want to hear about it. That’s not quite relevant to this comment, but it’s just a sign that nobody really cares there.
We have a large corporations running on autopilot rather than one that cares about the web or how society reacts to information they spread. The user is a product, and while we could just see this as neglect, the inclusion of disastrous content inclusion in Google News points to something worse at the top.
There’s no neutrality in anything, really. You’re either fighting against decline or promoting it. We see in all the small actions Google does that the big errors - like the failure to have an allow list for Google News sites, or worse, actively choosing to include disinformation and hate speech - is not an aberation. They either support those sites missions or they only seek profit and don’t care about what they are doing, which means they support those missions.
I write this just so that maybe somebody at Google can read this, hope that somebody still cares, and turns the “suck” knob back down before going back to bathe in their Scrooge-McDuck-styled* swimming pool filled with money. I’d love for you to fix search and stop cancelling products like Google Reader, but really, Google News, what the heck?