In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often practically at launch, and finally the decline of quality and coverage of Search (more spam and more older sites dropping out).
Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort.
Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the decline were apparent.
Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google" is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results.
I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI.
I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon, but the time to challenge them could be now.
I'm refusing to implement Google Analytics on my startup's product. Because it's slow, but mainly because I don't trust Google enough to let them put whatever code they like on my page.
I'm running into serious flak from the marketing team because they don't know how to use any other tool. GA is the industry standard, apparently, and every site uses it, etc etc. They're even hinting that not using it could affect our SEO (I haven't seen any evidence for that, but if so it just reinforces my desire to not give Evil Google our traffic).
Even a couple of years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem. I trusted them to do the right thing. Now. No.
There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1])
I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that.
Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era of low effort reposts, aggregators, optimizing for clicks and a large SEO industry.
In addition, most of the user-generated content is now inside "walled gardens" like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, and is either impossible to index, or much harder to quantify and rank than websites linking to each other.
There has to be something better out there, but it will be a difficult challenge.
Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory.
"back then Google was still admired by the tech people"
"Losing our support"
why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ?
I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google.
Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have.
But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours.
And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do. There are nuances and shades of gray in life, as we all learn when we grow up.
In the end, what matters is the silent majority not the chatty loud ones that have a personal grudge against some big corporation.
That "Google is evil" is highly overrated and over hyped. I always question the agenda of people promoting this.
This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com.
What are you searching for? Programming-related questions? Then go to stackoverflow.com directly (where you'll end up in 99% of cases when you search with DDG or Google anyway on these topics). Tip: to search SO, I've found it works best to create (but not submit) a new question with as much info in the headline as possible; the results that SO brings up to check for duplicate questions are excellent search results (btw have they changed it recently? I don't remember working it as good as it's now). Requires a StackExchange account though.
Are your searching for review of tech gadgets or christmas gifts? Then many people on HN admit to include "reddit" in their search terms. Then why not go directly to reddit.com for your search.
Are you searching on YouTube? Then indeed Google (YouTube itself) works best, but the real solution is to quit your media consumption habbit of spending your waking hours on monopolists video streaming sites that don't benefit creators. For just music without pointless and data-intensive video and ad noise, there are several alternatives.
Maybe it's time for new topic-related meta search engines and link aggregation sites.
In the end there isn't much new content worth searching for, thanks to Google and Facebook extracting almost all (70% in 2018) ad revenue, and the demise of the federated web in favour of 2010's portals such as github. I can assure you that the modest amount of new content worth reading can be easily summarized and searched by basic, non-personalized search algorithms; no ML required.
Going to Google to search things is really asking for the site with the most ads and trackers on them, is something that no self-respecting "Hacker" should be doing, and is a habbit you can quit at the turn of the decade if you haven't already. Because it's literally equivalent to asking "Ok Google, fill my feeble mind with shit".
> "I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI."
There was a social search engine, Aardvark (circa 2008). Google acquired it in 2010, then discontinued it off in 2011. The design is discussed in their paper below. There was also ChaCha -- another social search engine.
>> In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people.
That’s not quite right. There are plenty of tech people who stopped admiring google much earlier (shuttering of google reader was probably what keys me into where they were ultimately heading, and I’m sure many others saw things much earlier). On the other front, G$ is neither entirely evil or good. It is a very large company. There is still good, field advancing work and valuable contributions to the open source community coming from them. One the other front, there are absolutely perverse motivations and capabilities to break the open internet coming from them.
It’s a fine line to tread. They are like the Bell labs of our generation, for better or worse. Great tech came out of it, and breaking it up will kill that great tech R&D part. Then we will have to wait for the next disruption. I’m not in a position to say which is better, but this is how I see Google position currently.
Then they went full throttle with monopolistic practices, corruption, patent trolling, litterally and publically insulting the competition...
And now, they just use a tiny fraction of the huge amount of money they made during that time to wash their image: better PR, involved in open source, etc.
I'm not worried for Google. People will forgive and forget everything like they do with most politicians.
They just have to keep accumulating benefits, and then hire poeple to "make the brand great again". Works everytime.
I’m no fan of Google these days (I use DuckDuckGo) but I’m not sure I can entirely fault them with the decline of search quality. Spamdexing is burying the web in mountains of garbage. Malicious SEO and fraud have exploded and continue to grow at an accelerating rate.
What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but I’m too busy with school right now. I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web: a collection of information connected by hyperlinks. How we get a search engine to achieve that, I don’t know (it may take other tools as well), but I think it’s worth a try.
Great points. The idea that Google was evil had been out there long before 2014 of course, and perhaps some of that tin foil hatism was prescient rather than ridiculous.
> a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched
I wholeheartedly agree! In order to fuel the brainstorming with some divergent ideas:
- Queries answered/improved by real people (you didn't find what you wanted with "X", now people can suggest alternative search terms to help you find it. Whoever helps, gets a reward)
- Reputation-based search based on reviews (can be networked [as in social network] as well to put "trusted" reviews/hits at the top)
- Expose the query-language for your search engine, allow anyone to build a UI around it, link them together somehow so it's easy to jump between views
- Highly curated search engine, have a team of people insert pages manually after review
- Adjustable ranking. Some people might prefer links to are used a lot on Twitter, or from a special blog they like
Mix/match the above ideas, add/remove some, experiment and deploy prototypes for people to try. I'm sure there are better ways of doing search than what Google has right now.
(if you feel like contributing and adding more ideas, please use your lateral thinking, instead of convergent to disprove the ideas above)
I think a good mobile version of Apple spotlight might do more damage to Google than Bing/DDG.
Improving voice assistants in particular, like with Siri, could damage Google unless they’re not careful, since these assistants go beyond search and act as an operating system, to control IOT etc.
Text search is valuable and so on, but I can imagine that voice becomes the primary mode of interacting with the world (internet, etc) in the future. In that world without screens as the gateway, where are the gateway ads?
Back in 2015-7 or so yes, you'd be immediately dogpiled on here and reddit and most other sites for daring to criticize Google. I was trying to warn people about them and was always banned or downvoted to some shadowban realm immediately.
Google isn't the actual problem though, advertising is. The backlash needs to be primarily about ads, not the companies that just lie repeatedly in order to bend all tech infrastructure towards the needs of advertisers.
One way to kill it is blocking all their domains either in /etc/hosts or using pi-hole. But I imagine using the web would be slightly broken as Google host various font libraries and javascript libraries which if blocked, could break many sites.
People used to sit on a couch and watch TV for hours and also spent hours on the old phones talking about the most exciting shade of nail polish. Shopping is also fun.
Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not always cater to few most popular people's activities.
That does not mean that the total amount of Joe Doe's websites decreased. It is growing, just not as fast as the amount of my cat videos.
Sure big companies may try to subvert the Internet but I think that creative type of the populace will always find ways.
I agree and I also believe that it's important for people that care about these things to be vocal, stand behind and support people and companies that are doing good things. Promote what they're doing to an audience that doesn't know about them, buy their products, share their work... only that way the web may "recover" and a larger percentage of internet users may actually discover and spend their time on the more independent stuff.
FTA: "GOOG and FB ceased competing directly, focusing on what they do best instead."
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith
I don't think it's accurate to count stuff like youtube and google cloud as part of the %. It's gigabyte heavy but attention light. Just raw data about cat videos.
Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of attention crammed into each gigabyte.
Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem flawed.
There's a fundamental error, or at least assumption, in this piece that really needs to be called out. The author states it this way:
"Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social traffic."
This is stated in the context of a discussing of what the web was and might have been.
Let's be clear: when the web was tiny, having "significant traffic" wasn't a particularly difficult target to met. Get yourself on the netscape "What's New" list, and that's more or less the end of it. But the web (really, the internet) is now unimaginably huge compared to the days referred to at the beginning of the article. Having "significant traffic" now is not a realistic goal, or even a worthwhile goal, unless you define "significant" in a way that isn't strongly related to simple numerics.
If you're interested in and/or aspiring to the sort of web that seemed possible/desirable in 1994, then you're not really interested in building sites that attract "significant traffic" in the sense of huge numbers. Attracting the right people is a much more important goal, and that still relies on the same basics of "how to write a good web page" that existed in 1994.
In short, the dominance of "the trinet" in driving web/internet traffic only restates what could have been before computers: most of what humans do is related to commerce and mass entertainment, and attempts to do other stuff may succeed but will never be as visible or dominant as those two.
>The Web’s diversity has granted space for multiple businesses to innovate and thrive, independent hobbyist communities to grow, and personal sites to be hosted on whatever physical servers can host them.
A few months ago I was feeling the same way, especially about personal websites. I tried to find StumbleUpon as that seemed like a good alternative to see random unique websites. However, I was saddened to see it had shut down or transformed itself into a kind of Pinterest like clone.
Given that StumbleUpon was gone, I tried to quickly recreate the core functionality - click button get random website, at https://stumblingon.com - there are still a bunch of small, personal, interesting websites out there. We just need a good way to find them.
>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices.
This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.
Yes. The author of the article buried this point under all the Google, Facebook, Amazon commentary. Yet, it’s the key point.
Also, this article got me thinking that maybe public research should get to work on the AR/VR aspects of the web so the key infrastructure of the web continues to be publicly owned.
How can they even do it with encryption and CDNs everywhere? It's just not possible. The last trace is unencrypted domain name in TLS handshake and it'll be gone soon.
I've always the held the somewhat cynical position that this sort of stuff would push [the interesting] people towards other, decentralized Internets. I'm a big fan of new projects like IPFS and DAT, and GNUnet had a great call to arms on their about page (which seems to have been moderated a little) [1] saying very similar things to the article. Maybe the internet of things will save us after all, by finally providing the vast, dense network of interconnected wireless devices that is needed to provide a robust structure to a really distributed net.
I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly use the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who care about the internet (largely, the pre-FB mass of the internet).
These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture, it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase
I am learning Japanese. I am spending an increasing amount of time searching for things in Japanese, and am starting to notice how often a 'trinet' website even comes up on the first page. Virtually zero. I wonder if the 'the web is dying' mentality is only restricted to English? I would be surprised if English websites made up even half of all internet traffic
The next consolidation will be cleaning up the plethora of apps for mobile. User's interactions can be simplified with a few well-designed multifunctional apps. WeChat probably points the way in this regard.
Interesting article that's somewhat ruined by a click-baity title that it can't support. I first got on the web in 1994. There was far more difference between 1994 and 2014 than from 2014 to 2017. And that's the crux of it: just because it's different doesn't mean it's dying.
Google is interested in building an AI that is designed to turn people into its products.
What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people become?
All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges, persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good time.
The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30 minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer worth it.
The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.
Wait but goog fb and amzn have been aggressively trying to capture global markets. They have been increasing the footprint, does not that count for % increase from 2014 to 2017 ?? Does not make sense ..point about web is dying is opinionated. Today I can watch Netflix, order from doordash and connect with my family through FaceTime. All via web.
[+] [-] mojuba|6 years ago|reply
Google like no other tech giant always relied on the credibility among the tech people. Whether it's a new end-user product or a new programming language, it would go full avalanche with minimal marketing effort.
Losing our support, on top of poor product management and inability to innovate will be more and more difficult for them to handle. Rolling out poorly designed and poorly targeted products is already a sign of a disconnect from reality. They are slowly becoming less and less relevant and most importantly, less respected by the tech community. In a way it's the Microsoft of the 2000s when the revenue figures still weren't bad but the signs of the decline were apparent.
Yet unfortunately there's no competition to Search on the horizon and "google" is still a commonly used verb that will be very difficult to remove from the language. Microsoft seems to be happy with Bing's position today, which looks and feels like Google Search and maybe internally even mimics all the stupid and "evil" things Google Search does judging from their search results.
I think it is time (if not a bit too late) to try to challenge Google Search with something new, a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched. I bet a lot of people are constantly thinking about this, but the window of opportunity may be now while Google is putting a lot of their time and effort on ML/AI. I doubt you can compete with them by building a ML-based search, so it must be something else both in terms of technology and possibly even the UI.
I don't know what the bottom line here is. Google is not dying any time soon, but the time to challenge them could be now.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|6 years ago|reply
I'm running into serious flak from the marketing team because they don't know how to use any other tool. GA is the industry standard, apparently, and every site uses it, etc etc. They're even hinting that not using it could affect our SEO (I haven't seen any evidence for that, but if so it just reinforces my desire to not give Evil Google our traffic).
Even a couple of years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem. I trusted them to do the right thing. Now. No.
Google is the new M$
[+] [-] the_duke|6 years ago|reply
I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that.
Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era of low effort reposts, aggregators, optimizing for clicks and a large SEO industry.
In addition, most of the user-generated content is now inside "walled gardens" like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, and is either impossible to index, or much harder to quantify and rank than websites linking to each other.
There has to be something better out there, but it will be a difficult challenge.
Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181
[+] [-] kgersen75|6 years ago|reply
why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ?
I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google.
Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have.
But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours.
And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do. There are nuances and shades of gray in life, as we all learn when we grow up.
In the end, what matters is the silent majority not the chatty loud ones that have a personal grudge against some big corporation.
That "Google is evil" is highly overrated and over hyped. I always question the agenda of people promoting this.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|6 years ago|reply
This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com.
What are you searching for? Programming-related questions? Then go to stackoverflow.com directly (where you'll end up in 99% of cases when you search with DDG or Google anyway on these topics). Tip: to search SO, I've found it works best to create (but not submit) a new question with as much info in the headline as possible; the results that SO brings up to check for duplicate questions are excellent search results (btw have they changed it recently? I don't remember working it as good as it's now). Requires a StackExchange account though.
Are your searching for review of tech gadgets or christmas gifts? Then many people on HN admit to include "reddit" in their search terms. Then why not go directly to reddit.com for your search.
Are you searching on YouTube? Then indeed Google (YouTube itself) works best, but the real solution is to quit your media consumption habbit of spending your waking hours on monopolists video streaming sites that don't benefit creators. For just music without pointless and data-intensive video and ad noise, there are several alternatives.
Maybe it's time for new topic-related meta search engines and link aggregation sites.
In the end there isn't much new content worth searching for, thanks to Google and Facebook extracting almost all (70% in 2018) ad revenue, and the demise of the federated web in favour of 2010's portals such as github. I can assure you that the modest amount of new content worth reading can be easily summarized and searched by basic, non-personalized search algorithms; no ML required.
Going to Google to search things is really asking for the site with the most ads and trackers on them, is something that no self-respecting "Hacker" should be doing, and is a habbit you can quit at the turn of the decade if you haven't already. Because it's literally equivalent to asking "Ok Google, fill my feeble mind with shit".
[+] [-] dpflan|6 years ago|reply
There was a social search engine, Aardvark (circa 2008). Google acquired it in 2010, then discontinued it off in 2011. The design is discussed in their paper below. There was also ChaCha -- another social search engine.
> Aardbark wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)
> "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale, Social, Search Engine": https://web.archive.org/web/20110216155450/http://vark.com/a...
_
=== Update ===
I've found some HN posts about Aardvark and the acquisition:
> Aardvark: Now All Your Friends Are in the Answer Business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677178
> Aardvark Mulls Over A $30+ Million Offer From Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980607
> Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118132
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|6 years ago|reply
That’s not quite right. There are plenty of tech people who stopped admiring google much earlier (shuttering of google reader was probably what keys me into where they were ultimately heading, and I’m sure many others saw things much earlier). On the other front, G$ is neither entirely evil or good. It is a very large company. There is still good, field advancing work and valuable contributions to the open source community coming from them. One the other front, there are absolutely perverse motivations and capabilities to break the open internet coming from them.
It’s a fine line to tread. They are like the Bell labs of our generation, for better or worse. Great tech came out of it, and breaking it up will kill that great tech R&D part. Then we will have to wait for the next disruption. I’m not in a position to say which is better, but this is how I see Google position currently.
[+] [-] sametmax|6 years ago|reply
They started as liked hackers.
Then they went full throttle with monopolistic practices, corruption, patent trolling, litterally and publically insulting the competition...
And now, they just use a tiny fraction of the huge amount of money they made during that time to wash their image: better PR, involved in open source, etc.
I'm not worried for Google. People will forgive and forget everything like they do with most politicians.
They just have to keep accumulating benefits, and then hire poeple to "make the brand great again". Works everytime.
[+] [-] chongli|6 years ago|reply
What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but I’m too busy with school right now. I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web: a collection of information connected by hyperlinks. How we get a search engine to achieve that, I don’t know (it may take other tools as well), but I think it’s worth a try.
[+] [-] Ygg2|6 years ago|reply
To me, it also implies Google probably won't ever lose the search crown directly, the same way Microsoft never lost it's OS crown, to Linux or MacOS.
However, Windows is dwarfed by the Android install base.
[+] [-] Cougher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capableweb|6 years ago|reply
I wholeheartedly agree! In order to fuel the brainstorming with some divergent ideas:
- Queries answered/improved by real people (you didn't find what you wanted with "X", now people can suggest alternative search terms to help you find it. Whoever helps, gets a reward)
- Reputation-based search based on reviews (can be networked [as in social network] as well to put "trusted" reviews/hits at the top)
- Expose the query-language for your search engine, allow anyone to build a UI around it, link them together somehow so it's easy to jump between views
- Highly curated search engine, have a team of people insert pages manually after review
- Adjustable ranking. Some people might prefer links to are used a lot on Twitter, or from a special blog they like
Mix/match the above ideas, add/remove some, experiment and deploy prototypes for people to try. I'm sure there are better ways of doing search than what Google has right now.
(if you feel like contributing and adding more ideas, please use your lateral thinking, instead of convergent to disprove the ideas above)
[+] [-] BillFranklin|6 years ago|reply
Improving voice assistants in particular, like with Siri, could damage Google unless they’re not careful, since these assistants go beyond search and act as an operating system, to control IOT etc.
Text search is valuable and so on, but I can imagine that voice becomes the primary mode of interacting with the world (internet, etc) in the future. In that world without screens as the gateway, where are the gateway ads?
[+] [-] stopads|6 years ago|reply
Google isn't the actual problem though, advertising is. The backlash needs to be primarily about ads, not the companies that just lie repeatedly in order to bend all tech infrastructure towards the needs of advertisers.
[+] [-] octosphere|6 years ago|reply
One way to kill it is blocking all their domains either in /etc/hosts or using pi-hole. But I imagine using the web would be slightly broken as Google host various font libraries and javascript libraries which if blocked, could break many sites.
[+] [-] andrepd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmmarco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daodedickinson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
1. Chrome was successful because it was hawked on Google’s home page.
2. Android was successful because Apple never played in the lowend market.
3. Gmail was successful because it was better than the alternatives and had more storage space.
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
Google has secured a lot of top AI researchers. Depending on the dates when their options vest, we may see a lot of them leave.
[+] [-] bjornjaja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|6 years ago|reply
Now all that activities largely moved to Internet. Thanks to omnipresence of smartphones the hours dedicated to those activities had also increased. Of course share of general Joe Doe's website got smaller as said website does not always cater to few most popular people's activities.
That does not mean that the total amount of Joe Doe's websites decreased. It is growing, just not as fast as the amount of my cat videos.
Sure big companies may try to subvert the Internet but I think that creative type of the populace will always find ways.
[+] [-] markosaric|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cft|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ropiwqefjnpoa|6 years ago|reply
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith
Some things never change.
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
Compare it with say whatsapp traffic - that has a crazy high amount of attention crammed into each gigabyte.
Doesn't really change the message/conclusion but the metric used here seem flawed.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|6 years ago|reply
"Any website aspiring for significant traffic depends on Search and Social traffic."
This is stated in the context of a discussing of what the web was and might have been.
Let's be clear: when the web was tiny, having "significant traffic" wasn't a particularly difficult target to met. Get yourself on the netscape "What's New" list, and that's more or less the end of it. But the web (really, the internet) is now unimaginably huge compared to the days referred to at the beginning of the article. Having "significant traffic" now is not a realistic goal, or even a worthwhile goal, unless you define "significant" in a way that isn't strongly related to simple numerics.
If you're interested in and/or aspiring to the sort of web that seemed possible/desirable in 1994, then you're not really interested in building sites that attract "significant traffic" in the sense of huge numbers. Attracting the right people is a much more important goal, and that still relies on the same basics of "how to write a good web page" that existed in 1994.
In short, the dominance of "the trinet" in driving web/internet traffic only restates what could have been before computers: most of what humans do is related to commerce and mass entertainment, and attempts to do other stuff may succeed but will never be as visible or dominant as those two.
[+] [-] ALittleLight|6 years ago|reply
A few months ago I was feeling the same way, especially about personal websites. I tried to find StumbleUpon as that seemed like a good alternative to see random unique websites. However, I was saddened to see it had shut down or transformed itself into a kind of Pinterest like clone.
Given that StumbleUpon was gone, I tried to quickly recreate the core functionality - click button get random website, at https://stumblingon.com - there are still a bunch of small, personal, interesting websites out there. We just need a good way to find them.
[+] [-] solwyvern|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvhashim|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|6 years ago|reply
This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.
[+] [-] mch82|6 years ago|reply
Also, this article got me thinking that maybe public research should get to work on the AR/VR aspects of the web so the key infrastructure of the web continues to be publicly owned.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackflame|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RupertEisenhart|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://gnunet.org/en/about.html
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly use the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who care about the internet (largely, the pre-FB mass of the internet).
These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture, it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase
[+] [-] mlacks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cougher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuxt|6 years ago|reply
Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.
[+] [-] TheBobinator|6 years ago|reply
What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people become?
All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges, persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good time.
The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30 minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer worth it.
The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.
[+] [-] cryptozeus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|6 years ago|reply
I want to bring attention to the followup article Staltz wrote about what we might do about the problems he enumerated in the OP:
https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-interne...
[+] [-] Mauricio_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|6 years ago|reply