[m463]

It's a symptom of an underlying problem.

- companies used to respect us.

- computers used to belong to us.

The equation changed when companies found a way to charge advertisers big money by inverting these equations.

Google is just the poster child for all this, but there are lots of other players that have cashed in.

[mav3rick]

You are free to not use their services. People acting offended for using free services. Before you say "free" is not free, well no one pays for most web services. So this is an inherent human problem not one these companies created.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Well. How does Wikipedia survive? Or Archive.org? Or Open Streetmap? Maybe the people/haters don't even care so much about advertisements in general, but the sheer mass of them, which degrades the usability, and maybe some of the services aren't that good anymore in general, while having been better before? I remember the days i happily used Altavista Search instead of the Yahoo. Because Yahoo was spammed to death, while Altavista at the time wasn't.

It feels the same with Duck Duck Go vs. Google since at least 5 years now? I don't really care how it is financed in the background, i care about how much hassle it is to find something, or even being able to find it at all. Google fails there massively for me, and i wonder why that is? Maybe because it is Anglocentric? Or even US-centric? But then the same should apply to Duck Duck Go, which isn't the case, because it works fine for me. I know it's using inferior indices, but it doesn't matter when the better ones are so overblown that i fail to find the needle in the impossibly large haystack. I'm even using other search engines before i fall back to Google, in case of not finding something. Google has gone from something good to last ditch only for me.

That was for general search. Now to the maps. With the exception of satellite/air-imagery it leaves much to be desired, and that is the labeling of places. Which fails worldwide. That algorithm is just crap on higer zoom levels. At first i thought it would be because of my location, some country far away over the Atlantic in old Europe, but it's not. I recognized that while reading something about the history of building railroads trough the Rocky Mountains, and the Googlemaps made no sense at all, because it either omits small places altogether, or puts the labels where they absolutely don't belong. Bingmaps meanwhile were a joy to use, everything was there, at the right places, and it ran even faster! LOL?

Then there is this thing with business listings and reviews in the map which is useless in my locations. I don't read them anymore, because any i have read were wrong, or did otherwise not meaningfully apply. I don't know why that is, is it just vandalism from random people, coercion of services like Yelp, or whatver? I don't care anymore, because USELESS!

Then general accuracy about what is where, and how to get there in my favored modes of transport. In my locations Open Streetmaps wins. EVERY TIME! (I know that is not applicable in general, because coverage/accuracy thereof varies regionally)

What else? Hm. Youtube. What can i say? Expect to get dirty if walking into a market for stupid pigs. Though it has not only some rare, but many pearls. Just difficult to find them in all that stinking shit. Apart from that, what are they thinking if i'm listening to some ambient psychill/progressive psytrance mix which goes about 1 to 2 hours and they are interupting that with at least 4 adverts per hour for stuff which is totally unrelated and i have no interest in? Who thinks of something like that? Are they on crack?

Is there anything i like about Google? Yeah, i like EARTH. Glorious! My digital globe. Great. But i don't need that, it's more of a toy for me.

So, emperors new clothes for all the gaslighted androids, anyone? :-)