[inopinatus]

On the contrary, the end-to-end federated Internet was doing just fine before Google came along, and will do just fine, perhaps better, when it's gone and no longer trying to co-opt every god-damn standards process for their own preferences. No-one has a monopoly on innovation: most inventions are driven by necessity, and large companies stifle genius, they don't foster it. Far from being the greater good, Google is remarkably pig-headed, and often downright incompetent outside of selling ads; even the usefulness of their flagship search is in decline.

[ignoramous]

> Far from being the greater good, Google is remarkably pig-headed, often downright incompetent outside of selling ads...

As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs (in terms of impact) just ahead of Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest.

[josephg]

> webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs (in terms of impact) just ahead of Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest.

Thats a really weird claim. We can point to some real ways google has benefited the web: Their search engine is excellent, and was a huge leap forward when it was released. SPDY/QUIC are set to become the next HTTP2/HTTP3. And google chrome has made the browser a much more powerful and compelling platform over the last few years. If anything they're investing too much - and hurting the web by making it hard for other browser vendors to keep up.

But webrtc?? Webrtc is still mostly a toy, barely used outside of video conferencing. Its insanely overcomplicated for any other use case. And I still haven't seen a compelling reason to use it for anything else. Decentralized communication doesn't buy you much when the site itself is still loaded from a centralized server.

More important / impactful than XMLHttpRequest? No, I think not.

[tristan957]

What is the point of having a WebRTC standard if Google doesn't even follow it? Mozilla Firefox is given the shaft for many services because they don't support Chrome-only WebRTC APIs? Chrome and Google are bad for diversity on the web.

[_0w8t]

This all assumes that without Google this would not happen. But I fail to see why is this so. Linux happened without single corporation controlling it.

[ineedasername]

Linux was helped along massively when IBM embraced it and invested a $billion in it in 2000.

RedHat benefited significantly from funding by large corporations in it's early days.

Undoubtedly these companies helped shape the Linux ecosystem. A single company doesn't control it, but as big as Google is a single company doesn't control the web either.

[pjmlp]

Not only IBM, also Compaq and the daily hated Oracle were early contributers.

[ignoramous]

> This all assumes that without Google this would not happen.

To be fair, I am not the one that's assuming things here. I am speaking of how Google has indeed contributed when they really didn't have to (as pointed out with the example of Amazon).

> Linux happened without single corporation controlling it.

A consortium of corporations, sure: linaro.org

[nwallin]

What does linaro.org have to do with linux? I've been using linux since a decade before linaro.org was founded, and this is the first I've heard of it. Did you mean the Linux Foundation?

[ignoramous]

linaro.org contributes ARM-related work that directly impacts largest deployment of Linux (Android). And how long before ARM takes over servers as well?

I meant to highlight that Linux, not in its entirety but parts of it, is indeed driven by orgs (that you haven't even heard of).

[keeganpoppen]

there's no chance that webrtc is a more important innovation than XMLHTTPRequest... the web would be just a bunch of hyperlinked text and images without XHR...

[rixed]

This made me realize how much I would actually love that, somehow.

[kalleboo]

Yeah it would have been an interesting world if Java hadn't sucked so bad (and MS hadn't tried to kill it) and the web had remained a hypertext document platform and all the deep interactivity ended up in applets and Java Web Start apps. Both pros and cons to that.

[josefx]

Java, Flash, Silverlight, lets not pretend that Java was the only attempt. Sad part is that flash and java plugins got killed over security exploits while the always growing API surface of current JavaScript implementations still gets consistently owned in Pwn2Own style competitions.

[pjmlp]

No worries, we can replicate the experience with WebAssembly now.

[beebeepka]

Google was great until 2004 or so. I think uncle Sam made them an offer they could not or simply did not want to refuse. Then this Schmidt guy came and did the actual damage

[mr_toad]

Google was great until after they won the second browser war and gradually became used to power.

They’re a lot like a revolutionary government that gradually becomes corrupt and as bad as the regime they overthrew.

[pjerem]

Like mostly everyone, I was amongst those people who heavily recommended Google (really cool) products to friends & family.

Retrospectively, I feel so stupid to have promoted « free products paid by an advertising company » for years.

I know Google duped everyone on this so I don’t feel to be stupid alone. But still, in hindsight, there were no possible future where Google could stay on top without doing dirty things. We didn’t see the targeted ads coming.

[rixed]

I certainly hate ads more than the average person, probably even more than the average hell, but it feels strange to hear people sometime speak about Google as if targeted ads were the worse thing that could happen on the internet.

I've seen censorship, identity theft, money laundering, online harassment, online crime, information theft on very large scale to target, arrest and hang political opponents... All of which Google used to oppose more than any other big tech co. But somehow, the pitchforks are out against targeted ads.

[pjerem]

You know, I'm not saying that Google is evil or that it behaves with bad intentions. And I have no problem with targeted ads as a product. It's a pretty efficient product that helps a lot of business to have their chance. I acknowledge that. But at what cost ?

For me, Google is "evil" for what it is, not what it does. And I think that Google is an utterly dangerous company with such unbelievable amount of precious data that could change the course of the history in a really bad way if it falls into the wrong hands in the future.

Who knows who will control Google in 5, 10 or 50 years ? Nobody knows. But we can be sure that in 50 years, the data that Google collects about us today will be lying on some hard disk drive, ready to be used for who knows what.

Google is able to define and store indefinitely "who you are". And the human history is full of times where "who you are" or even "who you were" were some really dangerous information that threatened your liberty or your life.

[vineyardmike]

> As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs

Complex browser-based alternative to TCP? Standardized alternative to Socket.io? I can't say its not useful but webrtc is hardly the most important thing...

[efdee]

Was it though? Search kind of sucked before Google came along. Javascript in the browser was a joke. Google Maps and Mail were revolutionary.

I'm not as positive about Google today as I used to be in the past, but I don't feel it's fair to pretend that they didn't help us take giant steps forward.

[inopinatus]

Many of my primary sources of information have been obliterated by Google; they've also taken giant steps backwards, one case in point being the abridgement of the DejaNews archives, and frankly, no, search did not suck prior to Google: I always had better results writing queries for Altavista, and to this day I continue to use more specific predicates in the same fashion because results are often irrelevant otherwise - predicates that are, depressingly, having an ever-decreasing impact on the outcome.

One consequence was the preceding generation of search engines being harder to drive for everyday folks, and a relevance approximation thereby more immediately accessible on the consumer scale, but let's face that the algorithmic approach also spawned a whole bottom-feeding industry of SEO snake oil vendors and their merry-go-round of clickbait, malware, and global-scale consumer surveillance. The incentive to hang yourself from a single keyword means that Google became the foster parent of AOL's Eternal September.

My personal feeling on the matter of Gmail and Google Maps is that they are best attributed to their personal creators (Paul Buchheit, and the Rasmussens, respectively), not the corporation. The seed of Google Maps was an acquisition, after all, and many other technologies I've seen offered up in neighbouring threads as proof of Google's benevolence were either acquisitions, or ones where substantial parts of any credit must be shared (webrtc has been mentioned; it is both).

Javascript in the browser still sucks mightily, and although it's not an argument I particularly wish to stir up there's plenty to say in support of that perspective. What's more, many of the best solutions are the product of independent/small/OSS groups, although I will confess a soft spot for TypeScript. Consequently, and especially w.r.t Gmail, Youtube, Maps, and <whatever Google Apps is called this year>, Chrome starts to look like the Lotus Notes of today: a thick client, developed by a large firm, in support of its specific service & platform offerings.

[zuppy]

I have a different opinion regarding Altavista search results quality. The results were so bad that most of the times I had to also try Hotbot, Ask Jeeves and various directories (Yahoo, dmoz, etc). They were not good search engines but the web back then was way smaller and there was a high chance that you could have different content on the other engines.

That’s the reason why Google, a very small newcomer, crashed the entire search engine market.

[foobiekr]

Search sucks now. Searching on google is like talking to someone with no long term memory. It's like nothing prior to the last, maybe, 24 months exists.

[pjmlp]

Also one needs a black magic ceremony to be able to come up with a search expression that actually works without Google jumping in and help me by rewriting it.

[bsedlm]

As I see it, the real problem was making google into a for-profit corporation.

The world would be a better place if google search had been made a not-for-profit (maybe like wikipedia?)

By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010

[throwaway3699]

> By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010

UI changes and new features aside, the web is just so much more adversarial nowadays. It's no wonder so much rubbish floats to the top of Google because the reality it's drowning out all the other content.

If you had the source code for 2005 Google it would be objectively worse today than it was then.

[jay_kyburz]

I'm often ridiculed for this idea when I voice it, but on day soon I'd like to make a search engine that is only whitelisted domains, with opinionated / hand curated weightings.

[vineyardmike]

Not crazy. Do it and share it.

Just be prepared: the future of the internet is navigating politics. You better be prepared for people to be upset at query X returns results too right/left/up/down for their political preferences. Then senators start tweeting at you.

[jay_kyburz]

Actually I just remembered we don't have copyright fair use here in Australia so I can't legally scrape websites. Oh well.

Also, my search engine will be called "Jays Favorite Websites" and the right side of politics can bite me.

[drdaeman]

What would be an incentive to innovate past launch?

I'm trying to think of any changes to Wikipedia that happened after it launched and can't think of any. It surely does its job, but it doesn't change and there is no drive. Wiki concept was novel at the time, they did and continue to do an amazing job, but there's no evolution there. Or maybe I'm just a blind or unaware or biased - but, honestly, I tried to think of something and nothing came to mind.

Google constantly tries out some new things. They're really bad at maintaining them, they can't stop inventing chat services, they suck a lot and we could bash them endlessly, but let's credit what's due - they're always exploring some frontiers.

[adhesive_wombat]

Wikidata is a pretty neat thing that the WMF created well after Wikipedia launched. And it's not like the Mediawiki software has stood still since then, it's way more advanced now.

Just because cars still mostly have 4 wheels doesn't mean automotive engineers haven't been innovating the past 100 years.

[_0w8t]

When runnaroo.com was shut down I was surprised that it was done by single person who managed for some searches to return better results than Google.

Which among other things shows that patents are bad for innovation in new and quickly changing industry. Google came up with their algorithm and heavily patterned it. As an invention it was not ground-breaking, but it matched very well how web worked. This gave them essentially monopoly in search from which they massively profited. At least now those patents expire.

[sidibe]

I've never heard of anyone saying patents have much to do with Googles success, can you point me to something about that? To me their infrastructure and scale was the big edge they've had over everyone