[g-b-r]

> that I (and millions of other people less fortunate than me, that couldn't "afford" the non-ad-supported cost of these services) have benefited tremendously from the existence of Google and its ilk.

People who were into Google seem to tremendously overestimate the value it provided.

The only Google thing I ever used is Android, and only because it's too hard to avoid it.

Had there not been Google you'd have used alternative services, and your life would not have been much worse.

Yes, a similarly good search engine would have emerged, similar products would have been devised, and the internet would have been ad-supported as it already was before Google.

[stickfigure]

I used Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, etc in the era before Google - and it was worse.

If you're suggesting that some other company besides Google would have worked out the same algorithms and business plan, then this seems incoherent. Even if true, we'd be here discussing how much value we've gotten from Notgoogle. It's still a tremendous amount of value, whatever the company is named.

[g-b-r]

> I used Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, etc in the era before Google - and it was worse.

I guess you were only talking about the search engine, then.

The technology was ready, PageRank was inspired by other work, and Google came to a good degree out of government grants.

And by the way, the search engine I was using when Google came out (I think it was Northern Light, but I might be mistaken) was not significantly worse; Altavista and Yahoo were definitely among the worst engines by then

> If you're suggesting that some other company besides Google would have worked out the same algorithms and business plan, then this seems incoherent.

Why incoherent?

Had another company done exactly the same but with a different name, yeah, not much would have changed...

But there was no need for things to go this way, for the products you love to emerge; they just, probably, would have been made by several companies, rather than all by one.

But actually, there have always been alternatives to Google's products, it was just your choice to not use them; you could probably have gotten a similar value without ever touching a Google product.

[titanomachy]

I agree that competitors have caught up now, but there was a time when Google Translate and Google Maps (for example) were the only game in town. I tried most competitors, and they were all nearly useless in comparison.

[spencerflem]

I've been trying to live a relatively de-google'd life right now, and much like you say, it's not so hard. Google Maps is the big exception for me.