
Google Ideas - duck
https://www.google.com/ideas/
======
jackmaney
Can someone please summarize what the hell this is supposed to be? Sure, DDOS
attacks, hacking, etc are bad. What else, exactly, am I supposed to pull away
from this horribly designed site?

~~~
jonknee
> Google Ideas builds products to support free expression and access to
> information for people who need it most — those facing violence and
> harassment.

> Google Ideas is a team of engineers, researchers and geopolitical experts
> who build products to support free expression and access to information,
> especially in repressive societies. We focus on the problems faced by people
> who live in unstable, isolated, or oppressive environments, including the
> billions of people who are coming online for the first time.

> With the right tools, we can make the internet more free and open. Many of
> us take the internet for granted, but for human rights activists,
> journalists, and artists living under censorship, a free and open internet
> can be a matter of life and death.

~~~
thieving_magpie
Google is such a strange company. Don't they participate in the suppression of
free expression in places like China, justifying it as a cost of doing
business?

edit: in an effort to not spread bad information, I'd like to retract my
statement. It was based on outdated information.

~~~
kbenson
This reality of the censorship appears to be well documented[1], and I don't
think it's quite as simple as that. Here's the TL;DR

Google filtered terms the Chinese government required (by law), but did so by
returning results saying that some items were filtered out specifically so
users would know their results were filtered. Google never gave any
information on who searched specific terms, but after some attacks on their
servers in an apparent attempt to get this information, Google announced they
would no longer filter searches for China. Talks on how to accomplish this
broke down, and Google redirected their China site to Hong Kong, which has no
censorship restrictions, but the Great Firewall seems to be filtering results.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#China](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#China)

~~~
moey
They stopped the redirect[1] and now just show a link to Google Hong Kong.

They also removed the warning that the user's search results were being
filtered [2].

To the best of my knowledge, the current status: User visits Google China -
[http://google.cn](http://google.cn) \- This is a hyperlink to Google Hong
Kong on the front page \- IF user searches via Google.cn, the search results
will be filtered by China not self-censored by Google. They will NOT be
presented with a warning anymore. \- IF user searches via Google.hk, from
mainland china, the same thing will happen and the results will still be
filtered. [3]

At this point, I don't believe the link to .hk Google serves as much use as it
does a political statement.

[1] "Google stops Hong Kong auto-redirect as China plays hardball"
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/google-
tweak...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/google-tweaks-china-
to-hong-kong-redirect-same-results.ars)

[2] "Google's dropped anti-censorship warning marks quiet defeat in China"
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google-
def...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google-defeat-china-
censorship-battle)

[3] "China censors searches on Google's Hong Kong-based search engine"
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032301250.html)

~~~
kbenson
I agree, I think their original stance, showing results and noting where they
had to filter, was much better. But if that makes them a target, and can
reverse and good they think they are doing if they are hacked by China and any
identifying information (correlation with the Great Firewall seems likely) is
found, I can see their reasoning. If you truly want to do the right thing, is
making yourself a target that makes the situation worse the right way to go
about it? It's a complex situation, and there's probably lots of information
that we aren't privy to. At least it got press and there was some awareness.

------
dmix
Google's designers have totally lost it, just try scrolling on this page
without getting dizzy:

[https://www.google.com/ideas/products/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/)

The page looks so nice but then they proceed to destroy usability with bizarre
navigation schemes and breaking nearly every common design pattern - scrolling
is just one of them.

~~~
MarkSweep
For me it scrolls ridiculously slowly. And they broke the side scroll bar and
arrow keys, so I have spin the mouse wheel a ton to get it to move at all.

I don't see what the point of breaking scrolling is.

~~~
on_and_off
In OsX + Chrome it works perfectly with the trackpad. They might have only
tested this on a limited number of browsers/OSes ?

~~~
nindalf
Unusable on OS X + Firefox. Definitely didn't test on other browsers.

~~~
psibi
Also unusable on Linux + Firefox.

~~~
Sgt_Apone
It's broken on Windows + Firefox as well. Works fine in IE though.

------
gmisra
Julian Assange believes that "Google Ideas" is, amongst other things, a
channel for Google to get involved in geopolitics while maintaing political
cover and distance - and Google Ideas often engages in surreptitious actions
in concert with the US government. [http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-
not-what-it-seems-279...](http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-
seems-279447)

IMO, anything Assange say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But then
again, the same holds for Google PR.

~~~
themeek
Julian Assange is perfectly right in this case.

Google is already very involved in geopolitics.

Google Ideas is a way to protect US investments in culture export "civil
society" apps.

------
Lancey
Does Google have a team working round the clock to develop the most annoying
webpages possible? For as many "cool wow amazing" CSS tricks as this site
uses, it doesn't do a good job of explaining what it is at all. And what's up
with the products page? Why does it scroll so slowly?

~~~
calbear81
I was hoping to learn more about the project too but they broke scrolling on
that "wheel of content" thing.

------
jokoon
Having a decentralized forum/chat/data system would be really awesome, even if
that might be against google's interests. I really want the future to have
more p2p systems.

There was edonkey, then bittorent, then the cloud, then git, then bittorrent
sync...

I don't understand why systems like freenet and bitmessage have not taken off.
The internet was built for p2p, but it's still mostly used as a broadcast
system where everything is centralized.

Why isn't google trying to fund those projects ? Because they re so much
invested in the web of HTML content they can't look eitherway.

~~~
benkant
I had a rant about this on Twitter yesterday[0].

Google makes money precisely because the web is centralised. If we moved to
P2P systems they could still provide an index, but I'd wager far less data
would ultimately pass through them. Not to mention that if people were more in
control of their data rather than LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, I bet
they'd be less inclined to having it indexed publically simply because they
have a choice.

There's all sorts of network effects and shitty incentives at play, and it's a
shame.

My twitter rant (not the whole thing even)

> though they have their place, centralised systems reinforce the role of the
> middle man, which is prime for rent-seeking and lopsided value

> in reality networks exist on a continuum between centralised/decentralised.
> The web makes it difficult to choose the correct degree per case

> both centralised and decentralised systems have trust issues, but they are
> different in kind not magnitude

> the incentives are wrong for innovation. Google requires centralised, so
> HTTP is fine. Ubiquity, so HTML is fine

> web developers have spent years becoming skilled in their corner and are
> incentivised to defend and perpetuate the platform

> if you think discoverability, zero-install and sandboxes are only possible
> on the web, I invite you to consult the literature

> we could have decentralised, secure, simple, efficient primitives, but
> network effects and incentives steer us away

> tech solutions are moot unless they incentivise behaviour that leads to
> better returns for everyone. layers on HTML/HTTP will never do that

[0] [https://twitter.com/benkant](https://twitter.com/benkant)

~~~
kbenson
In what way do you think the web is centralized?

~~~
jacquesm
That's a good question which deserves an honest answer but this comment box is
really too small for that and essay sized comments are frowned upon.

For starters: navigating the web in the beginning consisted of clicking links
which caused you to go from one website to another. This all worked well when
(a) the web was small and (b) there were (hardly) no trash pages.

Search engines changed that, and once they got 'good enough' the link graph
became a mere starting point for crawling the web rather than the way we
navigated from site to site. For a little while the link graph was used as a
popularity measurement but this too changed (because of the huge number of low
value links).

Then we got silos. A 'silo' is a bunch of data locked up under a trade between
users and large web properties. The trade is 'you give us your content and a
bunch of information about yourself and we'll use that content to attract
others and to sell ads'.

Examples of such silos are Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Finally, if originally (and the internet itself) was strung together by a
peer-to-peer approach it turned more and more into a division between
producers and consumers, with the producers on the 'server' side and the
consumers on the 'client' side.

Mobile devices accessing the net further accelerated this trend, right now the
only internet (not web) applications that are still peer-to-peer are torrent
applications. For the most part the division on the web is complete and
hosting a web server on your very powerful cable modem or DSL line would be
grounds for termination of your access.

Servers are hosted centrally and are operated by companies whereas clients are
simply terminals that access the content stored on those servers.

I hope that answers your question in enough detail, you could easily write a
book about this.

~~~
kbenson
The internet is, by it's nature, peer to peer and decentralized. Cut a cable,
or take out a large networks, the internet will route around it, either
quickly (routes converging on a new peer) or slowly (a poorly connected
network finding a new upstream to purchase connectivity through). That
companies then build on top of this and implement services where they are the
middle of both connections does not change this fundamentally, it just adds an
optional layer. To assume our connections have upstream bandwidth that is
never or rarely used is false. I would argue that we generate more content
per-person than ever in history. The seer amount of pictures, videos, webcams,
posts and comments is much higher than ever before. Are they hosting it
directly from their connections? Usually not, but that's as much a case of
being efficient and reaching an audience as it is in companies wanting control
over the data. Even then, there are services which are decentralized from
that, such as email. It's not efficient to host content yourself. Even the
large networks use dedicated CDNs. For the end user, Facebook is a CDN.

That said, I agree there is a clear move towards our data and services being
handled by fewer, and larger entities, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft,
Apple, Amazon. But they aren't a single entity, and I don't consider that
centralized. Any one of those providers could implode today, and very little
of their services could not be picked up by some competitor easily. I don't
consider that centralized.

~~~
jacquesm
We call them datacenters for a reason. When I received mail in '95 or so the
machine receiving it was the workstation I wrote the reply on.

Your peer-to-peer view of the internet died roughly in '98.

~~~
kbenson
> We call them datacenters for a reason.

And there are many of them, some owned by companies that use them exclusively,
some conglomerations of many different providers but owned by yet another
party. How is this centralization? I still think you're just arguing that
we've compartmentalized certain services to _sets_ of companies, for the most
part, but even that isn't centralization, because there are multiple distinct
companies using multiple distinct networks and in many cases they are
presenting multiple distinct capabilities. Not having something handled at the
end point does not mean it's centralized, there's a very large middle ground
here, and that's where we are currently at. I'm not sure I see any evidence
that we are moving away from that towards actual centralization.

> When I received mail in '95 or so the machine receiving it was the
> workstation I wrote the reply on.

And many people that used POP3 continued to do so well into the 2000's. It's
silly to run a mail server on your workstation. I know, I did it for years
myself. You run into all sorts of stupid problems related to your workstation
not being always on, badly configured backup MX servers, and other issues. We
don't do it anymore not because we were forced out of it (you can still do it
now), but because there are solutions that are better for most use cases, and
we opt for those.

We don't all wash our own cars, or do our own plumbing, or even clean our own
houses. Some people do, some people pay others to do that work. The fact they
pay others doesn't mean we've moved towards centralizing those services. There
isn't some national bureau of plumbing that is our only recourse when the
toilet is clogged and we don't want to fix it ourselves.

~~~
jacquesm
Ok. So you say we're not trending towards a more centralized internet because
you discard all proof that that is exactly what is happening. That's fine with
me but it really doesn't help to move the discussion forward.

The _reasons_ why we are moving to a more centralized internet are what is
interesting, such as - you rightly identified those - that stuff isn't always
powered up and that keeping a mailserver up and running is work and so on.

But none of that changes that centralization is happening.

Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet. That's what a
decentralized network infrastructure used to mean, where the 'peers' were
equals.

Nowadays it means clients in one camp and servers in another, and large scale
consolidation of those servers in the datawarehouses of a relatively low
number of companies serving up the bulk of the data. If that trend continues
it's not a bad or a good thing per-se but it would be good to stop and think
about how desirable that is.

So from that point of view a lot of centralization has already happened.

Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they
can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical
reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content
(or google, or Yahoo).

In the end, convenience won over 'peer-to-peer', there are many reasons
besides convenience (firewalls, for one) but the results are here and we'll
have to live with it (except for a couple of die-hard hold-outs).

~~~
kbenson
What I've tried to make clear, and either failed in or you disagree with this
as well, is that I don't think saying we are "centralizing" or moving towards
a "centralized" internet is correct, largely because that implies we are
approaching, or event still moving towards, the end-point of that spectrum,
which is _centralization_ , and that implies a single authority.

I think it is correct to say we are, or at least _were_ , decentralizing, _to
a degree_. I think it's correct to say that we are not fully decentralized,
which we were close to initially, but I don't think it's entirely constructive
to say we are moving in a direction that leads to a centralized internet, and
what that implies (a single authority, even if for a single service). I think
we are moving towards, or have arrived at, what we see in many markets. Large
dominant players that the majority use, but with a large market of smaller
players that provide for the niche needs. Take the automotive industry, for
example.

I think we are largely arguing over semantics, which is something I don't want
to do, but at the same time it's hard to be sure I'm not just reducing your
arguments to the point there's no difference and ignoring important points at
the same time.

> But none of that changes that centralization is happening.

I think it's cyclical, and there will be periods where we move along the
spectrum back and forth, but I doubt we'll get as close to the decentralized
end as we started at, but for many reasons. I don't think we'll get all that
close to the decentralized end either though.

> Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet.

My argument has not been "we are decentralized", it's been "we are not
centralized". To that effect, peer-to-peer is irrelevant to my argument, and
I've tried to make that clear.

> Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming
> they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any
> technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all
> your content (or google, or Yahoo).

Because it's very, very inefficient. There are upsides to centralization (e.g.
discoverability), just as there are downsides (e.g. homogeneity). I think the
sweet spot that maximizes the upsides and minimizes the downsides is somewhere
between decentralization and centralization.

------
ISL
Just getting a black screen with a mute button. Page source is more readable
:).

~~~
jaytaylor
You're not missing much imo:

[http://i.imgur.com/yN0f3Sf.png](http://i.imgur.com/yN0f3Sf.png)

~~~
mindhunter
you're missing a lot if you're into web design. of course, content is king and
google fucked up big times by not having a proper fallback. but that parallax
scrolling is the best I've seen so far
[https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack-
map/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack-map/)

~~~
conorgdaly
I visited that page in both Chrome & FF and see no use of parallax scrolling.
This is a good example of parallax scrolling:

[http://www.firewatchgame.com/](http://www.firewatchgame.com/)

------
yellowapple
"Enhance your experience by turning on sound"

How about no. Seriously. Google of all companies should know better than to
rely on autoplaying any sort of audible multimedia, especially as what I'm
guessing to be the preferred source of information (guessing since - at the
point where people started talking - I simply closed the tab).

------
danso
One of their products: Investigative Dashboard

[https://www.google.com/ideas/products/investigative-
dashboar...](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/investigative-dashboard/)

Some good ideas there, but mostly it's a collection of high-level tools and
visualizations...my main objection is that journalists have a tendency to see
data and documents as "magic" and making a slick Investigative Dashboard
doesn't really dispel that. The main problem of data and document collection
is not much different than in data science, where research and data
cleaning/collection is by far the most time consuming part of the process.
Improving OCR (and let's give Google credit for its work on tesseract) and
creating a more friendly interface for tesseract (such as a training GUI)
would be much, much more useful to the average investigative reporter.

And in terms of collection/research: if Google took up the work of reverse-
PACER (for court documents), or furthered its work in election data
([https://developers.google.com/civic-
information/](https://developers.google.com/civic-information/))...those would
also be hugely beneficial initiatives.

~~~
wavefunction
I'm getting 404s on the pages on the actual
[https://www.investigativedashboard.org](https://www.investigativedashboard.org)
site.

This sort of information would be useful for a project I'm working on,
especially the business relationships.

~~~
danso
IIRC, the corporate data is all part of OpenCorporates, which has its own API:

[https://opencorporates.com/](https://opencorporates.com/)

> _OpenCorporates aims to do a straightforward (though big) thing: have a URL
> for every company in the world._

------
BinaryIdiot
This is confusing and I'm not entirely sure what the message is. What am I
missing?

Edit: okay so I think I get it; they outline a product then you can click
through and apply to use that product. Not very descriptive though.

------
Eupolemos
If I was doing sensitive stuff, I wouldn't expect Google to protect me from
anything in which the US has economic or intelligence interests.

I think these products are meant for journos and NGO workers who want some
level of protection without knowing much about what they are doing.

The way I see it from under my tinfoil hat, is that this is a bit of
protection paid for by making your work instantly indexed and searchable by
the US for various purposes.

~~~
themeek
It's more of a cyber shield for NGOs that align with US strategic objectives.

------
wenham
Blank screen for most, try going to
[https://www.google.com/ideas/products/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/)

~~~
aamar
That one's blank for me too (Chrome 43, OS X 10.10). Any alternates?

~~~
tvvocold
Blank too, Chrome 42 on Windows 7, need help!

------
addedlovely
Like that glitch effect on the text and images, tried something similar with
CSS clipping masks before. This canvas implementation is rather slick.

------
krisroadruck
I thought this was going to be about actual ideas not bla bla terrorists cyber
dude fear mongering. Shame.

------
alfonsodev
"Protect against hackers" I still feel bad when I see the word hackers used
like that. Although words end meaning what the majority think they means, it
feels wrong to see this usage in a Google website.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Well, there's "Crackers", but that carries some racial connotations with it...

------
yjgyhj
I miss old Google... Their UI was the simplest, most basic of all saas
companies. My browser uses my GPU and my computer has 4x as many cores, and 4x
as much memory. But googles web pages are unusable on my machine.

It may not make web designers swoon circle jerk, but a web site with 0 CSS (or
close to) would give a better experience. In this case, and in many many many
others.

------
perrygeo
Leave it to Google to create an atrocious, bloated, horrible UX for a dead
simple content page.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
It's not just Google. It has now become OK for developers to shift the burden
of the app almost completely to the client. It has become OK to not care about
graceful degradation if a user doesn't have JavaScript running. It has become
OK to completely over engineer the front end, UX be damned.

~~~
indians_pro
i can never tell why certain comments get downvoted on hackernews. yours
obviously has a sad tone, but people take everything literally here.

------
drinchev
Sidenote, but I'm taking a look at how googlers made this website. Reason for
this is that whenever they create a webpage I can see how they've achieved an
effect that people are blogging how to do efficiently. In this case the effect
is the background parallax.

So... I see that they are doing this on their ideas page [1] with the
following code on their background image :

    
    
        position: fixed; transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px); -webkit-transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px);
    

Difference from any other methods is they use position fixed and it actually
looks smooth on my old mac.

------
Splendor
I'd be curious to know how Google's decides which ideas are worth defending.

------
arthurcolle
On first thought, this sounds like Google's version of Hooli XYZ, but on a
deeper level I guess this is kind of like Facebook's ThreatExchange?

~~~
MCRed
I think Hooli XYZ is supposed to be Google X, pretty directly.

~~~
tvvocold
Looks like hooli.xyz[1] got a better 'design' than Google. At least i can open
their page.(Most HN users got a blank page when landing in goolge' IDEA.)

[1] [http://www.hooli.xyz/](http://www.hooli.xyz/)

------
sidcool
People bitching about UX here. That's fine, freedom and all. But those
comments being upvoted to top??!!

------
nickdirienzo
Can't explore more than the landing page in Firefox... Wish I could see more.

------
jusben1369
Fascinating. I'm not sure how long this has been around but feels like a nice
counterweight to Tim Cook's critique last week about the importance of privacy
and making the world a fairer/safer place.

------
kevinSuttle
Just going to leave this here. [https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-
seems/](https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/)

~~~
themeek
Google, like most other multinational companies inside the US, have
partnerships with various parts of the US government.

Google is aligned with the United States State Department and DoD when it
comes to investing and spreading American culture and values around the world.

This partnership brings the United States a lot of value, and those at Google
also believe that it enriches their company, America and the world.

There is a bit of a paternalism to the conscious design of culture export, and
it can be hard to think clearly about.

------
flinty
Inspired a little bit by Aaron
Swartz?[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany)

------
skbohra123
Direct link to products
[https://www.google.com/ideas/products/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/)

------
Rifu
As an aside, I can't help but be amused at how flash-like the experience is.
Impressive what we can achieve natively in the browser these days.

------
pidusd
And when I try to help!

[http://cl.ly/image/0R1d0Q3n291z](http://cl.ly/image/0R1d0Q3n291z)

------
daveloyall
I'll focus only on "Project Shield".

It's supposed to protect news outlets from DDoS. Fine.

It's altruistic. Fine.

I see no technical guarantee that some future Google couldn't pull the shield
away from a news outlet that speaks ill of Google. Not fine.

No centralized "shield" tech can provide said guarantee--rather, only a
decentralized, community-driven shield can be provably neutral. Amiright?

~~~
iMerNibor
It which point the news agency could make a big deal out of it, probably not
worth the hassle. I mean you can search for bad stuff about google on google
and find results - they havent filtered that either

~~~
indians_pro
ha, if they filter that, it will be the ultimate red flag. i read an article
on prisonplanet.com that said they removed them, and cnet.com from search
listings on the front page because they published some critical articles
involving google and the 'see aye lmao' (three letters)

------
a-dub
The website is a mess, but, I met a guy who works for this group a few weeks
ago and it sounded pretty cool.

When I asked what the hell they did, he said that they did some Cloudflare
like stuff for political speech in the middle east and spent a bunch of time
on building and deploying infrastructure to link up a bunch of anti-human-
trafficking agencies all across Asia.

------
meesterdude
WTF is this shit? This site makes no sense, groundbreakingly horrible design,
and totally unclear mission and purpose. Just 100% BS.

Maybe it's a jaberwocky.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas)

------
CrackpotGonzo
Lol at the site not working on Chrome but working fine on Safari.

------
raonyguimaraes
Blank Screen!

------
phragg
That infinite scroll on their "Products" page is the best "Idea" they've
implemented on this site.

------
logotype
A few issues in mobile Safari: background cropped in landscape mode and form
submit button styling on :hover.

------
molsongolden
Investigative Dashboard doesn't seem to work at all beyond the home screen.
Not sure if it is just FF.

------
zoo1
Similar site [http://www.hooli.xyz](http://www.hooli.xyz)

------
kup0
Interesting content but one of the worst scrolling mechanics I've seen on a
website

------
chrismarlow9
I smell another too big to fail coming in 20 years for some of these tech
companies.

------
bobcostas55
Here's an idea for you, google: don't hijack my effing middle click. I use it
to open the link in a new tab. It's not up to your website to override that.

------
sj4nz
So I get a blank blue/purple screen.

 _Shrug._

------
littletimmy
Google's influence is quite concerning. Being a corporation, it should not be
allowed to be a player in geopolitics.

Break it up.

~~~
sangnoir
> Being a corporation, it should not be allowed to be a player in geopolitics.

Says who? Corporations have been waist deep in geopolitics since (at least)
the beginning of the 20th century. see British Petroleum & the Iran coup, or
Hearst and the American-Spanish war ("You furnish the pictures and I'll
furnish the war.")

Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics

\- Fox Media (and anything owned by Rupert Murdock)

\- Oil companies (e.g. Haliburton)

\- Movie studios

\- Fracking companies

\- Numerous corporations behind TPP/TTIP

~~~
eveningcoffee
> Says who?

As I read it, parent commenter said this. It is an opinion.

> Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics

It does not follow that it should be like this.

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indians_pro
i think sangnoir wrote it in a morally outraged tone, and listed evidence to
support littletimmy's post.

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j2kun
I was recently talking with my friend about Google and he brought up a good
point.

Google had a really deep and good idea with PageRank for search, but what
truly innovative ideas have they had since then? Scaling datacenters with
commodity hardware? Giving people lots of free email storage? These were neat
tricks (and huge engineering challenges) but they don't feel very game
changing. Maybe I'll feel differently if I can ever get my hands on a self-
driving car, but until then... I'm honestly curious what game changers Google
has produced.

