
A Serf on Google’s Farm - Doubleguitars
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm
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mathperson
This is probably the best content I've ever seen from TPM. Took a lot of
negative feelings I have towards Monopoly and effectively crystallized a small
subset of the harms in a particular case. Digital capitalism is not so
different from the old forms..

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bryanrasmussen
So in the article he says:

". If we were kicked off the road more than half of our total revenue would
disappear instantly and would stay disappeared until we found a new road –
i.e., a new ad serving service or technology. At a minimum that would be a
devastating blow that would require us to find a totally different ad serving
system, make major technical changes to the site to accommodate the new system
and likely not be able to make as much from ads ever again."

Is there a framework/library whatever you want to call it that helps with
that, I mean something that abstracts you ad serving systems enough that when
you need to slot another in its place it's a matter of some configuration
properties or a couple lines of code changes?

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anterograde
Google having a monopoly on search engines is super scary and it seems no
other engine has the hope of rivaling them anytime soon.

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VladTheImplier
>implying Google is the only one

I wouldn't say so. First of all, outside the anglosphere and europe google
ain't that popular. Slavic countries mostly use Yandex and Asia has Baidu.
Whilst Google is globally represented, it does not have a global monopoly, at
least on the Search Engine market.

Also I have switched to DuckDuckGo and I must say, that I do get better
results, with the absence of personalization. Living in Germany, mostly using
english systems and speaking russian gave always half baked results, where
searching for anything programming related was a hit and miss affair, even
after tweaking search language. With non-personalized results I find myself
finding stuff more quickly, at least related to my work.

With the recent wave of "leaving Google" movements, I think it is the single
best time for others to step up.

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rm_-rf_slash
I switched to DDG and my search results are just as accurate as google.
Certain conveniences like showing me store hours and expected wait times are
surely missed, but not missed enough to get me to switch back to Google.

