
The Case Against Google - antipaul
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html
======
Upvoter33
I'm personally MUCH more worried about facebook and twitter than Google. Our
current political discourse has gone off the rails in the U.S., and I think a
large part of it is due to those two entities. Google I think is only a mild
player in that space, which, in its extremes, is a threat to democratic
society.

~~~
Pigo
Sometimes I wonder how much their impact is overblown though. It seems like
it's a very loud presence in people's lives, and a lot of very loud people on
it who think they are making some kind of impact. When is the last time you
were swayed by lefty or righty radical? I'm not even convinced it really
pushes people further down an idealogy. But then again I'm genX. I just don't
take tweets that seriously, even when they come from Trump or Obama.

~~~
Slansitartop
> When is the last time you were swayed by lefty or righty radical? I'm not
> even convinced it really pushes people further down an idealogy.

I haven't been _swayed_ by such radicals, but I have been turned off and
disgusted by them, feelings which bleed over to people who I associate with
them. I can see that effect as one that re-enforces political polarization.

------
thisisit
Is it just me or this kind of rant-like writeups make it difficult to go
through the content? While I held on to the romanticized story about the
dating site, I gave up when it segued into multi-para story about Rockfeller
and SC.

But I get the point and I think there is some value in Google making everyone
dance every time they change their algorithm. Things might have been better if
they have some kind of review board. Apparently having zero or negligible
customer facing teams seems to be the norm.

~~~
shahbaby
I pretty much just read articles backwards now.

~~~
Jeff_Brown
I was totally riveted. Without the storytelling I would not have learned, for
instance, of this gem:

"In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory [regarding the federal antitrust
lawsuit], but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and
other compliance officials — the kinds of people who, previously, were
routinely ignored — be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began
casually dropping by attorneys’ desks and describing new software features,
and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might
trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into
his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product
reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to
the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman
emperor."

~~~
yesenadam
Incidentally, it seems 'thumbs up' had the opposite meaning to today in Roman
times. Weird huh.

[http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-
history/](http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-history/)

------
sol_remmy
I feel like media has become more monopolistic than tech and needs to be dealt
with first.

I'm personally worried about the dominance of big newspapers. It seems that
the field of "trusted online newspapers" has narrowed down to only the New
York Times and Washington Post. Most non-Tech Hackernews submissions come from
either Nytimes or WaPo.

I worry because these newspapers seem to increasingly be setting the political
and social narrative for the entire country. That's a lot of power to give
Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim.

~~~
stevenwoo
Most local newspapers in the US are slowly dying due to their advertising
revenue being killed off in favor of digital ads. I contracted at the Mercury
News about five years ago and the vast majority of their income came from a
single advertiser and their classified/ads had declined from a section that
was larger by itself than the entire newspaper is today. Not enough people
want to pay for news to make it worthwhile for smaller players to thrive in
the current environment. Also newspapers don't set the political and social
narrative for the country - only three printed publications backed Donald
Trump and he won the election. That shows the Rupert Murdoch/Fox News TV crowd
was more effective, at least with the electoral count if not the popular vote.

------
granitDev
I think part of the problem when it comes to Google, is the massive name
recognition. I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to
Google doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives
exist.

If you asked them, they probably think Google is the internet, and if you have
to find anything, you have to go to Google to find it.

I'll admit I have no proof of this, but I've found, generally that the non-
technical individuals I know, have incredible poor working knowledge of the
internet. I take as my primary evidence though the masses vulnerability to
really stupid and easily caught scams, spoof websites, click bait, and spam
emails.

As a technical user, I'm constantly baffled that people fall for this crap. So
if people really are that incomprehensibly ignorant, I'll bet they don't' even
really know what a google is and why they use other than it's all they know
and they'd be lost without it.

If the general public can't figure out no one is going to hand them a million
bucks from nigeria, how the hell can they figure out you don't have to use
Google?

I use DDG btw. I find their results fantastically good. So good that I can't
even use google. The spam, the adds, the poor results. I cant' take it. I also
can't handle that google returns different results on different computers.

I get the same results on DDG every time i make the same search. I've gotten
lazy and started performing searches for things instead of typing in the
address because it's consistent and faster.

~~~
alsetmusic
> I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to Google
> doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives exist.

I have seen my father type a web address into a google search page because he
doesn’t understand that he can use the location field to go directly to that
address. I corrected this behavior the first time I saw it. He was doing it
again the next time I visited.

This is a man with a high level of education and a healthy mind. He’s utterly
lost on many of the basic concepts of his computer. The thing is, it works for
him and I would never know he was making this mistake without watching him
because he still gets the desired result in a roundabout way.

~~~
skybrian
I'm not sure it's a mistake. Doing a search seems better for non-technical
users since you get spelling correction, and you're more likely to get a
decent result if you mis-remember the domain name.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It's not better. Because often the top result is a paid ad for that result.
This is bad for a couple reasons:

\- It's a tax on the services you use who have to pay to be the top result,
you burden companies you patronize when you do this. When you search for
Dell.com in search and click the top link for Dell, Dell just had to pay a
couple quarters to not have you redirected to a seedy scam site instead. Times
millions for every other person who does this.

\- Google Ads allow advertisers to spoof addresses, and display a different
destination address than where clicking the link actually takes you. I've seen
amazon.com, bestbuy.com, and even, hilariously, youtube.com hijacked in very
authentic-looking malicious Google Ads at the top of Google Search. For
security reasons, you should never, ever click on a Google Ad.

~~~
skybrian
This seems like a good argument in favor of understanding the difference
between ads and search results. (Unfortunately it's more subtle than it should
be.) Or maybe installing an ad blocker.

------
dqpb
The New York times is participating in a campaign against Americas top tech
companies. I don't know what their goal is, but no good will come off it.
Google is one of our strengths, not one of our weaknesses.

~~~
Jeff_Brown
The article takes great pain to point out the importance and value of Google.

Genghis Khan was one of Mongolia's strengths. Standard Oil was one of 19th
century America's strengths. An empire can be great and still stifle good
things. It's hard to know what we're missing.

~~~
moultano
>They basically shut down Foundem, creating more time for them to give advice
to other companies and regulators fighting Google. This consulting work, _some
of which was funded by Google’s competitors_ , has helped to keep the Raffs
afloat.

They really buried the lead.

------
space_fountain
I think something that's maybe being exposed here is that it isn't clear how
to make digital products work together and that the incentives are to keep it
that way. Walled gardens are being built inside basically every major tech
company. Most aren't even illegal.

Here's a simple example I ran into recently:

I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an
audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you
switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio
book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever
expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple
of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files
it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible.

I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any
small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and
they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel
like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that
could just go out and do it.

Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but
everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce
their right to do so.

~~~
mayneack
Speaking of walled gardens, that feature already exists for Amazon e-books and
audiobooks read through kindle/audible.

~~~
space_fountain
Yep. Almost mentioned that here. My original plan was just to do that in a
more open way, but I realized it had a bad combination of being hard and not
that cool.

Besides I and plenty of other people prefer real books.

------
justonepost
This is so inane. I use bing all the time (accidentally) and I always go -
wait, what's wrong with google? why are these search results so awful? oh
riiiight. (switch to google).

Google is being attacked hard by Apple (blocking ads), amazon&azure (cloud)

and ads (facebook).

What Government really needs to do isn't break up Google per se, but generally
give more natural advantages to smaller startups versus larger corps. One
example would be corporate tax.

Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on
smaller ones.

In fact, if I were the democratic party this would be my rallying cry. Time to
really re-invigorate the american dream.

~~~
vog
That's strange. I've had the same feeling with Google for a long time: Why are
the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years?

Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back.

For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party
crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites?
Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where
their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing
the Wikipedia article as well?

If you really want to embrace diversity, look beyond the two largest players.

For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy
and so on.

For laptops, it's not Windows versus MacOS, there's MINT, FreeBSD, Ubuntu,
etc.

For servers, it's not Windows Server versus RHEL, there's also Debian,
FreeBSD, etc.

For smart phones, it's not iOS versus Google-Android, there's also LineageOS,
Replicant, etc.

(For nitpickers: Yes, LineageOS is heavily based on Android, which is again
heavily based on Linux. Still, a slick LineageOS doesn't even need GApps,
which is a huge difference to the e.g. stock Samsung/Asus/... crapware
Android.)

~~~
Kurtz79
My relationship with DDG for the last few years has been the following:

\- I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is.

\- I set it as the main search engine on my browser.

\- I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google,
and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some
cases.

\- I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few
months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it.

...and the cycle begins, again.

~~~
username223
The key to switching from Google to DDG is memorizing a few shortcuts for
fallbacks, like "!g" (Google), "!gi" (Google images), and "!gn" (Google news).
It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters, but over
time you'll find yourself using them less and less. They will never completely
disappear, but one day you'll realize you're only using them in a few percent
of your searches. In most cases, you will know in advance that you
specifically want "Google results" instead of "search results," and can add
them on the first query.

From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the
information it would be gathering about you.

Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm
willing to type "Chinese _food near ZIP code_ " or "Chinese _translation_ "
instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data
to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.

~~~
amelius
> It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters,

Especially on mobile. Can't they use something more mobile-friendly than "!g",
such as "gg" or "/g" for example?

~~~
amelius
Better idea: place a "Google" button after the (say) third search result.

If not done universally, allow me to activate this feature in my preferences.

I tried DDG a few times but always switched back to Google eventually (typing
<BACK> and then <SPACE> "!g" <ENTER> is tiring, especially on mobile). I think
this option would make me switch to DDG indefinitely.

~~~
amelius
I just came up with the idea to make a bookmarklet, which converts the current
DDG search into Google:

    
    
        javascript:(function(){ var s = document.location.search.split("&")[0].substr(1); document.location = "https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&"+s; })();
    

It's not perfect, but it's a start :)

To be clear: while this button directs people away from DDG to Google, it
actually allows people to use DDG as their first (main) search engine, and
lets them switch to Google if necessary without much inconvenience. The better
the DDG search results, the less views they lose to Google.

~~~
vog
Nice idea! However, I still struggle to see the advantage over "!g".

The workflow is exactly the same: Search for stuff in DDG, and if you suspect
that Google might have returned a better result, prepend "!g " to your query
(which might be even faster than clicking on the bookmarklet, depending on how
fast you type).

------
blakesterz
Kind of an interesting thought from the article:

" If you love Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust
offenses — and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what
wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings."

~~~
fancyfacebook
These bizarre roundabout ways the NYT finds to worship corporations are
starting to get creepy. Calling their work wondrous and speaking directly to
people who "love" Google is just absurd. Just stop, don't worship an
organization.

~~~
icebraining
Or maybe you're just giving undue importance to those words. One may "love"
Google in the same way one "loves" quesadillas, or chrome rims.

------
setgree
I'm starting to despair that there's so much demand for reading/publishing
'the case against' X or Y company pieces, i.e. this and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950).
Everybody who is _for_ these companies is not like, passionate about them, we
just use their products and pay (collectively) a lot of money to do so.

With Google in particular, if their dominance was so unassailable, we wouldn't
have slack or zoom, which exist essentially because gchat and google hangouts
were so half-assed.

------
lgleason
Part of the reason that Google is in this situation is because, instead of
staying neutral politically they took sides making themselves more of a
target. There is also the issue of data privacy as it relates to sharing the
data with the US Government. If they start to share more data with the US
Government, the risk losing users and ad revenue. On the other hand many argue
that their refusal to share data is bad for society as a whole. For example,
some argue that more sharing of data would have helped catch the Florida
school shooter before it happened.

No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing
headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings
in most of their profits.

~~~
prepend
This is the sad reality. Google is out of sync with political currents so now
there is this PR campaign against them.

Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in
line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides.

Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The
lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on
DC.

For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M.
[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115&year=2017id=D000000115&year=2017)

------
cmurf
A trifecta of failures: failure of capitalism to innovate its own self
moderation from being inherently anti-competitive; failure of democracy which
engages after the fact based on emotion and is reactionary; failure of
meritocracy where elites hand out favors to "friendlies", lower the ladder of
regulatory avoidance to some and not others, ergo the opposite of merit.

This is why we need more ethics, logic, rationality, and the promotion of
epistemology as moderators. Capitalism, democracy, and meritocracy all in
their own way are prone to people gaming the system, might making right.

------
excalibur
> People loved Standard Oil a century ago, and Microsoft in the 1990s, just as
> they love Google today.

Which people are those? One of Microsoft's defining features has always been
the juxtaposition of software iterations that consumers truly despise with
those that they're sort of ok with.

------
thedarkginger
"Many of the most important antitrust lawsuits in American history — against
IBM, Alcoa, Kodak and others — were rooted in claims that one company had made
technological discoveries that allowed it to outpace competitors."

Does that say more about the success of antitrust at spurring competitors to
catch up or that "technological dominance" is only good as long as long as the
paradigm doesn't shift (i.e. Kodak is now pretending to be a crypto company as
a last resort)?

------
bob_theslob646
>"“Google’s built around horizontal search, which means if you type in ‘What’s
the population of Myanmar,’ then Google finds websites that include the words
‘Myanmar’ and ‘population,’ and figures out which ones are most likely to
answer your question,” says Neha Narula, who was a software engineer at Google
before joining the M.I.T. Media Lab"

I'm not sure if it's relevant but I get an exact result when I do this search.
Not sure if that is horizontal search...

------
pfedigan
This was a fantastically written article. I've learned and been able to
explore so much from it.

I still love Google and wouldn't be where I am today without it but it makes a
fair point when camparing this time to the early oil industry. It's not like
there's no competition against Google, it's just been a fantastic tool and why
use anything else.

------
mgeorgoulo
Never expected that something could be blamed for being too useful.

Or did I? To tell you the truth it always seemed like there's an _awful lot of
logic in the way internet works_. Seems like the real world is catching on,
trying to close this gap... I certainly hope it's too late :)

------
sjg007
It's pretty easy to measure how addictive YouTube is. Let a toddler use it.
Now is it all bad? Maybe. I found my kids build into their genuine play things
they saw on youtube. Is it worse than cartoons/tv? Maybe.. Should it be
rationed, definitely.

------
aiCeivi9
Previous discussion about case:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458)

------
kaeawc
Whoa. Why is this post so buried?

------
chewzerita
And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page...

~~~
Slansitartop
> And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page...

Comments like yours are stupid and add nothing for these reasons:

1) A journalist or writer likely does not have technical control over their
paper's website design. This is certainly true for someone writing for the
NYT. They're not going to hold back their article because someone on the
website team chose to use a product from the company they're critiquing.

2) Google, Facebook, etc. are so dominant that it's often not really possible
to avoid them and their technology and still have a functioning business.

------
ebbv
Foundem sounds like a spam site to me. By definition if I’m finding Foundem
results in Google, then Foundem would not be the one who is solving my search,
Google is. I actually think one of the issues with Google over the last decade
has been a failure to clean up the results. Google used to be merciless in
hammering spam sites into oblivion. I miss those days.

------
falcolas
Meta: It's unfortunate this, like most tech behemoth critiques, got flagged
off the front page so quickly. There are, of course exceptions to this rule,
so perhaps those are simply enough to saturate people's desire for such
articles.

More on point: what choices does a startup have when wanting to operate in a
vertical that Google/Facebook et.al. also want to infiltrate? Find a smaller
niche that doesn't hold enough interest (or money) to interest them? It's
funny, I wouldn't have thought the RSS reader niche would have appealed to
them originally, and yet here we are today where RSS reader startups still
find themselves competing on price against a product that no longer exists.

It really does seem like its not enough to just be better; the "worse is
better" paradox in action.

~~~
sctb
It wasn't flagged; it tripped the flamewar detector, which we've just turned
off.

------
jacksmith21006
The problem is Google will just be replaced with someone that dominates. Tech
just ends up winner take all or most.

We see it with each thing. From Search, to Ecommerce, to social media, etc.

So we need to think through would someone else be better than Google? Because
that is just what will happen.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
This isn't natural, though. It's the designed goal of centuries-old patent law
which has become counter productive.

------
rnernento
"Be evil." :(

------
fancyfacebook
I love how difficult it's becoming to actually ever visit a website from a
google result, especially on mobile. And even when you do you're usually still
stuck with their tracking and spyware. Reminds me a lot of AOL's strategy back
in the day.

~~~
pmart123
I find this to be extremely annoying as well as it obscures the site link as
well as it makes it very difficult to copy the source link if I want to share
it. I think the comparison to AOL's strategy in 2000 is very warranted.

~~~
nasredin
LMFTFY:

It is IMPOSSIBLE to copy search result link. Not just "difficult".

~~~
cat199
have been running browser mods for ~5y to do this.

it's a pain. but it works.

currently greasemonkey 'direct link out' and 'bypass google redirect'

~~~
newscracker
I've been using "Google Search Link Fix" with Firefox (for a long time) to get
the direct links on search results. [1]

[1]:
[https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix](https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix)

------
mudil
Google is not the most evil corporation ever invented. The most evil
corporation has not been invented yet.

------
fareesh
This talking point comes straight from the top

[https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=...](https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=20)

Expect a lot of press on this subject over the next few weeks.

~~~
jacksmith21006
But you do have to wonder what Soros motives are. He is really not someone
that looks for the greater good.

There is going to be some financial aspect that makes him money. Not saying he
is not accidentally aligned with the greater good but most certainty not the
driver.

~~~
fareesh
[https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco-
aap...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco-aapl-nflx-fb-
silicon-valley-stocks.html)

Looks like a good time to short.

