You started a flamewar with this unsubstantive comment. Please don't post like this to HN, the same way you wouldn't drop a lit match in a dry forest, or litter in a park.
What exactly did they built? AFAIK, even search engines already existed when they entered the game(they just did it better). The fundamental protocols that makes the web work weren't invented by them. What made you think "they built the web"?
I mean thats not entirely true. They build and maintain HTTP3 and Chrome (oversimplification, I know)
They do somewhat control the fundamental elements that make the web work. Blink/V8 is obviously more powerful than Webkit, Gecko, as far as the market is concerned.
I think this is backwards, like saying that a road paving company built cars. The need exists because the Web took off and became huge, and maybe Google can take credit for helping it scale, but Google was only successful because other people were creating content people wanted to find at a massive rate. If the web was tiny we could use hand curated indices. If Google was never founded, and the web got bigger, one of the other dozens of search companies would have helped the web scale instead.
If you prefer video, watch the 1998 PBS piece Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet. I won't link to it because I'm not sure if the site is legit, but I just re-watched a few minutes of it and it's funny to look back at the hype in that era.
They've built browsers, standards, protocols, libraries, and frameworks for the web. They've contributed more to the web than probably any company outside of CERN.
And we're all poorer for it. They have taken a public service and molded into something that makes money for them and only for them. And all the while (maybe gradually) they've masqueraded as some benevolent philanthropy.
The day "don't be evil" came off their motto is the day they conceded they are evil. At least as evil as any publicly trading company has to be.
Releasing hundreds of open-source tools and donating protocols to standards bodies is really not what I would consider evil. The web is a thousand times better now than it was ten years ago.
And despite the frequent misinformation, "Don't be evil" has never once left their code of conduct.
> The web is a thousand times better now than it was ten years ago.
How?? For who??
The web in 2010: type something into Google, click first result, enjoy life
The web in 2020: type something into Google, try to figure out which results are ads, click several results before anything is useful, click through cookie disclaimer, refuse to allow notifications, decline to download the mobile app, attempt to dismiss surprise autoplay video that pops up once you scroll, except one of 30 scripts didn't load right or something so the popup's background stays covering up the page, disable javascript in frustration. Oops, now Cloudflare thinks you're a bot and all you're allowed to do on the web any more is teach Google's AI what traffic lights and crosswalks look like.
This. And don't forget constant nagging about linking everything to a Google or Facebook account.
The web has turned into a nightmare for end users. I hope there will be a popular uprising of some sort, people saying that enough is enough, but I doubt it'll happen. Everyone seems happy about downloading gazillions of individual apps that are little more than wrappers for the web sites, just so the companies can get a better platform for poking around people's phones.
> The web is a thousand times better now than it was ten years ago.
I disagree wholeheartedly. I think the web is much worse than it was ten years ago, and the trendline indicates that it will continue on that trajectory.
I think it's much worse as a user (ads everywhere disguised as informative articles, bloated websites, constant tracking, consolidation of websites into a few corporate silos)
and also much worse as a developer (wow wtf javascript frameworks)
As a developer, maybe -- I'm not a web dev, so I have no way of knowing.
As a web user, though, it's substantially worse for me. Websites tend to have less substance and useful information, they tend to be flashier and harder to use, the ubiquitous tracking is completely unacceptable, and the web is becoming increasingly opaque and dangerous as more and more of it requires client-side scripting and the like in order to function.
As the web gets smaller and smaller for me every day, I honestly think that I'll see the day when the web is something that I will largely stop using altogether.
>Releasing hundreds of open-source tools and donating protocols to standards bodies is really not what I would consider evil. The web is a thousand times better now than it was ten years ago.
Is it really? I only see small marginal improvements in the technical side, and lots of losses in the freedom, privacy, quality of treatment as a customer or user, etc, side, a lot of them because of Google.
>And despite the frequent misinformation, "Don't be evil" has never once left their code of conduct.
This makes the parent's point, as "for over 15 years" means you've started around 2005 -- well into the Google era. You never known the web without Google, which is why you can say "Google built the web" and other such nonsense.
There were browsers, standards, protocols, libraries and frameworks before Google and there is a plethora of them now, too, that have no connection to Google.
Without the web, there would be no Google, but without Google, there'd still be plenty of web.
Heck, if you want to talk inventions, it was Microsoft who came up with doing XMLRPC inside the browser and actually made a decent web port of Outlook using it. That alone is a pretty massive cornerstone of the modern web.
Google once did a great search engine, which they're well on their way to ruining. The only other thing they've accomplished is privacy-invading copies of already existing services, which has become popular because they figured out how to offer them for "free" (I.E. monetize other people's personal data to sell ads).
Not creating an interactive map of the entire globe? Or upgrading email into a tag-based, nearly-infinite inbox? Or transforming the browser's security model into a multi-process, sandboxed application?
It's easy to forget all the things we now take for granted.
MapQuest and OpenStreetMap came before Google Maps, which in itself was mostly tech they bought from other companies.
There were plenty of webmail systems before GMail - Google just had the financial capacity to offer more storage. Saying they "upgraded email" is more than a little bit steep. You might as well say they downgraded it, considering GMail's repeated and spurious blacklistings of completely legitimate domains.
As for Chrome, there existed several browsers before it. Sandboxed tabs is a good idea, yes.
Of course they've improved upon stuff. They've had a lot of money and great minds to throw at their products. There was even a time when I believed in and appreciated their "Don't be evil" motto.
But, as with any technology, it's mostly work done standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before them. For a long time, they've been acting very carelessly with both that legacy and the one they themselves create.
All of which are either garbage or data collecting nightmares. The web was fine before Google even existed. They built a better search engine that peaked around 2004 and then went downhill.
I did and I'm sorry about that. I shouldn't have treated you that way. I do think internal corporate propaganda is a real thing from FAANG employees on HN whether intentional or not, but how I commented isn't the way to handle it.
I imagine there probably are a lot of FAANG employees on HN.
Though in my opinion, just sharing their view isn't inherently a bad thing. It only becomes a problem when they're encouraged to share from their employers. That would be propaganda.
If anything though, hearing from insiders may actually be more informative, or offer a new context that we can't see from the outside.
You have to be aware of bias, but that's just as true for other comments too.
If you prefer they contributed more than any other compagny.
Alos, it may not be true anymore these days, but google was one of the most efficient and yet least "commercial" (i.e. ads were not that bad) back in the days..
the funniest is that the people who disagree with me saying google built the web are the one criticizing google for "destroying the web" when they are only destroying their website. the conginitive dissonance is off the chart.
He wrote legislation that expanded federal funding for large-scale IT projects. (He also wrote thank you letters to those teams. I still have a photocopy in a box somewhere.)
Your web browser is probably free today in large part because Netscape had to compete with a tool built under a National Science Foundation grant. They sold Navigator in boxes in stores but they were free on the internet (chicken and egg problem that could be easily solved by the internet savvy and anyone they were friends with). Every web browser since copied the previous generation.
