Google Hates You(sfgate.com) |
Google Hates You(sfgate.com) |
A company cannot literally “hate” anyone. It has no feelings, intentions, or consciousness. So who exactly is supposed to hate you here? The CEO? The executives? The leadership team? Every single employee at Google? And who is “you,” exactly? Billions of users spread across the planet?
I get the point the title is trying to make, but it feels more accurate to say that Google optimizes for incentives that are often misaligned with users, not that it emotionally despises them.
However, based on my general observation, a company's primary purpose is often the self-actualization of its owner. People usually cite monetization as a corporate goal, but since owners rarely hate money, the two usually go hand in hand. In reality, though, an owner's self-actualization takes precedence even in the face of clear financial losses. From that perspective, the employees hired by the company also bear a certain degree of responsibility.
Of course, I don't think that is inherently bad. You can't just divide everything into a moral dichotomy of good and evil; it's a deeply intertwined issue of desire, greed, and self-actualization (such as doing the exact research one aims for through massive corporate R&D investments).
Your point is valid, but it relies on extreme reductionism. For example, I might think a particular nation's system is flawed. A country has its merits, yet we still "hate" specific countries. But when you think about it, a nation is just a system too, isn't it?
Ultimately, we just speak selectively based on these cognitive frameworks. You could argue that Google's employees are entirely blameless, or you could argue they are serving an evil system. It’s merely a difference in perspective.
What is absolutely certain, however, is that Google's current form of business has completely upended the existing economic structure. Whether this is a net positive or negative remains to be seen. In the future, Google might pivot its business model to pay high-quality creators directly, but the real issue is that this new system leaves everyone highly susceptible to being subjugated by Google.
Realistically, we cannot predict everything in such a complex future, nor can we say this is definitively bad. Google users have a desire to find answers more easily, while content creators have a desire to make a living off their work. Striking that compromise is exactly what makes this so difficult.
Oh, no doubt. But it's a lot, lot less fun, eh?
Still, I'll push back on the vague sense of jargon-esque doublespeak: Google's management frequently make decisions that do work against the best interests and the desires of its users.
The youngest Google Search seems like it has a lot in common with the next-youngest Google Search.
Also, the irony isn't lost on me that I had a cookie dialogue fill 80% of the screen and this little snippet:
> Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.
> Advertisement > Article continues below this ad
They don't just want your eyeballs they want your data. They want to track you and give that data to advertisers.
Like I said I do sympathise and maybe it's a necessary evil, but in my opinion all of these sites are just a less successful side of the same coin.
it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
Google is not a lawnmower. Google is people. And they hate you.
sparing the user the usual experience of visiting some random ad-riddled clickbait mill and trying to extract useful information from ten paragraphs of SEO diarrhea.
>Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them.
~~learn to code~~ (oops, too late, lol).
> Look at this horrible s—t. Look at it!
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6EBMG8OEBI
No, I'm not going to look at it, and neither should you...
Google changes its search box
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370
Google Declaring War on the Web
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449
DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
>Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Its mission is not to give traffic to websites. If websites are a bad way for users to get information due to endless rambling or obnoxious ads then don't be surprised if that information is made more accessible. It's like if Google Maps didn't have things like business hours hosted within Maps instead of requiring the user to do extra work and find it on the business's website.
Before if I asked a question, the top 3 results would be StackOverflow. I'd click into the first one and find out that the question was subtly different than mine making its answer useless, but it included a lot of similar words. Go back and click into the second one. It's exactly my problem, asked three years ago, no answer. Go back and click into the third one. Same question, but it's been answered. Great. But the accepted answer has a score of -3 and another answer has a score of 5. So which one do I follow? Whoops, it's actually neither of them, because the library has broken both of those workflows.
Now I get my answer right away 90% of the time. And if I don't then I scroll down and I'm not worse off than I was 2 years ago.
> This isn’t just a me problem. You don’t have to be a writer to have your livelihood be dependent upon Google search results. Small-business owners need Google to reach potential new customers. Students, many of them working on school-issued Chromebooks made by Google, need it to research term papers and study for final exams. In its earliest form, Google dot-com was the perfect utility for all of these people and millions more.
But I agree with you (despite being predisposed to agreeing with the author) that the invective doesn't quite land because they don't do quite enough work to ensure we're on their side in understanding how we might be affected.
I'll just take this space to note that folks that feel similarly to the author should try Kagi, as they let you choose how much AI you want rather than forcing a chat interface onto you or directing you away from links.
> it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.
but much of the article describes how Google is trying to deploy their final solution for intermediation. their attempts to 'googlify' things like grocery shopping and job searching pretty much failed. but now, they are promoting a model where, finally, all information they present has been googlified. they are not a phone book or card catalog, but now the entire library. there aren't original sources any more, just what Google has decided to tell you about something.