This is how Google will collapse (2019) | Hacker News Reader

This is how Google will collapse (2019)

hackernoon.com

29 pointspartingshots23 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648060

Don't forget the failing Google cloud.

It is way too "Googly" for its own good. I did a shootout of six visual recognition APIs a few years ago. I got five of them to work in under fifteen minutes. Google Cloud has an authentication system modeled after

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWEvp217Tzw&feature=emb_logo

and took much longer, trashing my Anaconda installation along the way. (IBM Cloud sticks out because it is still sending me spam.)

GCP growth beat expectations in the recent quarterly earnings.

I'm not sure one can generalize from a pandemic economy. Macroeconomics beats microeconomics.

I'd /never/ use GCP in any sort of business setting. Too high odds an automated Google algorithm would take out my business.

Googley automation worked well enough for B2C, and when Google hired the best people. When Google has a mid-tier workforce, buggy algorithms, and bugs can take out entire businesses, you run into problems. Combined with the old culture of arrogance, I don't see GCP ever competing with Amazon, or even Azure.

GCP includes G Suite. Earnings went up for email, office documents, and remote meetings software.

Looks like the server collapsed first.

For anyone else getting a 500 error:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200731131748/http://www.sfu.ca...

(Some images seem to be missing)

This is one of the images that loaded for me, but not captured by archive.org. It is a line graph of global monthly active users using mobile adblocking browsers. It is supposed to be the second article image (between the two bar graphs).

https://imgur.com/L0EPxOQ

(Side note, can anyone suggest a better site than imgur? They are pushing mobile users to their app instead of website.)

Arguably the most valuable pieces of Google are the YouTube content and GMail addresses.

what about google search& Android?

Search can get eaten almost overnight. No stickiness. I switched to DDG when Google annoyed me.

With Android, we're already seeing forks in China. A bit more stickiness, but not great stickiness.

Ads is still a big two-sided market.

> Search can get eaten almost overnight. No stickiness. I switched to DDG when Google annoyed me.

And I've switched Runnaroo.com which has been presented here just some weeks ago. It already feels much better than Google. In rare cases when it fails me I fallback to DuckDuckGo. If DuckDuckGo doesn't manage either - only then I go to Google. In the majority of cases Runnaroo results are the best.

Awesome, and thank you! I'm the creator of Runnaroo. I've actually been surprised at how willing people have been to switch default search engines. Right now I believe it is mostly early adopters and tech focused people (like here on HN) using the service, so I'm not sure if the general population will be as willing to switch to a new search engine. I personally believe they will if the service gets good enough.

Thank you for a great job! Keep doing it! By the way, organic economy already starts growing around Runaroo. E.g. I'm already spending thousands dollars (and I'm going to spend much more over time, and this takes place in Europe where normal salaries are not as high as in the US) on things and services I order from local non-IT companies whose web sites I've found with Runnaroo. I hope we can break the Google's monopoly and sort of divert some cash flow from bullshit SEO and spyware marketers to real people.

The search results are qualitatively different from Google or DDG. The first one I tried, for a very specific term was a lot better. The second one, for a generic question, was a bit worse. That's helpful!

Minor UX quirk: I need to hit <enter> twice to search. That's probably enough friction to lose a lot of people.

I'd like to check out Runnaroo but our enterprise site blocker blocks it due to its having the web category 'Uncategorized URLs' - so I can't get to it where I need it most! Right now I use DDG so whatever they're doing is good with our site blocker.

I use Google Drive and apps quite a bit.

Unlike existing YouTube content (which has immense cultural value) and existing GMail addresses (which many people use as their main identity) Google Drive as well as the apps are very much replaceable. I.e. I didn't mean the services, I meant the content - YouTube itself (let alone GMail) are easy to replace also. Most of the Google drive content probably is private and easy to migrate, also and either backed-up already or not-needed by the owners.

The article timestamp says 2017, not 2019.

Disclaimers: The author owns a small number of Basic Attention Tokens (the utility token that makes Brave’s model possible). This article was updated on May 5, 2019. The original version as mentioned in Life After Google was originally in the Hacker Noon publication and can be found here.

I figure that someone will inevitably come up with a viable mainstream alternative to Google Search. One that is privacy oriented, and isn’t riddled with SEO spam. One that might function very differently than the search engines we’ve known for the past 25 years. I wonder what form that might take

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