Web by Google (TM)
landshark.io
landshark.io
I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. You'd need a constant pressure to prevent this situation and given that the USA would be in the best position to do that I'm not holding by breath.
The internet started decentralized because there was no money to make and we were still figuring things out. As soon as it became mainstream it started to coalesce and we're just now reaching the final stage of this evolution. Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Good luck convincing the internet population at large.
Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh.
Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago:
Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers:
This is not definitive, but it's something I guess. Here are a few observations based on that data:
1. On the desktop, it looks like Chrome and Firefox are at about parity for HN users. I kind of doubt this actually, and think it's more likely that Chrome still beats Firefox by a sizable margin. But even if this is off, it looks like HN users actually do use Firefox significantly more than the general population, which means the evangelization here isn't just a vocal minority among HN users.
2. On desktop Safari is a distant third. It would appear more people browse HN in any mobile category than browse HN on desktop using Safari.
3. On mobile, mobile Safari dominates. Then mobile Chrome has about half as many users as mobile Safari, and mobile Firefox again half as many as mobile Chrome.
EDIT: I pulled an Athena report of the referrer breakdown as well, if anyone's curious:
I really like addons and that's why I don't use chrome on mobile.
Surprisingly I also started using Firefox Focus. At first it looked like nonsense to me, no addons. But then I found out it sometimes makes sense to start from scratch, focus on some topic and delete all tabs with one tap when done. And if I find what I searched for or want to read it later, I share the page to Saved messages on my Telegram. This workflow works surprisingly well for me.
But then, with Bush Sr and then Clinton, the rules changed; Microsoft started playing the political game, and essentially avoided a similar fate.
There is no antitrust enforcement anymore. Breaking a company once indeed only buys a little time. But getting regulation workiNg again WILL work, and will likely include breaking them.
If only the US would vote in politicians that cared about competition. I can’t find any amongst either presidential or congressional candidates, though.
From what we've seen with GPT-3, we can train one machine learning model by ingesting the entire scraped web and a whole lot of (online/offline?) books, and it can often produce correct answers to questions. The accuracy of those answers, presuming the questions are not subjective ones, is only going to increase. Google's status, as a search engine, in 2025 is not something I would bet money on.
The iOS/Safari thing is another issue, which perhaps other anti-trust regulators will address in Google's favor. Assuming they do not, consider that if Google stops paying Apple many billions of dollars a year and another company (or Apple) replaces the default iOS search, Google's search ad business will be severely and irreversibly damaged. Removing iOS defaults would not only remove a large chunk of Google's US mobile search traffic, it would be the more affluent chunk. Everyone who knows about marketplace dynamics knows how damaging that would be to Google if that inventory ended up with Microsoft or Facebook.
Even without regulatory intervention (which is almost 100% guaranteed at this point, barring some act of god, though I don't know how large that intervention will be) Google's days atop the mountain are certainly drawing to a close. Perhaps the ground has already given way, they know it, and the maniacal stupidity of trying to coral the web into some AMP graveyard is a reaction of desperation.
To address the original blog post, I think the author is way off the mark on video. Youtube is big, but far from the king. Google has repeatedly flopped on the social side, and isn't going to be allowed to buy TikTok. They don't appear to be taking any ground paid streaming services like Netflix or Amazon. They are big, but no where near as important relative to their dominance in search.
Hopefully those same anti-trust regulators also have statistics for browser market shares :)
What other alternatives are there for Youtube, that are even in the same region as Youtube?
Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.
It's actually pretty cool, and earnings from web monetized users now cover ~3% of the operation of the site during the first month of having it implemented.
You basically just have to add a meta tag to the site that directs to a payment pointer (you also have to sign up with one of the wallets for the payment pointer).
Definitely not getting rich from the implementation, and the earnings are much lower than if I just ran ads, but it is a nice feeling to have the users of the site directly contribute to supporting the product. Plus it is such a low barrier to set it up that there is very little downside to having it added to the site.
Implementing simple "Web Bucks" is not pedestrian at all. There are real reasons why all Paypals suck, and you can't simply ignore them and hope to build an open cash alternative unbothered.
"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites.
Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.
I'd still argue that it correlates with centralization. We could argue about causation but it still goes hand in hand IMO.
A company is much less likely to invest resources into improving IRC or Jabber because if you made huge breaking changes you'd end up with an incompatible, custom fork of the protocol (negating the benefit of using a standard protocol, since you'd effectively lose the interop with third party client) and even if you kept the standards open and federation possible you're basically hurting your own business since you make it easy for people to use your work without giving you a way to monetize it.
If your objective is to be profitable it makes a lot more sense to just create your own centralized, proprietary protocol and clients that you control end-to-end. Standardizing and federating your protocol is a massive amount of headache in the long run for very little benefit in terms of $$$.
Except most emails end up at Gmail SMTP servers (@gmail.com and hosted G Suite).
slack/discord will probably disappear and be replaced by another closed system until we find the right way to do real time chat in a decentralised way.
If SMTP is only used to tunnel proprietary content à la winmail.dat, it doesn't really matter that it's still technically open.
Isn't that what IRC was supposed to be? But as others have pointed out, it's trivial to roll your own chat software and monetize it. You can't do that with a decentralized standard.
> I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again.
The natural course of humans is to walk around on the ground too, yet we fly. Regardless of whether it takes energy to do, it's something we should obviously do anyway because the alternative is worse. Sorry for the bad analogy but "it's natural" and "hard" isn't a valid argument against doing something about something.
I don't really buy your story anyway though. It assumes it was a fair fight and I simply don't think that's true in the case of the web.
Genuine question, do you mind saying (or pointing to something) what are the implications of browser choice of individuals reading HN?
I think at some point Chrome became significantly better than Firefox and did a better job listening to users, so power-users (developers) started switching, once they switched, they primarily developed for the browser they use themselves (it's just more convenient when you get a link to look at to open the inspector in the browser that is set as system standard), so support improved further on that platform, so market share would constantly rise. This in turn leads to more devs reducing their focus on Firefox, so users turn away when a site looks or functions worse.
Now, Firefox has caught up on a bunch of things, yet Google's market share is huge both in browsing and advertising. It would be good for more developers to actively support the strongest alternative platform, because this in turn might affect adoption of that browser, even if it's just small numbers (every site that doesn't work might lead to a user switching to Chrome). It would keep them at least a little more safe from a monopoly that might start imposing policies that are bad for their business, the same way app stores are causing issues because they are the only way to access mobile phones (outside of web app - which is the point of the whole discussion)
Edit: note there's probably many reasons - this is just one way of looking at it.
Easier to monetize means you can fund all the work required to achieve superior user experience, and user experience is the most important differentiator. People have repeatedly shown that UX is more important than security, privacy, cost, freedom, openness... anything. If it "just works" and can be adopted with little or no friction, it wins.
Yes, central structures allow capturing of monetary value, which provide economic incentive to people and that is a powerful motivator for attracting good UX/UI/Designers to make the product improve mass appeal
For whatever reason, good UI/UX hasn't been the FOSS's strong suite. Until that changes (and there's also no reason why it can't change) it will continue to lose ground on anything that is user-facing. Anything that requires expertise however, FOSS will continue to shine.
Just like democracy, you are never "done". "Oh great we are in a democracy nothing can remove that from us!" nope, gotta fight to keep it that way...
Don't get me wrong, I'm totally uncomfortable with a monopoly of this scale; I'm a Firefox user, a Pihole user, a non-FB user. But when people (non nerds) ask me why, it's hard to answer. They're all happy enough: Chrome is fast, AMP is faster, they get to find out the stuff they want to find out from incredibly accurate search, or Facebook - so what's the actual problem here?
My answer is normally about principles or competition or fairness but in practical terms, I haven't got a lot of answers.
Help me out here.
Once Google feels comfortable with doing so not allowing arbitrary routing in Chrome will be on the table to control what websites people visit. The only things stopping that is a feeble threat of state intervention or the threat of competition in the browser space reclaiming market share as a result.
They can, and probably will, take Chrome wholly proprietary at some point. Microsoft kowtowing to their engine is in their favor for now, but long term its in their business interests that Microsoft not have a browser anymore. That they present Chrome as the only option to users.
We can mire in the details of what a browser is, but for 99% of people Chrome is a program you run that shows you the stuff you want. The http, html, etc underpinnings are totally irrelevant. Chrome could be doing anything as long as it were showing the content the user of it expects. Google has already done this in the past with things like SPDY. I'm sure standards realize this - its why http/2 was a thing after all - that at this point if Google creates a new protocol it is de-facto required to become a standard because that is the only way for alternative browsers to keep pace with Chrome.
As such Google gets to dictate the future of hypertext. Not the users of the platform, not standards bodies formed to collaborate, the board of directors of a publicly traded US company.
As for SPDY, standards bodies like to "pave the cowpaths" so they codify existing implementations. Apple and Mozilla supported SPDY, it eventually became http/2 as you say, and then everyone dropped support for SPDY. This sounds like everything worked as intended.
It won't help much if a huge part of Chrome's proprietary new future involves running on proprietary content as well. Just wait until Chrome has some special non-HTTP integration with "lightning fast AMP pages" that other browsers can't serve, or serves a lot slower.
When one entity controls the web and you run a web based business, then you have to live in constant fear that they will destroy it. By accident or by malice.
One example how this is already happening is AMP. Google says "Give us your content or we will send people interested in it to your competitors instead". And they get away with it.
This is the opposite of freedom.
"Once they have wiped out all competition, they can start charging you."
It frustrates me, why not just give me a link to an actual web page?
Facebook, Uber, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. None of them are optimized for Google index.
Most top consumer internet applications don't take place in your browser.
And I'd argue that google's about the only thing propping up the internet. Chromium's a reasonably open platform (certainly more so than internet explorer, which not that long ago looked destined to become the dominant platform), gmail has kept email viable, android is somewhat open (and without it, apple might own that space entirely), etc
Every other player that's gotten traction has set up a walled garden
In fact it's exactly the same reason why Mozilla is increasingly not sustainable. Email hosting is simply not a lucrative business. That's why it's all run by large portals like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. which use them not to make money but to collect information about people, and monetize through ads or other indirect methods. Of course, this only becomes profitable at scale, and there are not that many companies at that scale.
As for Mozilla not being sustainable: I think they could be, but not the way they run their business.
Email hosting is lucrative enough for Fastmail.
Fusing the two never seems to work well. See blog comments for an example.
Think about what would be left if you took away all "social" apps from the internet.
Even if we don't go that far, think about non-social online apps that don't use the "web".
For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Office, Adobe creative cloud, etc. Most users of these apps use native apps instead of a clunky browser.
Some people think Microsoft Word is a clunky native app, others that Google Docs is a clunky browser app.
Maybe they are both right.
I would use Mozilla if the browser was just a little bit less bad. Currently it randomly takes me about 5 seconds to move my cursor in the hackernews input box. That is not Google's fault. Mozilla's future is mostly of their own making.
Using Firefox here with a few hundred tabs open, working just fine. I suspect your setup has other problems.
Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse?
Total “get off my lawn” complaint but how do you turn the damn AMP off? :)
It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.
This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm interested to know whether that would work. As I see it AMP can be just as big a problem just by being there by default on Google properties as by being something you, the consumer, can't turn off.
I haven't found a simple way that works on both my mobile and my desktop devices yet but I'd be interested in any recommendations.
Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad.
Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url
And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go!
I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.
It’s too bad the sites just couldn’t do that on their own and avoid the need for amp.
Use DuckDuckGo.
That sucked.
They want your canonical web page to be AMP.
Call it antitrust.ly! :)
"Accelerated Mobile Pages" should not be showing up on desktop at all. If they do, that's poor coding by the website itself. Just like how you often get stuck on website's mobile version when browsing on desktop.
> it’s completely broken
That's a pretty big statement, could you specify in which way it is "completely broken"?
> friction increasing to grab a link
This has been mostly fixed, I haven't had an issue in the past year. On Chrome and Firefox I believe, it works natively, and in other browsers I believe it adds an extra bar at the top to grab the link.
> Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
Quite the opposite, in my experience it's often a far simpler and focused page with less crap. The only slight disadvantage is that comment sections on articles are often disabled, but they are usually a click away. It makes sense anyways to not load those by default on mobile.
> A theoretical page load time improvement?
It's definitely not theoretical. It's also a way to bundle websites allowing easier edge caching which helps tremendously.
> we already have “request desktop mode”
Partly because the majority of websites never gave a shit about optimizing their mobile experience without an incentive.
> seemingly even worse?
I truly believe this is a case of "assigning downsides you notice to AMP, but upsides being mostly invisible". You wouldn't have anyone to assign it to when you see a mobile page on desktop, but if it's an AMP page, then you have someone to get angry at.
Another example would be how a spam protection could be blocking 99% of the spam, but if a couple bad content get through, you'll think the spam protection is doing absolutely nothing and it sucks, because you don't get to see the 99% of work it's actually doing.
Since it’s been a few days, just to respond to only the easiest point, copying a link to the non-AMP website so socially share takes 3 to 4 incremental clicks on mobile, so that’s what I meant by that.
But reflecting you’re spot on, since I can’t quantify the benefit AMP has had on the internet it’s hard to claim the negatives are so eggregious. Thx for that perspective.
For better ranking in the dominant search engine, so you make more money from your participation in the dominant advertising network.
I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.
Likewise Microsoft still is a massive player in enterprise software even as AWS became a virtual synonym for cloud computing.
An interesting thing I have noticed is that Amazon has made staggeringly little progress at user facing SaaS -- think salesforce.com. I went to an AWS conference years ago and the gap between the speaker's enthusiasm for zocalo and the crowd that couldn't care less (e.g. The crowd that was pumped for IAM and T2 instances) was striking.
In desktop & laptop Windows still holds a 87% market share.
"Consumer computing devices" is such a vague market. If you study markets at such a big scope something like Texas Instruments wouldn't even make a blip while if you're paying more careful attention you'll find they absolutely dominate the scientific calculator market.
I would bet that MS will outlast all the other tech giants by a long way.
That's a very interesting observation. Google will thus prevent a native payment option at all costs, which leaves a huge opening for Brave or another payment provider. (Which is enhanced by content providers being threatened by AMP.)
I don't see Google in a very secure position. Their employees nowadays don't seem to care which will become a huge problem once Google has to actually react to a changing market. Amazon is getting product searches and Facebook can take over everything else whenever they want because Google's results don't come from analysing the web but from showing the pages that other people with the same queries are visiting.
Additionally, Huawei is forced to setup their own app store. If they have the better TikTok app, and online payment with wechat, the next generation of users will switch. China has so much more developers that a Chinese app store will become the more interesting place for new apps. With Zoom and TikTok, they have shown that they can create competitive apps.
There are obviously subsets of the web where this doesn't apply (twitch and YouTube where patreon is common, onlyfans, etc.), but that's almost solely for video and live interaction.
Micropayments are, apparently, not what the textful web wants.
Can you elaborate on what a native payment option would entail? How would it be different from non native payment options? How would it be different from crypto or other payment options that already exist?
>Wasn't it that the creators of Netscape wanted to put some kind of payment protocol similar to crypto in the original browser but ran into trouble with the government, can't remember anymore. 402 error was famously reserved for money trouble.
You could have one standard, in the same way that webpages are standardized. Then you could use your preferred option on any webpage. It would come with your browser, so no need to install anything. Unlike the Apple app store, you wouldn't have one player controlling everything, so the payment network wouldn't take 30% of all profits.
Of course, whatever is feasible as a standard is also feasible as a plugin, or at least, like Brave, as a new Browser, if Google limits the plugin api. The difference is that nowadays, every payment option tries to be the winner, preventing every other player from advancing. With a standard, those fights would be over and users could start paying for everything.
I think the biggest difference would be that people would pay for single articles and videos from obscure sources. Nowadays you have to hand out your credit card or register for an obscure payment network like Brave or patreon. People register for Netflix, but not for a blog they visit one time in their life. It's very likely that a webpage and a visitor use different payment options, thus payment is not possible. As a consequence, everything is paid with adverts, like the article states. With a standard, that would shift and the default option would be a clean article without ads.
I don't know? Was it?
> With a standard, those fights would be over and users could start paying for everything.
What prevents anyone from making a standard? Why do we see standards for everything else but this? What would the standard entail?
I think the real issue here is that payment is a hard problem, open payment systems like bitcoin is horrible to use, and closed payment systems like visa is closed due to trust and security concerns.
To me it seems like the author is just dismissing the inherent complexity and accusing the people who put in the time to standardize the protocols we have of being incompetent. This is not worthy of hackernews.
Good question. hakfoo's answer seems to be a good start.
I would include something for automated micro-pre-payment. If you are just browsing news sites, it would be inconvenient to constantly confirm payment. Likewise, confirming payment for every played song is annoying. But that would also require some form of trust-network to take care of spam and fakes.
Like html, I wouldn't worry about getting it right the first time. It just needs to be usable and can be refined from there.
>What prevents anyone from making a standard?
Nothing. But where's the benefit for anybody to push it? If it is a standard, then all competitors can reap the profits without any investment.
This could have been Mozilla territory: Join Brave and make micro-payment a valid option for content creators.
Something like <payment name="transactionId"> <amount>30.00</amount> <currency>USD</currency> <ordernumber>123456</ordernumber> <method name="WireTransfer" account="234567" routing="3040567" /> <method name="PayPal" destination="company@company.com" /> <method name="CreditCard" url="https://secure.gateway.com" merchantid="123456" /> <method name="Dogecoin" walletid="D0304050600405kgjfd" amount="2600" /> </payment> This would render as a group of buttons representing the payment choices. The browser would pop up an appropriate form-- potentially in an isolated context where the fields can't be sniffed by on-page scripts, perform the remittance, and submit a structure of verifiable confirmation details in the field transactionId when the form was submitted. Since the flow is steered entirely by the user's browser, there's a stronger degree of trust and control; I could imagine, for example, bank-provided plugins that required a seperate authentication before relaying the card details, or more sophisticated 3-D Secure style checking and fingerprinting. The entire PCI compliance and trusting merchants with the card number problems would never have come into play.
There is the Web Payments API now, but it's a clunky ball of JavaScript with limited support. This could have been demoed in 1997 and universal by 2000.
If it is so simple, why was it not? Are you suggesting it was purely incompetence of the people who standardized the web back then?
but is Zoom chinese ?
Search and payment are important as well, but only really become relevant when the content is on the web.
The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or finger plan files [0]: you write some text in a file in your home directory and a service makes it accessible to anyone who connects to your machine. Apparently plan files were somewhat popular thing at one point; you could finger the machines at id Software and read what John Carmack was doing on any given week [1].
The problem with this approach is that the internet (not just the web) is not end-to-end. Assuming your ISP isn't using CGNAT, I have to:
- Punch a hole in my firewall or setup up a DMZ host. Unless my workstation is the only thing on my network and hooked directly into my modem, but nobody does that. Everybody has a LAN with private addressing.
- Setup dynamic DNS, since there's no guarantee that my ISP has given me a static address. In practice this isn't that bad, but if I lose power in a thunderstorm you need to have the same name you had before.
- Harden and update whatever service I run. It'll get probed regularly, and is a high value target since it presumably runs on the same machine where I run my password manager or buy things using I credit card.
A VPS is just a convenience and security measure here. You get a public IP address without any additional management (default-deny firewall, NAT) and can isolate your private data from the VPS which is more likely to be compromised.
The alternative would be to make a new network which gets rid of all the extra layers of management - just your machine, with a publicly accessible name that you can point people to. No smart network appliances in-between imposing NAT, DHCP, or firewalls beyond the one on your machine. I think there are P2P networks which work like this, or Tor if you give your machine a name in the .onion namespace. I don't know of any which are better on the security aspect though.
If the network hosted “just your machine”, then your website (or whatever published content you have) would disappear when your machine shut down for the night.
In a way, what you did was describe a few of the benefits that IPv6 offers. I'd say "that's coming" or "it being actively rolled out" but we are about 25 years in & usage is still an underwhelming figure.
Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines.
Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use.
I imagine if you told the user they could have a browser with extensions, ad-blocking, background playback etc they might be a bit more inclined to consider using Firefox.
In theory yeah, in practise it looks a bit murky to me right now due to the state of the web. Apple is under a lot of fire right now (quite rightly) but I have a suspicion if other browser engines are allowed to run on iOS there will effectively be no incentives to develop for any other browser engine and we'll start seeing "Works best / only in Chromium" type websites and apps (I've already experienced this a fair bit using Firefox).
All the devices I've purchased have been Nexus/Pixel devices, so Chrome is a given there.
I assume at the end of the day Samsung Browser is just a reskinned Blink, though?
Agreed, but I think the native Google Maps app is superior than any browser experience.
Weird questions that they got asked already on their Windows machine as part of BrowserChoice.eu?
They're only "weird" because this practice of forcing your own browser (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari) down the throat of your users has become commonplace.
There seems to be an implicit assumption by those commenting on Mozilla's downsizing that the antitrust case against Google is going to take the same path as the case against Microsoft.
Google's anti-competitive conduct under examination will not be focused on Chrome, it will be focused on the markets for search and advertising.
Mozilla does not provide any potential competition in those markets.
The case against Microsoft focused on the software industry. Today, the focus is on the onlilne advertising industry.
Netscape was a software company, like Microsoft. Mozilla however is not an online advertising services company like Google.
Of course search is really hard, but how is it possible that huge companies with nearly infinite money and talent (MS / Apple / Amazon) were never able to do it? MS actually tried; it's unclear if the others even gave it a thought.
The rest of Google is different. I use Gmail but could easily switch. I've not used Chrome for over a year now and really don't miss it (either on desktop or mobile). Google maps are the best but others would be good enough if need be.
But search? Every time I try to use Duck Duck Go I'm extremely disappointed. Google search is something I don't think I could live without.
Without giving away any trade secrets, part of it is the power of search behavior data (for example, what you click on after a search, how long before you go back to the search page, etc.). The more popular your search engine, the more search behavior data you have, which makes the search results better especially for tail queries (the less common searches).
So then you attract more searchers, and it's a cycle that is hard for a newcomer to break into. It's why academia has given up on competing with commercial search engines in the web space, and why alternative search engines are just begging at the table right now.
Google's search is the way it is now because they've now had 20 years to work on it. To create search of similar quality you'll need to spend a comparable amount of time (during which Google will not rest on laurels, but will continue to evolve).
It would've been great if someone took the pains to implement, maintain and evolve a search similar to Google's at the time when Google became available (or a few years after that). Then it's possible we would have two high quality search engines now.
But even that is a simplistic view of things. Everything that Google ultimately has feeds into its search. Google Translate? Helps Google understand pages in multiple languages. Google Maps? Helps Google learn people behaviour, places of interest, businesses etc. Google Patents, Groups, Books? Provide vast amounts of natural text to train models on. And so on and so on. A "just as good" search needs all (or nearly all that) that to become just as good.
ie., people have spent years writing their sites explicitly with google SEO in-mind... add-in all the data google has via adwords...
What if selling phones and cloud compute is a superior business to search and they are smart to realize it? In reality both Apple and Amazon are bigger companies than Google, and Google is actually the one trying to chase selling phones and cloud compute?
Maybe because google's market is everyone, disruption can no longer exist?
What exactly is the expectation here, that there is one integrated protocols stack that covers all of this? I don't see why.
Nothing is stopping someone from building P2P distributed search engines, and nothing is stopping someone from building "safe and easy way of exchanging funds".
Given that we still don't have good solutions to either of these problems it seems the right answer according to this person would be to just skip the internet.
This feels like a gripe without substance, yes we know these are hard problems, saying that Google's dominance is a consequence of the IETF not integrating these into HTTP is absurd and baseless.
There is also a reasonable argument to saying that search/payments are so fundamental to what the web became that a solution at the protocol-layer would be appropriate.
If the author wants to integrate it into HTTP, well they can actually try and make that case through the open standards process.
The questions of what does native suppoert imply and in what protocol should it be integrated are still unanswered. It seems very low effort to me, at least give a high level rundown of what that practically means and what he expects to see.
Bitcoin runs on open standard protocols, why is it not native? Is it because it is not ratfied by the IETF? Same question goes for existing P2P search engines. And even with protocols, you still need infrastructure. HTTP being an open protocol does not give me free HTTP hosting, and search indexing and lookup similarly won't be free.
I think if it was easy to solve these problems and integrate them into HTTP it would be easy to solve them outside HTTP and it is not clear why the solutions must be integrated into some existing protocol like TCP, IP or HTTP.
I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s
Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching, and then they ask their contact to do the same, who ask their contact to do the same, I think we could have fast and massively parallelized trust based searches. Then you can rank the results based on how many times they appeared.
Right now I'll settle for a centralized search engine/service that works like Google did before all the crazy, like before Amp, and before penalizing non-mobile-optimized sites, and so on.
Federated search scares me because it might constrain search results by being tainted with a localised world view.
Basically affinity groups maintain lists of links (sort of like social bookmarking) that are the crawl root urls. Crawling comes from Common Crawl plus updates for recency. Groups can pool resources to run their own indexes and receive a share of the profits from text display ads.
A more realistic dream would be finding good algorithms for "webscale" search engines, that all competitors (Bing, DDG) can use such that any one of them can't have excessive advantage over the others.
Secondly, human curated directories may still have future. If I search Google for interesting links or just programming blogs on specific topic, I find lot of SEO optimized low quality content instead of deep technical content so that I often have to search through HN, reddit etc.. and sort by popularity - but searching for particular topic is difficult.
I've used file sharing software which has the same "tree style" query forwarding. I think latency would be the big issue though, we're used to getting a result instantly -- and the right result too (Google does a lot of extra work knowing what you actually mean, not just keyword search).
Has this been attempted before? does it have a name?
Respectfully, not really. Arguably search is much worse now than in 2010.
What if someone could come up with a simple search that could easily understand “hey this is a paywall” or “hey this is a paywall but somehow securely and with privacy I checked and you have a login to this site in your password manager” or it could do time based searches better than “last day / last week / etc”.
Consumers have insatiable needs and are never satisfied. It’s not clear someone can’t create something unimagined yet that’s vastly technically superior based on solely focusing on customer experience. Even if you just assume NewEngine(tm) is venture backed and can lose money in the short run until it monetizes later it should still theoretically enable it to be closer to consumer desires than Google which has to post quarterly ad revenue figures to wall street and the SEC.
And lets not forget that a very large portion of the population would need to hear about that product on an AMP page in their Chrome browser on their Android phone, probably following a Google search or noticing a story on Google news.
That seems fairly unlikely to me. Google gives you what you're looking for immediately for the average query, and anything beyond that is a power user detail not relevant to most people.
This insight seems highly plausible and sad at the same time.
The result is that large swaths of the web are essentially inaccessible. It's contracting. I feel it as acutely as amnesia.
This 'Constitution' will give us the Web of a few giant tech companies, for those few giant tech companies, by those few giant tech companies.
Many here on HN, including me, wish we could have a Web of the people, for the people, by the people.
The issue, as always, is relative power—which absolutely skews heavily in Google's favor. Individuals accessing the web today have far less relative power than 25 years ago, even if they can accomplish "more" with less effort.
In the past it was Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, XFire, .. I mean those companys were so big (e. g. XFire for gaming streaming) but they failed to stay ahead of time - lets see whats up with Google or Facebook or Amazon in 15 years.
Are you proposing that we don't do anything about a specific problem because there may be other theoretical problems?
That's like saying, "If this guy in this dark alley doesn't kill me now, a heart attack might eventually kill me, instead; so I'll just stand here and make it easy for his knife to find me."
They put plenty of effort into their software and at that scale it is amazing how fast it returns results.
For my websites I achieve better ranking placements in Bing then I do in Google - we should probably all start using Bing from now on?
I’m not happy with the current situation and would hate to see Mozilla fail, but I can’t fault Google for the current situation.
Doesn’t that strike you as a poor move?
I don’t see why we should be relegated to put up with another x-number of years of these companies behaving (arguably) badly, just so things can change and they can be replaced with another company that will do the same thing.
Dont use AMP? Well you will lose money / power.
Dont use search? Maybe miss out opportunities. How can I as marketeer convince my clients as Google traffic is 90% source of income?
I get your point but I'm not sure what could be done without harming economy (aka people).
Always worth reading:
Whenever you see the amp symbol, avoid visiting that site.
The main AMP concerns seem philosophical, which I don't think OP was asking about.
With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players.
I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.
They buy a lot of dark fiber, and IRUs, and wavelength services from carrier-of-carrier type big ISPs, but by no means do they control the internet.
But they are not in the same business of long distance OSI layer 1 ISP operations as CenturyLink/level3, zayo or Verizon are. Where I would be really worried is if I saw amazon making a serious bid to acquire a company similar to Zayo, NTT, KT, France telecom/opentransit, or Telia.
Google can now dictate which webshop is shown first in search results on a product level.
I know retailers are sick of this. They need Google to be found on the web but they don't like how Google is destroying retail.
Its hard to see right now but history tells us it will come and they will fall, every incumbent always gets complacent and stops innovating and someone comes and cleans up. For example YT hasn’t fundamentally changed in a decade, and the user experience is starting to feel a little off (sponsored content, a gamed recommendation algorithm etc. are all degrading the experience).
I don’t know how / where we’ll consume the bulk of our video in 2030, but there’s a significant chance it won’t be YouTube.
A) what happens if Google decides to stop funneling money to Mozilla? What becomes of Firefox?
B) at what point do you think the $350+ million/year cash flow to Firefox will get cut off?
C) do you think Mozilla has a reasonable chance of success of replacing that amount of money with a deal with Microsoft/bing?
I think there's at least 3 reasons why Google wants to continue funding Firefox:
1. To get access to 200M+ users for their search ads
2. To have a competitor that helps Google make money and so Firefox can serve as evidence, that Chrome has competition and Google isn't trying to stomp out competition, in anti-trust cases.
3. To stop other search engines (e.g. Bing) from partnering with Mozilla.
If Google were to not renew the contract next time, then they take two risks:
1. What if a lot of former Firefox users switch to something other than Chrome?
2. What if someone continues funding Firefox so Google loses out on the additional reach for their search ads?
The benefit of cutting off the funding could be quickening Firefox's downfall and, perhaps, the bulk of Firefox users switching to Chrome.
I think Google will cut off the deal when the number of Firefox users drops enough for the risks to be negligible. Until then, Firefox will continue to slowly lose users and the bulk of those will switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari. I wonder what the breakdown is. I'd suspect the platform default largely dictates which browser a former Firefox user switches to.
There are some companies that probably have a strong interest in google not controlling the web entirely. Though it will be hard to replace that revenue entirely.But they seemed to dithched focus on web platform as it is still such mess for both users and developers, so meh.
Chrome for me is done, using it only for PWA.
That could be the last blow to any meaningful Firefox market share.
And from the same journalist, words to not use if you work at Google and are talking about your employer or its offerings. https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
There is one small silver lining: when and if Google manages to successfully turn the rest of the web into ca. 1992 style information providers for their updated version of videotext there might be just enough breathing room to create something even better.
After all the web killed AOL, with Google going after the AOL playbook they set themselves up for a similar debacle. When it isn't 'the internet' anymore a service will quickly lose value.
We need anti-monopoly action to avoid complete dominance by these tech companies. Google services need to be split up and run independently.
It doesn't seem as if most of us care.
Microsoft is not a better company in any way, but two companies controlling the most widely used browsing platform is better than one company controlling it.
My impression is that this is what's different this time: it was chosen by developers themselves
Does it matter?
We still give cancer treatment to smokers. We still give dialysis to alcoholics. We still pull the plastic out of our own oceans.
I am curious to hear what the author would propose instead. I’m not sure keeping a local cache of all web text would work very well.
It’s not just limited to Google; it’s for any site providing only third-party OAuth login. I can never remember which one I signed in with, and if that service ever shuts down, it’ll be a pain to figure which of the hundreds of services I’ve signed up for using that OAuth login. It’s much easier to change an email.
And yes, I do use a paid alternative to Gmail (ProtonMail)
Every non-Google service I log into that allows external auth supports at least Facebook and plain old e-mail in addition to Google. Maybe your experience is different, but I use a lot of very mainstream services both free and paid.
I know people who don't have Google accounts. I only use Gmail as a throwaway address for when I expect spam (e.g. signing up for dodgy-looking web sites). I happily admit I'm a huge fan of Google Maps and would not at all mind paying for it, and I actually do pay for YouTube, but everything else from Google has pretty good alternatives as far as I can see. (And even Maps has acceptable alternatives, it's just that much better.)
AMP is like putting all the non-Gmail mail you receive on your Gmail account into a separate folder, and only including Gmail senders in your Inbox.
I love that. Quoting for emphasis.
Mozilla never provided a way of donating directly to Firefox.
I'm using the internet to buy things, research things, share memories, call people, pay, get payed etc.
Just because 20 years ago people build small websites (including me) doesn't mean the internet should be a bunch of private niche websites.
Not many people ever found my websites. No one cared.
Also, Apple isn't the 'alternative to Google'. The open web is an alternative to Google and Google is doing what it can to strangle it.
1. Lack of native distributed search led to Google’s monopoly.
“The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.”
This doesn’t make any sense. Google’s entire early innovation was to use hyperlinks as an indicator of popularity and thus a proxy metric for veracity, and PageRank was born.
Original attempts at distributed search based on other metrics like text analysis were tried (Webcrawler, AltaVista which was used by Yahoo, Inktomi which was used by Lycos, HotBot, etc) but didn’t produce better results, and Google eventually grew to #1 by 2004 (6 years after intro).
Google could not have existed without the hyperlink. The reason it has a monopoly today is largely due to investment cycles and intellectual property law: after the dot com bust, there wasn’t exactly an appetite to build new search engines given PageRank was patented and would need to be licensed (it expired in 2019).
This monopoly doesn’t matter as much: generic search engine use has been declining for years in favour of other approaches to finding content (social media, syndication, domain specific aggregators, etc).
Decentralized Index/search (not just distributed but truly decentralized) remains an open research problem. it may be possible to improve and deploy with the right incentives and investment, but it’s ludicrous to think this was possible in 1992-1998.
2. Lack of native payments led to advertising to take off.
This has no factual basis: CGI-bin scripts to purchase things with HTTP POST calls existed as early as 1993. Amazon and eBay launched in 1995. PayPal started when Google did, in 1998.
More importantly, most viewed the web as another visual media like Television, which was ad-driven. People generally didn’t like paying for things that felt free, like information, or music, or movies.
But again, the Ad Words monopoly remains tenuous. Facebook has been steamrolling it in growth and will eventually eclipse it. We are also seeing a lot more willingness for people to pay for content to avoid ads.
3. “poor native video support (it is hyper_text_ after all)”
It was called hypermedia widely by around 1995 when images and audio (Real Networks in particular) took off, there just wasn’t the processing power, bandwidth, or compression algorithms available to make this real until 1998 when MP4 came out.
Google’s early attempt at video, Google Videos, was a market failure. They had to buy YouTube which (most importantly) made it easy to publish videos compared to others, but it took many years for it to reach #1.
And that position too is threatened between Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, etc.
In summary, Google is #1 in a number of markets due to a combination of smart business moves, smart technology, being an early player, and the business/investment climate at key inflection points of the industry. There are a large number of competitive pressures against Google that make this lead tenuous. Google is as vulnerable as AOL or Microsoft were in the late 90s, when they were thought to be unassailable.
As for the health of the web, let’s remember that regardless of all the claims of the death of the web, whether native mobile, or WebSockets, or walled gardens, GraphQL, or single page apps or accelerators like Amp (which had to change offer direct hyperlink access due to complaints), the web remains entrenched, omnipresent, and has no clear replacement.
This matters because the core architecture of the web: URLs, HTTP, MIME, and (to a somewhat shrinking extent) HTML remains the foundational glue that holds all this mess of media and technology together, and is fundamentally about enabling decentralization. URLs still are the main way that native mobile apps integrate with the network. HTML is still the default fallback UI. HTTP is still the primary application protocol by far.
All of this was the design intent of the architecture of the Web: to last decades, regardless of how the origin servers or user agents evolved. It’s an architecture ripe for innovation to make decentralized alternatives to today’s incumbents.
To paraphrase John Lennon, centralization is over, if you want it.
But this requires the experience to be actually better for users, and not just in an “eat your vegetables / don’t give your privacy away” manner. Starting a new venture to take this on requires a combination of investment, insight, and commitment that’s not easy to assemble. But it can and probably will happen, relative to legislation or very possible social catastrophes that entrench the current players longer than needed.
!!!
While your point is valid and reasonable in it's own right, posting it in a discussion about Google isn't really the right place.
I quickly found that many of my local business have an online presence only on Facebook. No web site, no freebie aggregator type thing, nothing, just FB. This in a major European city.
It makes me wonder if it might be useful, as a public service, to have some kind of free business listing that (with your permission) automatically duplicates what you put on Facebook, just to encourage people to at least be discoverable outside that walled garden.
"The web is open!" they would say. It's a key part of the web. It's part of our core values! We're going to change the world!
Yet 95% of these people are now at Facebook or Google actively trying to rip apart what made the web good, stable, and open.
It's repugnant. Every person you know working at Facebook should be ashamed of themselves and they should be socially ostracized.
- phone - text messages - Facebook
She has no concept of the internet outside of the Facebook app.
My facebook experience is similar to how it was in '08. Updates from friends, though those are getting less common.
Replace'Facebook' with 'WhatsApp', outside U.S. especially for developing economies, your comment would be completely valid but even more dangerous as unlike Facebook's content WhatsApp's content cannot be put under public scrutiny and much of its users haven't even used a browser before let alone email.
That's interesting that you do. I can't see it because I just don't go on Facebook. And it isn't a moral stance - I have an account, and occasionally I will respond to a relative or a friend. It's just such a small part of my life that I just don't see the danger you do.
But in the end, the US government will most likely have to split the company in order for stuff to really change.
DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, and it's not perfect or a panacea, but it works well enough (and there's "!g" for when it doesn't).
What we really need to do is be willing to pay for our tools, though.
Wikipedia estimates there are 21 million developers in the world, so if one out of twenty developers donated $1 / month to Mozilla, they'd be getting $1 million / month. You could sustain a few small dev teams on that. Not tons, but it's something.
If you took it to $5 / month, now you're looking at a lot more manpower.
If donations are given to specific software projects rather than the foundation as a whole, and bookkeeping is in the open, you can have decent confidence your money is actually going where you'd like it to go, too.
Just some half-baked thoughts.
I would gladly donate to mozilla the day I knew my money didn't go to Bakers already filled pockets or to some worthless diversity cause like a "queer feminist filmmaker" that is obviously on their payroll.
Mozilla as an org takes in a lot of money already, it is just that they seem to spend it on nothing of value for the most part. It's sad, but it's the reality.