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Comment by jarsin | Hacker News Reader

"There are plenty of businesses they (google) will truly disrupt by taking control of the data that you have kindly provided them (spiced up with metadata)."

Except what has google truly disrupted so far beyond web search? Mobile? Nope late to the party. Cloud? Nope late to the party. Social? Nope late to the party.

My point being you cant predict the future. 10 years ago everyone was saying all of dev jobs are going to be outsourced.

And here we are today with tons of demand and a future that nobody knows where its going especially not google.

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The idea here is that better "web search" progressively disrupts entire industries whose job was to provide the information that is being searched: that to help people find your product you make it more accessible to Google, which then takes your information and presents it to users in ways that no longer requires you, and so you are removed from the market; the main limitation of this process is just "how smart" Google's algorithms become, so over time (as Google improves this process) you see more and more industries buckle under the all-mighty weight of Google.

Yet Google has its problems too: younger generations are using social networks to discover content online. AI assistants like Siri are going to become more prevalent and people will more often go to them for answers instead of a search box.

If you've got good content on a website its worth having a website. But if you're a restaurant or hardware store you probably don't need a website because you probably don't have any content worth putting there. Or if you do you're sharing it on Facebook and Instagram instead and making sure your Foursquare and Yelp information is correct.

I really don't think Google is the problem for someone making websites, its Tumblr and Squarespace that make it super easy and inexpensive for a business owner to make something slick themselves.

But Knowledge Graph will make this automatic. Going to extremes, some people's lives could be significantly changed.

Say you've been running a small scale website with content details and making decent a living off it. If Knowledge Graph eats up this niche, your traffic will drop a lot.

But life is life. Accidents happen, the world changes and people will move forward. But I do believe this is the first time machines could make people obsolete completely without intervention from other people.

> "There are plenty of businesses they (google) will truly disrupt by taking control of the data that you have kindly provided them (spiced up with metadata)."

Even without the data, google could disrupt markets, because of their position as the "gatekeepers" of the internet.

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