this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
187 points (99.5% liked)
DeGoogle Yourself
9726 readers
74 users here now
A community for those that would like to get away from Google.
Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!
Rules
-
Be respectful even in disagreement
-
No advertising unless it is very relevent and justified. Do not do this excessively.
-
No low value posts / memes. We or you need to learn, or discuss something.
Related communities
!privacyguides@lemmy.one !privacy@lemmy.ml !privatelife@lemmy.ml !linuxphones@lemmy.ml !fossdroid@social.fossware.space !fdroid@lemmy.ml
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Always has been.
Nah, they were great when they came into existence. 'No ads, no portal, no nothing, just a search-engine". That was their sub-motto (freely quoted from memory). When the results had a time-spent on it to awe at their incredible speed AND accuracy. Before them, searching the web was annoyingly annoying.
But the moment the "don't be evil" fell, shit continuously went downhill. Maybe even before, more unnoticed, surely went gradually.
Nowadays it's even a bad search-engine, except you're looking to buy something.
You're not looking at the choices they made before and during the don't be evil era. With all tech, if they didn't create it, someone else would've because it's not that super smart people "created" a thing but that the community created and made available the tools required to "invent" said technology.
But they were still created from the actual innovation of pagerank, straight out of public research, right?
I don't get your point. When they went into existence, it was a search-engine. It just did that and it did it very well. Nothing else compared slightly. No javascript, no tracking, no portal, no ads, no shit. just results.
"If not them, then someone else". Yes sure. If there's something to exploit, it will be exploited. People are shit. But we're talking about google :)
It started with gmail IMO. That was an early milestone of the evil empire. They announced mining your emails to build an ad empire. I remember being bewildered that nerds on forums were going nuts over 1GB of storage. What a shit trade off I thought. But what did I know then especially relative to the expertise of internet nerds.
Gmail was launched around 2005 which means the concept was in development several years before. That puts the timeline around 2000 probably. Google was evil from very early on.