NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Not going to pretend it doesn’t suck but I think this is actually a good thing in even the medium term.
Google was within spitting distance of being a de facto monopoly in the search space. For Eothas’s sake, it is the verb for searching for information.
Google shitting the bed DID make a massive gap for all the people who only ever wanted the top result to switch to LLMs (which actually are great for search engine purposes… if you take them with a grain of salt). But it also made a huge opening to actually innovate on what a search engine should be.
I am a huge fan of Kagi (the product, not the company) because… yeah there is a lot of bullshit in there and more every year. But it also largely decouples predictive algorithms from my search results and gives me the power to prioritize some sites or outright remove others from the results. And while I never realized it… that is exactly what I want. Fandom wiki when there are actually good ones? Block fandom. Shitty news site? Block it. Actually useful blog? Prioritize. And so forth.
It sucks but… I am not sure how much was actually lost. The people who weren’t really searching moved on to the next thing and the people who were can either use bing (support BDS, etc) or duckduckgo or spend a few bucks a year on one of the new products and… yeah.
That said, a Google that collapses destroys every web browser in existence since everything is either Chromium or funded by it. But… that is like a next year problem?
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Every major tech company has a stake in chromium. Google could die tomorrow, and someone would bankroll it for their own selfish use.
You thing Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon wouldn’t jump at basically owning the development of the worlds most popular web browser?
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
That really isn’t how it works.
Every major company has a stake in Chromium because the company that prints money out of the aether maintains it. Chromium is so successful that Google outright funds a good chunk of Mozilla just so nobody can say they have a monopoly.
Google no longer backing Chromium wouldn’t be the immediate death of the project. But it would mean the end of professional support as the vast majority of downstream companies MIGHT hire some staff to work on their own internal forks. But they aren’t going to be paying people to add new features (for good or for ill) to the upstream.