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Google has been a constant part of my life from early 2000's and I'm grateful to them for providing so many useful products. Most of them were awesome and worked fully without annoying ads or subscriptions. They will come with something new (usually unannounced) and I will be so excited to try it. Technically, they would almost work from day one. Needless to say, I was a Google fanboi during the first decade of the company. Google Search, GMail, Maps, News, Android, Chrome... thanks Google for all these great products. For a commercial company, they had high ethical standards and still seem better than most competition.
Thank you Google, you've made a dent in the universe!
I came here expecting to see this thread completely filled with the usual Google hate and was pleasantly surprised to find this here instead. Thank you!
I'm fully in agreement with most here that the modern Google is a danger to the internet, but it's pleasant to be reminded that this wasn't always the case. It's a bittersweet anniversary, so let's take the sweet with the bitter.
Google Reader, it was Google Reader’s murdered that made me losing my trust. Before that I was exactly like you are. These days I avoid anything Google. Not even because they’re a data farm from my digital and personal life, but because I cannot trust any product of theirs to keep being around.
I have used Gmail since the invite-only beta, although I have never given out my gmail address. I only use it as the forwarding target for my hundreds of one-time addresses in use. Now I am ashamed that I still have not completed my migration away from it.
I have some 30 Google accounts, each for one service I used either once or sometimes for a couple of years. Although most of them are unusable now because I cannot proceed beyond the login without supplying a phone number. Well, they have recently sent out mails that they will delete them soon if they remain unused.
I did use Google search from when nobody knew it in the 1990s until 3-4 years ago when I switched to Duckduckgo.
20 years ago I would have applied to Google if they had only had a tech job in my country.
I have only one Android account. I keep that phone constantly in flight mode, except when I absolutely need to use a single app for work.
Today I am convinced that Google is a harmful company that the US government should split as they did with AT&T. And as a European we should not send any data to the US because of what Snowden have taught us and the US government does not grant data of foreigners any protection.
Advertising is 95% an unethical business. Using the computation power that Google wastes for it in the cloud and at the edge is just evil. Overconsumption is a fact for large parts of the planet. Trying to sell more is wrong, we need to live with less. Myself by my own choices I took a 30% salary cut twice in my career. And I am still on the overconsumption side, even if the phone I type this on is 9 years old and my main phone more than 5.
Google is amazing. I pay them money for multiple services, but the Google of 2000 would want to kick 2023 Google's ass, take it's lunch money and auction off g.2000's pens.
As much as I wish it, Google search is only the secondary focus. They multi-billion deal with Apple shows the massive cash stack developed from search, which would lead one to believe Google lives from search. I would have no problem with this co-dependant relationship, except it show the darker side of Google. Anything for installs. If Google was suddenly forced to be ONLY a search engine, I maintain they would fail - No gmail apps. No slides. No voice. A "nothing but search" Google would make unimaginable amounts of money, but it would only be clicks. Quick impressions, that don't generate the revenue Google stockholders now depends on.
The clicks themselves should be enough. My mind explodes at the concept of counting Google's click-thru revenue; thank god for 64-bit CPUs! As the world's finest data-mining corporation which {likely, obviously, as proven in court} funnels untold data to `todaysTLA {}` they have show time and time again, they care not for their free-tier customers, employees or paying "customers". The amount you pay pales in comparison to how much the revenue stream is from `{data mining data points for gmail, android etc}, of course they are going to monetize you. The massive income increase and the thankful government's soft-hand approach is the underlying motivator. The amazing ability of Google's lawyers to keep the vast majority of the current anti-trust trial relatively hidden screams of influence.
This being said, who do we turn to? Who's the stalwart, effective and visible protector of the internet now? Obviously not firefox, gnu, debian or mullvad. Where is their a major-league player that can take us back to the internet of old, the internet of a useful GeoCities page? I use Firefox on every device I own. I'd cross-compile before I go to Chrome, but they don't just own client-side-internet, do they?
The internet before capitalism was a wonderful thing, but we had a problem - someone eventually pays. Someone eventually pays for everything - email, www, gopher, newsgroups, ftp. Even today, at some point, you realize "the cloud" is just someone else's machine, which they pay for. Universities fronted the bill for years, but quickly bowed out.
Maybe one day we will reach a point that a `cloud_server {4-core arm cpu, 4GB ram, 40GB disk};` is so cheap as to be offered for free. Until that day, the internet is for those who pay in either money or information. I do not agree with the way TLAs work the system. I think the google tradeoff is bad. I understand that my ability to browse www.mario64speedruns.com depends greatly on if I trigger a captcha through Cloud{Flare,Front}, based mostly on my ad-blocking.
And even once we reach the promised land of free 4/4/40, it will only survive because of actual, paying, CC-on-file customers. The sooner we come to "horrible acceptance", where we realize the free-love-1972 isn't the world we live in, the better. It will quicken the people a thousand times smarter than me figuring out a way to keep 1% of the web free.
None sucks; better than none sucks less; therefore 1% is amazing,
And how far they've strayed from the beginning. Don't be evil. Won't show ads inline with search results that look like organic links. Constant product churn, search results inundated by click farms, and one can't leave out WEI...
They knew it was inevitable.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Funny how they introduced WEI using an unknown dev in the UK. It seems dirty. Like something that wouldn't be ethical to have a person do, even if that person agreed to do it. They still haven't gone and officially claimed it, months later it's under the developer with a rubber duck for an avatar and 26 followers on GitHub.
You're only counting the negatives. Even with all those negatives, Google has a net positive effect on the web/Internet, IMO.
They destroyed the internet, with blessings for simplifying it, and then they cannibalized their own services for short term profit.
To paraphrase what the DOJ just said in their opening statement, the Google you're talking about is long gone.
The google that deserved much praise has been dead since not long after the DoubleClick acquisition. They’ve been DoubleClick/Google since. Ordering intentional.
That means they’ve been evil or rushing as fast as they can toward evil since… 2008.
Google died at about 10 years old.
The minute a competitor appeared to challenge them, they threw all their initial goodwill away. It’s very unfortunate, so yeah. Thanks for destroying the internet Google.
I honestly think the world is a poorer place for having had a single
US company dominate so many areas of digital technology for so long.
I hope that in another 25 years giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on are just small players in a globally inter-operable, open and diverse technological world.
They are dominated by the mindless calculus of Wall St, injected deep into their programming. If they deviate from what Wall St wants they loose. So they dont dominate. They are dominated.
What is needed is what Cory Doctorow is saying.
We need to push politicians to fix the antitrust law. It isn't just Google that is benefiting from this now toothless law.
That's what you get when government(s) just sit back and hope the market sorts it out.
There has never been such a world, in any industry. Capitalism abhors competition. Absent strong government regulation monopolies are inevitable.
I would argue that a strong unified platform (Windows, the web, whatever) is good for user and developer experience.
Love them or hate them, their impact on the internet and the world is unparalleled - Both positive and negative impact, but mostly positive.
Positive impact: Google maps
The amount of people that were empowered to explore and discover (or time saved from getting lost) is incredible by any measure
I’m surprised the first result today for “how to cut a pineapple” isn’t an SEO optimized recipe with a wall of nonsense to scroll past before the actual instructions
How much tuning did Google need to do for that?
Google search was great back in the day! It’s a shame what it’s become, but nothing lasts forever.
I mourn the death of what I thought they could be.
These feel like epitaphs, to me:
"We're not a conventional company and we don't intend to become one."
"Do know evil."
I remember using Google Chrome as a way to fight the Microsoft's IE monopoly. Now I'm using Firefox for similar reasons
How many more years before search, the undisputed King of the Web, is dethroned? You can sense the end coming. Verbatim search stopped working years ago. AI returns false info in big bold font. Billions and trillions of results are only 9 or 10 pages deep, and then the links abruptly stop. Ads everywhere, but nothing has ever been remotely worth my click. I hope their downfall comes soon. Watching it slowly descend into an abyss of garbage is saddening.
Obviously denting the universe at such scale comes with upsides and downsides. Aside from the impact they've had product wise, it's important to highlight the contribution they have made by shaping the culture of Silicon Valley technically, socially, and economically and second and third order effects of that (e.g. folks find their partners and have kids at Google :). I myself am a beneficiary and thankful for that.
I hope someone makes a spoof animation / video that shows a timeline of the descent from “do no evil” to “evil” and showing how search used to be great up just an SEO optimized wall of ads.
I still have fond memories of being in high school and a librarian showing me this “Google page”. Back when it seemed like SV tech would be an enlightened realm for the betterment of humanity.
Hmm, I guess it's nothing to celebrate, what with all the attacks on privacy and the open web they've been doing.
Google i want to celebrate every year with you the shift and fullfillment that my life finally have taken in action with trough You and your Team Make My today my crossover to a life of pourpose and abundance partnering and sharing todays date of Celebration forever i want to give you as a gift the priviledge of being the hand who believed in me as much as i believed in you and Make my dream NOW A Reality You Daugther in Spirit,Flesh and Bone i said EXPLODE MY PAYDAY GOOGLE HAPPY 25TH ANIVERSARY !!.
What an incredible change in just 25 years: from the darling of the tech world with a ton of goodwill to just another big US corporation spreading spyware around the world. I miss old Google.
Get lost with this congratulatory BS. Google has been a monopoly, a force for evil, an advertising protection racket that the mob would envy, for longer than many of our children can remember. We’ll all be better off when Google is no longer around, and when new companies can take its place.
And they still mark their own email as spam and even phishing after 25 years.
They should get some kind of an award.
Google has taken away parts of our freedom.
Today you have to make a choice: Do I want to pay a premium to lock myself into the Apple walled garden or do I want to prostitute all of my privacy to Google.
Choosing a 3rd way comes with severe limitations in your daily life.
> "That search returned 10 blue links, but no green dress."
Such a heart-warming story about Google wanting the green dress for itself, scraping a copy so the destination site didn't get the web traffic.
I fell in love with Google when I used their first Gmail beta version (Google search was the beginning of the affair). It was a fresh new outlook (pun?) to how email should be. And Google wave was a jaw dropper for me. It did not succeed but the tech was solid for its time. Eric Schmidt did an absolutely wonderful job. Then came Chrome and Android and YouTube. Their knack of creating/acquiring the best products and making them world class peaked in 2013 I feel. When Larry took over, I was overjoyed since he is the quintessential nerd. But alas it was Elon Musk and not Larry Page. The Google Glass demo was stellar too but again failed to commercialize. Their early thoughts on high altitude internet balloons and self driving cards enthralled the crap out of me. I always wanted to work with Google.
I hope it returns to "Don't be Evil" mantra and create/acquire some world class products again.
Many good memories. I am old enough to remember how bad search was before Google and when Google was one of the alternative search engines on Yahoo!
I miss iGoogle............. :'(
I just got an email that they killed Google Podcasts app. Birthday surprise for us!
It's difficult for me to celebrate what this company has become.
Has Google had any good new products in the last decade?
at least thanks for google offer google drive to me:)
Eh...
Hey Google uh, can you melt an egg? heheh
If I were Google I would celebrate by renting a car. It’s crazy to think that in ten years they’ll be old enough to run for president of the United States.
Wish that company would just fail already. Thank god openai is dominating the next chapter in technology