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No. It never was. googol has always been garbage but people are stupid and jumped on the bandwagon.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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I'm guessing you're too young to remember the time before Google existed.
You get what you pay for.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
No, they always sucked.
Before they took the "No" out of their slogan "Do No Evil".
They just reorganized the slogan, it’s now:
No, DO evil
Do? No, Evil!
Sadly I don't, from the time I've started using google its always had ads and such.
Everyone's talking like the original Google was some sort of divine design philosophy, but actually it was just that both of them were backend people, and that was all they knew how to do in HTML.
This is kind of a glib take.
I can't take credit for it. It's really Sergey Brin's glib take.
I think it's like a life cycle of a company when it goes public it doesn't works for itself or it's products then it's just numbers game.
So what's the 2025 1999 Google?
From a perspective of "new tech that hasn't solved monetization or is still looking for investors/a buyer/ipo while it burns away at venture capital"?
Probably the free versions of Ai. The AI wars are peak right now with all the free samples you can get.
Perplexity searches live internet and is pretty good at it. Gpt does too I think, but isn't as ready with the sources.
You have to think of it like tech inflation. Yeah, they're probably tracking you and stealing your data, etc But in today's internet, that's the bare minimum of a startup (compared to 1999, when tracking was a red flag)
We don't have one. Running a search engine is expensive and you can no longer just run on endless amounts of VC. You need a way to make money somehow. Kagi might be the closest (I haven't tried it because Google is still generally usable for me, but I've heard good things), but it's not free.
You can still run on endless amounts of VC. You just have to pretend to be the next big thing. Right now that’s AI.
"More Google!" was a red flag
If it's centralised, you have no guarantee it won't get worse.
We need a decentralised search engine.
We need a decentralised search engine.
... Thats all the people outside. It's really inefficient.