What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like
What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like
Google is moving to quickly kill internet search and replace it with a closed ecosystem of LLM-generated answers. This will change the entire economics of how the internet works.
Welcome to the future, where asking a question costs $4.99 and you'll never be able to find out if the answer is right or not.
Lmao there's whole books about this. One is Life After Google, published 10 (?) years ago and it said blockchain would rule the world :) The subtitle is literally "The Fall Of Big Data And The Rise Of The Blockchain Economy"
Without Google's grubby paws across most the web, it'd be much more like the initial intent of what the internet was supposed to be, a welcoming place with open and accessible info!
If you don't want to pay to access a web search service, just use docker and run your own SearXNG instance! This will also allow you to host our own AI model that searches the web through SearXNG. While it may sound like a lot of work, it truly takes an afternoon and some unused RAM on your PC to make happen, then you're set up!
the initial intent of what the internet was supposed to be
A communication network for scientists and the military?
Good call, I should have worded that better. While the government and scientists were instrumental in creating the foundation for the internet, I was thinking more along the lines of the early PC era. When the internet was more or less a tool for openly sharing and discussing information as well as ideas.
But a lot of tech stems from governmental need and/or government funding. I mean, the modern refrigerator was a result of NASA problem solving for the environmental conditions found in space! GPS, LASIK, MRI's, LED's, barcodes, closed captioning, and the human genome project were all also thanks to government research too!
While it may sound like a lot of work, it truly takes an afternoon and some unused RAM on your PC to make happen, then you're set up!
This shit is why open source software has a bad reputation.
Im going to look into this. What's the benefit of hosting your own searxng instance?
It's yours, no issues trusting a public instance with your searches. Pages full of settings to tweak as you like. Less problems with an algorithm 'helping' you. It averages searches over multiple search engines that you choose, you can set up your own (or a curated) block list of crappy AI slop sites, don't like fandom.com or something, gone. Manage your own bangs, e.g. !aa for annas-archive. Pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for better isolation. If you have your head around docker already it's more like half an hour to set up, so why not?
Can hook it up to perplexica and a local LLM for a fully local AI search that you define, use it as a MCP server, do deep research with it...
Docker enshitification coming in 3... 2... 1...
Meh there's a ton of other services like opentofu, podman, vms, ect...
If you don’t want to pay to access a web search service, just use docker
IMO: My personal problem with Docker is that it creates its own kind of vendor lock-in. Docker does not run on the server operating systems I use. The tendency is towards a Linux monoculture and that is never a good idea. Docker is a symptom, not a solution.
We know what the internet would have been without Google and other corporations closing it down because some of us lived it.
It was mostly decentralised niche forums that you had to know the links for, and you'd receive random emails telling you to visit this or that new site. People would also share links around school.
Sure, there was a chance you'd get Chlamydia if you opened the wrong link, but it was exciting and overall the experience was wholesome.
I had to advertise my first website on paper!
just dont use google? I havent used google search for years now and there hasnt been single time where i would have needed to use google search even once. Though unfortunately i'm still bound to the damn gmail because i cant find better alternative for it.
Though unfortunately i’m still bound to the damn gmail because i cant find better alternative for it.
I self-host my e-mails, but that probably isn't a viable solution for just everyone.
i just want a service that i dont have to hassle with, so this would definitely not be good for me 😅 Also i dont think many places even accept self hosted email as "real", at least some places dont accept alias addresses.
its so annoying when any decent alternative costs money, which isnt very good thing for my "official" email which i need for important things. Dont want to end up in situation where i get locked out of it because i didnt or couldnt pay for some reason. Though i constantly have to slightly fear that with google too since they can lock anyone's account for any reason they see fit.
Gmail is way more reliable than anything I could self-host. It's a huge pile of unsorted junk that is only usable with search.
A massive amount of folks are fucked due to using google for email, data storage, calendar, contacts, etc.
Literally just use Wikipedia more
Using other search engines, I imagine.
They've already got it mapped out.
Ah yes, the Volvo S90 and VW Passat, definitely SUVs. Even Google's screenshots show 40% garbage.
written before reading the article; it get the topic from another, more interesting and less imaginary, angle
Do we explore it post-Google or post-anything that would take its place?
Because those are two very different scenarios. There are plenty of Big Tech corps that are willing to take Google's place.
If we actually mean no one does search with targeted advertising and stuff, my bets are on more indie sites popping up, and Fediverse getting stronger as well.
We'll have more link indices, and more relevant search results hosted on different corners of the Internet.
On the negative: unless open-source projects step up their game, usability and quality of web interfaces will suffer dramatically. And without truly massive Fediverse or at least decent webrings, finding basic information and connecting to others might actually get harder.
If it looked like https://ooh.directory/ I would be delighted.
I hope that won't disappear anytime soon!
Everything remains the same or with few changes
No different for me. I have never used googol garbage so nothing will change.
I am asking my local searxng. As long as websites produce content there will be search robot that will crawl them, doesn't matter if it's google or common crawl dump. The content will be scrapped and indexed and you will be able to chose from where to find it. Google just relies on users that are locked in their freemium services. If they can force users to pay the users will pay for search. Fortunately for me I am not one of them. Good luck.