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> A hypothetical US gov't, benevolent and markedly less corrupt than the current one If we’re pretending this is taking place in another reality what are we hoping to learn from this hypothetical? > with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend It would be simpler for the US govt to build such a search engine like that today as google was a lot simpler back then, however it wouldn’t work because the internet has changed as much as Google has. |
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Depends on the reason. The government basically nationalized a lot of manufacturers in WW II. During the 2008 Financial Crisis they took over Freddie and Fannie. Look the government has enormous powers that are uncomfortable. But they have them for a reason. Ultimately the government is supposed to be an expression of the will of the people. Edit: "annihilated by ~15 years of cynical corporate marauding and product torture" - I'm with ya man, wrote my rant on this topic the other day https://chriswebb09.github.io/our-ai-reality |
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I don't think we can ever go back, and I'm not as convinced of the value of nationalizing Google, but it's clear that the monopolies held by massive tech companies are actively hurting society. Alphabet needs to be broken apart. |
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Probably the easiest solution is to make mandatory search engine selection screens, and provide a fat grant for Firefox so they don't face an existential threat without Google's money. Puts some pressure on Google to compete since every percent is a billion bucks they lost, and if it's anything like browser selection screens the people choosing other options snowball over time. Otherwise you need to break Google up just to separate search from ads, lot of complexity in that and adversity from big tech. |
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Firefox needs a national grant instead. Google is too far gone as a monopoly and that would mean setting precendent for other monopolies. Unlikely to happen anytime soon |
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So the problem is that the quality of its products would fall dramatically and then everyone would move to products offered by other large tech companies… |
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I'd be opposed to nationalizing Google. There are way too many downsides. I think, if we're going to be heavy-hitting about this, the more proper thing to do is to force Google to split their search off as a separate, independent company that has additional business requirements imposed on it to rectify the issues. But I really think that, if search is the worry, the market will eventually achieve its own kind of balance and you'll find an acceptable alternative to Google's that restores much of what has been lost. For me, that's already the case. |
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I like the LLM functions. If you brought back the 2010 algorithm it would just be swamped with SEO-optimised spam. |
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Just don't use google search.
I haven't used it in years. |
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The problem is the monopoly not the private nature of the enterprise. Bust that trust. |
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I'd feel better if standard protocols and open datasets were maintained. That way anybody could build their own "old search", or innovate off the global dataset. |
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2010's Google search code has been gamed many times over by sophisticated SEO schemes. So you can't bring it back "as it was". Best you can do is to restore its mission to "organize the world's information", but today's problems (e.g. AI slop) demand a new wave of technological innovation for them just to keep their head above water. Also, it's funny you brought up politics, as if the current political regime is the last corrupt one we'll ever have. If you have the incentives for corruption in place, you will have more corruption. If you give Google to the government, it will use Google to support that corruption. The Trump era is a great time to be asking, "would I want the government to have even more control?", because there will be another Trump eventually. |
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Sorry, but you’re crazy. There is absolutely no way I can ever go back to vanilla web search vs Gemini. |
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No, no, let's nationalize DEC and get our VAXen back! Then we can have AltaVista running atop OpenVMS, the way that God intended! And Windows 13 on Alpha AXP!!! Awesome man! I can't wait for my SGI GPU! Seriously though, this is a bizarre proposition. Google hasn't been a "Search Company" for decades. Google is not there to search the web for you. Internet users need to grow up. From this Iron Age of the Internet where we bashed the keyboard with "google search" to find whatever we wanted there. Ask any reference librarian, how to intelligently build a toolbox of bookmarks and resources, and use those resources to look up stuff that you want instead. I do not use Google Search, or Bing Search or any other, except in the dumbest of circumstances. I already know where such searches would've sent me, so I go to those sites and I query them instead. It's not rocket science. But that ship has sailed and the Days of Search Engines is in a notable sunset phase. It is simply impractical to build and maintain a search engine when LLMs are taking over. The LLM is your search engine now. Learn it, love it, bash it, Bronze Ager. |
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I am not sure who I hate and distrust more… Google or the US Government. Probably the US Government. To have a hypothetical benevolent us government you would need revisions to history earlier than 1776 |
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I think that huge corporations such as Google are effectively an integral part of the US government, honestly. |
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The thing that I always come back to whenever some kind of heavy-handed government intervention is proposed: what would the other side use this same power to do? OP explicitly called out a hypothetical benevolent US government, but the government changes every 4 years. Even if there were such a hypothetical benevolent government in power when this happened, 4 years later it could be something entirely different. |
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