View source for 2024/web search

I'm glad to see the US government ruling Google is a monopoly, but this could backfire.

The one advantage of having a dominant player is everyone can exchange knowledge about it. That society level knowledge of 'web search' will be lost.

It will hopefully be worth it for the sake of increased competition, choice and features, but it could just as well lead to arbitrary product mazes and walled gardens only some people can use, leading to more separation in society.

One thing Google still does is emphasize the open, standards based Web for their search results. Without this focus and "universal search," Apple, Microsoft and others will start to focus on roping people into their proprietary products.

Google exploited their position and removed features (like access to stats, seeing what links to specific sites, etc). IMO part of the remedy should be they must make access to that information available to anyone. 

Maybe this will be a good opportunity for duckduckgo, or maybe even decentralized open source engines like searx.

{{Blikied|August 7, 2024}}