Skip to content

What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like

Technology
42 27 4
  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    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.

  • 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!

  • 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!

    Thanks for taking my trolling in good stride. I actually loved the internet of 20 years ago. It was totally different from today, it's actually a shame a lot of the way it was is gone forever. I vividly remember frequenting a few blogs, just slow chatting in the comments, making your own response images, hosting your own stuff like these images, sound clips and whatever else. Most ISP's would give you some server space to host your own static html pages, and lot's of people used this. The blogs would host photoshop contests, link to stuff they liked, reported on news or music or whatever their niche. The blogs I visited are mostly still around today, but they just don't draw the engagement anymore.

  • 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...

    That is awesome. A little beyond me but I've played in docker a bit. Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?

    Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?

  • 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"

  • That is awesome. A little beyond me but I've played in docker a bit. Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?

    Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?

    Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?

    No more so than using any search engine directly, it's a nice to have. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

    Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?

    By the time you've investigated it, you could have stood up your own instance...

  • Thanks for taking my trolling in good stride. I actually loved the internet of 20 years ago. It was totally different from today, it's actually a shame a lot of the way it was is gone forever. I vividly remember frequenting a few blogs, just slow chatting in the comments, making your own response images, hosting your own stuff like these images, sound clips and whatever else. Most ISP's would give you some server space to host your own static html pages, and lot's of people used this. The blogs would host photoshop contests, link to stuff they liked, reported on news or music or whatever their niche. The blogs I visited are mostly still around today, but they just don't draw the engagement anymore.

    I'm just sad I'm too young to have ever seen that old internet, and what it was like...

    Makes me more determined to try and steer the current internet back in that direction though.

  • The Decline of Usability: Revisited | datagubbe.se

    Technology technology
    8
    66 Stimmen
    8 Beiträge
    5 Aufrufe
    R
    I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some "Zen" in computer UIs and that "Zen" is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of "you don't understand it". Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well. And also another idea of "you dummy talking about ergonomics can't be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit". So - pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked, almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that, blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications, objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that's why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.
  • 816 Stimmen
    199 Beiträge
    166 Aufrufe
    Z
    It's clear you don't really understand the wider context and how historically hard these tasks have been. I've been doing this for a decade and the fact that these foundational models can be pretrained on unrelated things then jump that generalization gap so easily (within reason) is amazing. You just see the end result of corporate uses in the news, but this technology is used in every aspect of science and life in general (source: I do this for many important applications).
  • New "subguides" on my guide to Pocket alternatives

    Technology technology
    1
    5 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    7 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • 76 Stimmen
    12 Beiträge
    10 Aufrufe
    A
    Let's not? I think we've had enough robots with AI for now. Thank you.
  • Right to Repair Gains Traction as John Deere Faces Trial

    Technology technology
    30
    1
    622 Stimmen
    30 Beiträge
    40 Aufrufe
    R
    Run the Jewels?
  • 93 Stimmen
    35 Beiträge
    16 Aufrufe
    D
    Same as American companies. Send you targeted ads and news articles to influence your world view as a form of new soft power.
  • This Month in Redox - May 2025

    Technology technology
    1
    21 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    8 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • 121 Stimmen
    58 Beiträge
    37 Aufrufe
    D
    I bet every company has at least one employee with right-wing political views. Choosing a product based on some random quotes by employees is stupid.