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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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"

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...

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.