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858 points colesantiago | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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sylens ◴[] No.45110023[source]
I think ultimately this is a good decision. The web has flourished in part because Google has supported Chrome so well over the years since they are incentivized to do so. You don't have to use Chrome (I don't) to benefit from this second order effect.
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bogwog ◴[] No.45110130[source]
What do you define as "flourished"? Chrome won in part because it was better than Internet Explorer, but ironically, the internet was better back when IE had majority market share.

Today, 99% of internet traffic goes to a handful of sites/apps, and the vast majority of the ad revenue on the internet goes to a handful ad companies. The internet is a SEO spam shit hole crafted in service of Google's easily gamed ranking algorithms, and designed with the sole purpose of serving ads.

Google effectively owns the internet, and this ruling is a green light for them to take even more. I wouldn't be surprised if they stop releasing Chrome sources and fully ban ad blockers now. The court already ruled that the government can't touch them, even when they've been found to have broken the law.

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lunarboy ◴[] No.45110623[source]
Internet was better via what metric? Your rose tinted nostalgia bar? And what's stopping anyone from making a better non-gameable search index that's driven by purely charitable intentions?
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1. wraptile ◴[] No.45112424[source]
> And what's stopping anyone from making a better non-gameable search index

The party that was found _guilty_ in this lawsuit?

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2. shadowgovt ◴[] No.45116610[source]
I don't think so. Remove Google from the story and search is still a problem involving massive amounts of storage, massive amounts of fast compute, and a clever way to index results.

The only part of that story Google impacts is that their clever way to index results is by mining traffic on their site and the larger web to decide based on user behavior whether their search query was satisfied. Since users can't spend active time on two sites at once, Google consumes a finite resource there. But do we believe Google's behavior tracking really is the final, best form that indexing can possibly take?