I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.
Understanding this Google se...
phone networks stop working when the government broke up Ma Bell in 1983? Or did shit get way cheaper and better
Specifically no, because AT&T didn’t go away, it just got split up and regulated. Shit got cheaper for sure, not always better.
If Google went away, any of those websites that are not actually a part of Google could just go be hosted elsewhere.
Read a little deeper about how so many websites have Google services entwined into all the pages they serve. There would be a billion+ hours of rework to get Google out of all the non-Google services that are in some way dependent on Google/Alphabet services. Sure, we could rebuild everything to not use Google, but would the other services that grow up in its place be better? They’re not likely to be cheaper, and under the current regulatory environment they’d likely develop even deeper invasions of privacy while building out their “modern” Google replacements.
Apple Maps always understands an address I enter correctly (Google Maps does not, sometimes you need to put imaginary spaces in between address characters
That’s an interesting perspective. As Android users my wife and I are used to opening maps and asking for a business by name and general description: Green Grocery on Main Street, or Manuel’s Mexican in Midtown Melbourne and it just looks up the address for us and maps to it. Same for anyone in our contacts, just ask for them by name and the address takes care of itself - we can put in addresses, but our “iPhone friends” are constantly asking for the street address of things because that’s what they have to put in. I guess at least iOS is good at address entry.
Apple Maps has never taken me to the wrong location
Again, we’re biased - people who use Google Maps are led directly to our house with no trouble, people who use Apple Maps end up on the next street over looking at our house across a neighbor’s fenced yard and calling us for more directions. We didn’t have to fix Google Maps to get people arriving at our door, but we were able to tweak the road to look more realistic, Apple has no such user feedback interface, at least not that we could ever access.
switch to a better option. I’ve heard of FOSS maps as well but haven’t tried them out yet.
That’s a nice thought. Do you remember the Google Mapping car fleet driving around for 10 years? I think they’re still doing scaled back maintenance, but that was a tremendously expensive project which gave them data quality that under-funded FOSS projects just can’t even begin to approach. So, there’s an interesting question: when we just Fuck Google, do we steal the data they paid to collect? I mean, we could call it AI training, would that make it O.K.?
Any cartography company with $2B handy to replace the dataset. They’re unlikely to buy it from Google, who is estimated to have already profited $9B from their investment.
Specifically no, because AT&T didn’t go away, it just got split up and regulated. Shit got cheaper for sure, not always better.
Read a little deeper about how so many websites have Google services entwined into all the pages they serve. There would be a billion+ hours of rework to get Google out of all the non-Google services that are in some way dependent on Google/Alphabet services. Sure, we could rebuild everything to not use Google, but would the other services that grow up in its place be better? They’re not likely to be cheaper, and under the current regulatory environment they’d likely develop even deeper invasions of privacy while building out their “modern” Google replacements.
That’s an interesting perspective. As Android users my wife and I are used to opening maps and asking for a business by name and general description: Green Grocery on Main Street, or Manuel’s Mexican in Midtown Melbourne and it just looks up the address for us and maps to it. Same for anyone in our contacts, just ask for them by name and the address takes care of itself - we can put in addresses, but our “iPhone friends” are constantly asking for the street address of things because that’s what they have to put in. I guess at least iOS is good at address entry.
Again, we’re biased - people who use Google Maps are led directly to our house with no trouble, people who use Apple Maps end up on the next street over looking at our house across a neighbor’s fenced yard and calling us for more directions. We didn’t have to fix Google Maps to get people arriving at our door, but we were able to tweak the road to look more realistic, Apple has no such user feedback interface, at least not that we could ever access.
That’s a nice thought. Do you remember the Google Mapping car fleet driving around for 10 years? I think they’re still doing scaled back maintenance, but that was a tremendously expensive project which gave them data quality that under-funded FOSS projects just can’t even begin to approach. So, there’s an interesting question: when we just Fuck Google, do we steal the data they paid to collect? I mean, we could call it AI training, would that make it O.K.?
One of the other many cartography companies can do it
Any cartography company with $2B handy to replace the dataset. They’re unlikely to buy it from Google, who is estimated to have already profited $9B from their investment.