[Lilug] The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

[Justin Dearing]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Robert Wilkens <robwilkens at gmail.com>wrote:

>  I personally wonder who will be the first to volunteer to stop using
> Google.  In my experience, it's the only search engine that finds exactly
> what I'm looking for almost every time.
>
Its not about volunteering to stop using google, at least not in the way you
seem to be thinking. I'm not suggesting taking the GNU approach of we will
rewrite a perfectly good system so we can control it. Something will come
along that is better than google, and it probably won't be a search engine
like we think of them today. People will "volunteer" to stop using google
the way they "volunteer" to use google today. Not as some sort of sacrifice,
but because its in their best immediate interest.

We already have plenty of websites that copy wikipedia (where google often
takes you) verbatim. and plenty of websites like answers.com and
stackoverflow that use crowdsourcing in different ways. No one seems to have
the magic formula yet, but it will happen. Somewhere between google and
Stephen Baxter's scenario, will be a search engine thats different from
google and somehow better.
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