It's "shareholder-linked" (probably not "driven"), but yes, upvoted. Nonetheless, even when with grave faults in the path, Google has managed to give us marvellous, paramount free resources (Google Street, Google Museum...), and would have given more (Google Books - if the negotiation had succeeded). I am grateful.
Google Streetview/maps isn't even the best mapping/'streetview' tool at this point. Filled with ads and bugs, some major bugs have been there for 10+ years.
For maps there's quite a few, just anything that doesn't have the amount of ads beats it. For Streetview apple lookaround is a better experience if it's mapped well in your area.
I believe Google has been trying to improve their Streetview in coverage as apple has become a concurrent, but it still has the same bugs people have been complaining about for years (like going backward when pressing forward type of bad). If I remember correctly the bugs have been 'closed' or something before just to include it in the same slightly different way.
And which public enterprise has undertaken those projects?
Looking at current hot problems, and exemplary of the situation: which public entities have endeavoured to backup the most important channels and videos from YouTube, the current historic video archive?
Why would I be grateful?! Because somebody did create those resources and made them available! And they did to common good (if anybody refused the expression "for" common good).
Which browser are you playing in? For me I find it works smoothly in everything except firefox mobile, and I'm just on an M4 Air, so you've got way more compute.
Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum, effort, and cunning.
The userbase of Firefox existing is obvious signs of caring. You really got to go out of your way to not use chromium. The userbase grows when people help others understand these issues, or ideally just install firefox for their non techie friends and set them up with ubo. be the change you want to see.
I feel like we are nitpicking here. Would you say that Google actually cares about those 3%?
When you have 97% of the market, you own the market, right? It's actually problematic to own 100% because then it's strictly a monopoly. Whereas with 97% you can pretend it's not a monopoly.
Why do i care about google’s opinion on the 7% desktop users. I just care that I have firefox. I continue to say that having 7% on desktop is an incredible large userbase when you convert it to people and not a percentage. Ive only pushed back on the minimizing all these people to ‘a rounding error’.
This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
Just be careful with nuance. Someone close to me asks Gemini absolutely everything because they like how it gives you a straight answer, but real life doesn't always work that way. Context is often missing (besides just being wrong at times).
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
I'm still getting there, but I've seen this. I spent hours a couple days ago trying to get pi, llamacpp, and qwen3.6 working well. I had them working before, but not well. I Googled, and I followed it's instructions and following the links it found. But everything was a partial answer, and nothing was clear.
I finally decided to ask Claude to do it. It discovered things I didn't even know to look for, immediately making it run twice as fast, and then also helped me do the changes I wanted, like per-model settings.
I knew it was settings.json, but I had it in the wrong spot (thanks, Google) and what I didn't realize is that the 2 settings.json files are different. 1 is global-only, and 1 is per-model-only. If you put the wrong settings in, it'll just ignore them silently. Which left me wondering why it didn't work.
Then it tested my settings. Then I had to use the official webpages to set the proper settings and it tested those, too. It made suggestions about removing or changing some settings that also made things work better and faster.
In less than a hour, it had vastly outstripped everything I'd tried, and it got it right and verified it.
And with how wrong I've seen Google's AI be (and how wrong others have said it is) I can't trust it to even bring me the basics about things. It's worse than useless, it's distracting.
There are quite a few Luddites like myself that don't trust AI summaries and would rather just have the relevant links, so for us this would be useful. Though TBH I'd rather just stick with the paywalled articles being highlighted as such so I can choose on-the-fly. Perhaps the block option is something I'll turn on when almost all the results are paywalled and I want to see if there is a better option before going to one of them.
Kagi also offers Kagi Assistant, which seems to harness models to apply a search-first behavior, and tends to produce higher-quality results for information that would not normally be within a given model's training data. While the cheaper Kagi plans don't offer the full slate of frontier models, I've found that Kimi models in Kagi Assistant are generally excellent for discovering information, even if I may then go to Claude or Gemini frontier models to parse what I've found.
Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)
There's nothing inherent about non-determinism in transformer architectures. All of it is removable.
reply