Don't worry Google has become incompetent - it is in the "Fading AOL" portion of its life cycle. Do you remember how incontinent AOL became in the final minutes before it became completely irrelevant? Sure it's taking longer with Google. But it's not a process that they can reverse.
That means the system will be really really awful. So challengers can arise - maybe a challenger that YOU build, and open source!
That open source can replace corporate centralization? Since centralized platforms started extracting more profits (including manipulation) things like Fediverse are on the rise. For mindless browsing, centralized is still king for now (Fediverse also works to an extent) but if your site has something better than what's on the centralized corporate platform, people will go there once they learn about it. We're on Hacker News instead of Reddit because?
1. Google lost the battle for LLMs, and cannot win that battle without putting a nail in the coffin of its own search monetization strategy
2. Google search is now no better than DDG, which it also cannot recover from without putting a nail in the coffin of its own search monetization strategy
If you want a randomly accuse me of living in a bubble that's fine. It won't bother me one bit. Me living in a bubble doesn't change the fact that Google is backed into a corner when it comes to search quality and competing with LLMs.
Duck duck go is now more effective than Google, and I've been using it instead of Google for 5 years. Now I mainly ask GPT4 questions, and eliminate the need for search altogether in most cases. I run ad blockers on YouTube. And they're not getting cash from me via Android.
You may be right that they can survive more readily than AOL did.. but I certainly won't help them with anything more than a kick in the pants! ;)
