" I don't care if it hurts somebody's conversion rate.
All I care about is the quality of my browsing experience"
In the short run, it won't matter, but in the long run, it may likely affect your browsing experience on the whole.
Google doesn't do anything well but search. So you are trading a slightly better search experience - which may cost you the death of several brands that provide much more than search outcomes.
Trip Advisor, Yelp etc. ostensibly provide a useful service, beyond whatever Google will do. So when those companies go, we lose those greater services.
The impact of Google's monopoly is something we cannot ignore.
It's like 80% of Russians still support Putin, because he 'seems strong' - but Russians also don't realize how much he has de-facto degraded their standard of living. Russians would be a lot wealthier if they integrated into global markets, stop invading neighbouring territories. There'd be massive growth and opportunity for Russians - at least in globalist terms.
I beg to differ. Google also provides great products for - Maps, Email, Browser, Mobile OS, Video, Photo management. If you think neither of those are great and you can think of a better alternative, you have a lot of market share to capture.
Having said that, I concur with the rest of your sentiment and would like to see services like TripAdvisor, Kayak etc flourish.
> Google doesn't do anything well but search.
I beg to differ too. It's increasingly difficult to use google search effectively - it has no concept of content vs sidebar/nav, so searches (particularly technical) often turn up a plethora of unrelated* top ten list blog posts.
They're still the best in the game - but that doesn't mean they're still doing it well. Just better than the competition.
* "term A" is in the body, and "term B" is in the navlinks but has no bearing on "term A". Google search sees that the body includes both terms and include it in the results.
I really wish Google offered some way to indicate that you wanted a strong spatial correlation between two or more words that wasn't just the "I need this phrase verbatim" of quotes and allowed them to still do the smart stuff with synonyms/different forms of the words.
As an engineer, I have found no other search engine better for programming related issues than Google. I've tried Bing, and DDG (which is my default on my work browser), and neither have performed as well as Google.
In the short run, it won't matter, but in the long run, it may likely affect your browsing experience on the whole.
Google doesn't do anything well but search. So you are trading a slightly better search experience - which may cost you the death of several brands that provide much more than search outcomes.
Trip Advisor, Yelp etc. ostensibly provide a useful service, beyond whatever Google will do. So when those companies go, we lose those greater services.
The impact of Google's monopoly is something we cannot ignore.
It's like 80% of Russians still support Putin, because he 'seems strong' - but Russians also don't realize how much he has de-facto degraded their standard of living. Russians would be a lot wealthier if they integrated into global markets, stop invading neighbouring territories. There'd be massive growth and opportunity for Russians - at least in globalist terms.