The things is, this is exactly whagt their marketing department has been pushing us to believe since their inception.

The motto, the glibly pedantic color schema, the focus on simplicity on their home site, and cleanly (yet viciously) integrated ad revenue, even the language of the letter in the original link, all of these things point to a naivete that ignores how corrupt the ethos of what Google's central argument is: meritocracy above all else, in other words: down with the dumb, down with the lesser, all hail the perfectly manufactured data stream that contains what seems like childlike wonder, but is instead an amalgam of people's minds. They are sucking the intelligence out of us and selling it back at a markup so high it begs disbelief.

The fact that there is Bing is good, adn Bing's search isn't all that far below Google's in terms of getting good data from the web, but the point is: aren't we forgetting that there was a loooong time when we derived a lot of good data without their services? I find the aggressiveness of Google's ignorance to be quite frightening. I find that they are so far removed from the effects of their casual relationship with owning what happens to the data they are "curating" that it seems anathema to good governance, and governance it is because we are subject to the whims of their algorithm's ability to provide us with data that goes beyond what the mind can handle and handle sanely.

There is a monumental schism between what the web is comprised of and the first page of Google's query results, and that is what I think is at issue. What about all of the rest of the data that we never see? How do we know it's not interesting? How could we ever spend the time to sift through it to make certain we aren't missing data that is far easier to comprehend?

Long post, but a quick example: I program a fair amount. I like C++ for various reasons, but the C++ reference page is dry as the Red Sea after Moses played the downbeat of the 40 year cadence the slaves danced to after raising one too many pyramids.

I would wager that there might be a great C++ reference page out there somewhere that has easy on the eyes detail, a fairly conversational tone and nice examples that aren't at the very end of the page. But, because Google's algorithm (and Bing's, Yahoo's, Duck Duck Go, etc) all get tons of traffic from the cppreference.com page, it or some Stack response is the go to answer for essentially every question for which I need an answer. How is that well crafted page ever going to get the right recognition if everyone is being diverted to the cppreference page? It's like the old trope, we do it that way because that's the way we've always done it. Sometimes this means we drive the speed limit because that's the safest way to drive according the engineers who calculated the road conditions when they were built, but it's a little different in this instance because it's the _quality_ of the road that matters, not merely the velocity we drive that dictates the "goodness" of the experience.

Google (and the other big bots out there) are ignoring the quality in their algorithm(s) and merely settling for popularity as the guiding rubric, and I think we are all too aware of how that mentality can lead to unsalient choices.