I liken Google Search and YouTube to how Blockbusters video rental stores used to operate.

If you went into Blockbusters then there was actually a small subset of the available videos to rent. Films that had been around for decades were not on the shelves yet garbage released very recently would be there in abundance. If you had an interest in film and, say, wanted to watch everything by Alfred Hitchcock, there would not be a copy of 'The Birds' there for you.

Or another analogy would be a big toy shop. If you grew up in a small town then the toy shop would not stock every LEGO set. You would expect the big toy shop in the big city would have the whole range, but, if you went there, you would just find what the small toy shop had but piled high, the full range still not available.

Record shops were the worst for this. The promise of Virgin Megastore and their like was always a bit of a let down with the local, independently owned record shop somehow having more product than the massive record shop.

Google is a bit like this with information. Youtube is even worse. I cottoned on to this with some testing on other people's devices. Not having Apple products, I wanted to test on old iPads, Macbooks and phones. For this I needed a little bit of help from neighbours and relatives. I already knew I had a bug to workaround, and that there was a tutorial on Youtube I needed to do a quick fix so I could test everything else. So this meant I had to open Youtube on different devices owned by very different people, with their logged in account.

I was very surprised to see that we all had very similar recommendations to what I could expect. I thought the elderly lady downstairs and my sister would have very different recommendations to myself, but they did not. I am sure the adverts would have been different, but I was only there to find a particular tutorial and not be nosy.

I am sure that Google have all this stuff cached at the 'edge', wherever the local copper meets the fibre optic. It is a model a bit like Blockbusters, but where you can get anything on special request, much like how you can order a book from a library for them to get it out of storage for you.

The logical conclusion of this is to have Google text search becoming more like an encyclopedia and dictionary of old, where 90% of what you want can be looked up in a relatively small body of words. I am okay with this, but I still want the special requests. There was merit in old-school Alta Vista searches where you could do what amounts to database queries with logical 'and's 'or's and the like.

The web was written in a very unstructured way, with WYSIWYG being the starting point, with nobody using content sectioning elements to scope headings to words. This mess suits Google as they can gatekeep search, since you need them to navigate a 'sea of divs'.

Really a nation such as France with a language to keep need to make information a public good with content structured and information indexed as a government priority. This immediately screams 'big brother', but it does not have to be like that. Google are not there to serve the customer, they only care about profits. They are not the defenders of democracy and free speech.

If a country such as France or even a country such as Sweden gets their act together and indexes their stuff in their language as a public good, they can export that knowhow to other language groups. It is ludicrous that we are leaving this up to the free market.