Google in the middle

"When a middleman controls a market, the supplier has no real choice but to work with the middleman"<p>Google dominates its market, but it doesn't <i>control</i> it in the classic monopolist fashion.<p>Consider this thought experiment. Suppose the government, for the public good, built a service for searching the web. If they did it really, really well, would it not work just like Google, minus the ads?<p>The newspapers aren't being destroyed by Google. They're being destroyed by the evolution of technology. Google is just the messenger. And a pretty neutral one, as such messengers go.<p>(Indeed, that neutrality is one reason Google is so successful. They approach business with the intellectual detachment of scientists.)

If you take a step back from this you realize that the news industry is the middlman.<p>People want the info or news, prior to the web you needed printing presses or a tv station to deliver it. This concentration of power has led to all sorts of power-crazed idiots getting involved to push their viewpoints and crowd out their opponents.<p>To add insult to injury they make all their money from providing eyeballs to advertisers leading to the same race to the bottom you see happening online.

I noticed the other day that I am using Google significantly less than I used to. I fulfill my internet needs by either searching direct on wikipedia or finding things on social networking sites, social bookmarking sites. My home page is now this Safari top sites page which I love and helps me avoid Google even further. And when I can't remember a domain, I use a QuickSilver trigger function which lets me search and open up the "I'm feeling lucky" or the number one result on google automatically.<p>I don't mean to suggest I don't search or that we are moving beyond search but trends in which we are navigating and interacting on the internet are changing.

I'm not sure why we're supposed to feel bad about it no longer being profitable to produce news content. Stuff changes. Old forms die and new ones appear. In total, we're incomparably better off than we were before the web. Google's power may be problematic but they played a large role in making that happen.<p>Buchheit was over-optimistic. I'd have suggested "Be Less Evil". Then everyone would say they're doing a great job!

This seems ridiculous to me. I don't go to Google when I want to read news, I go direct to NY Times, Washingtonpost, or WSJ. I seldom search for something and end up at a newspaper web site. Google isn't in the middle of the news business. This is some kind of red herring for the real problems.<p>Carr really hit the nail on the head in his response to Shirky a few weeks ago. The issue is that there are 5000 articles on the same thing from all of these different news sites. It didn't matter when you got one of these 5000 newspapers delivered to your doorstep, but now that they are online, the 5000 stories are all in direct competition, and many of them are just thin rewrites of AP content. The smart papers will stop printing a daily paper today and start finding niches where they can provide the best content. However, the end state is clearly that we don't need so many newspapers that cover the same things.

meandering hyperbole. perfect is the enemy of better.