It honestly depends on what you are searching for.
Case 1: You just want the name of the website, or an article, example "Facebook" -> fb.com, "Gordan Ramsay" -> Wiki/official website/Celeb gossip website you are good. Not much competition here.
Case 2: You are looking for something technical like "GNU rnano CVE-abcde"/"OpenBSD ARM64 Qualcomm Wifi driver not working", you are again in the fine territory, not much if any money to be made here so very less competition. There will be the official forums, websites, maybe some conference websites in this category.
Case 3: "Chicken potpie recipe", "How to be more organised": This is the category where people are trying to game the SEO algos. How the hell do recipe websites with 27 popups, 12000 word essay on the secret family history ends up on top ? There are a huge number of passionately made simple recipe websites but they have to be "found" by us. For the second query I mention about being more organized I think most people are looking for some sort of a review article which looks at some various schools of thoughts regarding discipline, cleanliness pointing to further resources and exploring the why and what to do for this. Here the search engine needs to determine the context of the query which is fairly abstract and then the internal heuristics it uses are supposed to drive it to a meaningful list of websites. Maybe the average joe would like to click cosmopolitan's article but I would never do that. Based on my previous click history maybe google should determine what I kind of links am I looking for. But when they figure that out they'd much faster use this behavioral insight for advertisers. A great search engine is basically a primitive personal librarian, I'd pay a yearly subscription for one.
The internet is vast and it has stuff that I don't know about. How my 7 word abstract query is gonna get me there is the question mark. Also, for a lot of queries the top results can be plagued by spammy/fraud results which are on top because they managed to trick the SEO algos. These bad actors were not as prevalent for 2005 google.
My comment on their post: (Nobody will read it there but you fine folk might)
> Just letting you know that I have unsubscribed from youtube premium and will actively be looking for youtube alternatives for content consumption (and creation in the future ?). While the dislike button has potential for abuse there is also potential for abuse by having no feedback mechanism. There are tons of DIY/informative videos on youtube where the information is wrong and can hurt viewers, what happens when someone unsuspecting installs a virus on their computer or gets scammed ? What happens when someone buys a product whose quality is extremely poor ? Does youtube take responsibility ? No, because you are a platform and had no role. I don't mind if you want to monitor the dislikes for abuse but this is taking it too far. I also don't mind creators manually switching off the bar for their videos.
At the end of the day you are manufacturing consent for your users as per the demands of your corporation friends and advertisers. You want a happy place where everything is happy and joyful with no abuse and attacking but alas that is not the world in which we live. Have fun and make profits hacking the brains of the viewers you "say" you care about for your advertisers and corporate friends.
> So my question here is that in a hypothetical scenario where terrorists are using whatsapp to coordinate an evil plot, which to most people would fit a scenario where Facebook can and should help the government - what is it that Facebook can do to help a government?
This logic has been used to justify mass-surveillance and degrade encryption for national security and "protecting the children" narrative. The problem is that governments also use this as a way to suppress civil liberties.
What if the government declares a journalist uncovering a multi-billion arms deal scam or some human-rights violations as a terrorist ? In the eyes of the law this qualifies the government to acquire private messages. Why should the government have this power ? The hardcore terrorists and journalists know about encryption and will setup their public keys for encrypted communication. It's the common man who is affected by such stupid legislation.
Can't whatsapp pull off a big brain time and disallow forwarding ?
Then users must copy and paste messages, links and media. Hence every message is a source message.
Most political systems tend to converge into a two-party system.
I think the internet has made people more vocal but access to opposing and nuanced viewpoints has made a lot of people grey. I know that's the case for me, not sure if it encapsulates the majority.
Even if they release their server side source code how can you ensure that the deployed version matches the source ? Eventually there is always a thread of trust.
The point however is that the government of India is forcing private corporations to break privacy related measures to suppress civil liberties.
Case 1: You just want the name of the website, or an article, example "Facebook" -> fb.com, "Gordan Ramsay" -> Wiki/official website/Celeb gossip website you are good. Not much competition here.
Case 2: You are looking for something technical like "GNU rnano CVE-abcde"/"OpenBSD ARM64 Qualcomm Wifi driver not working", you are again in the fine territory, not much if any money to be made here so very less competition. There will be the official forums, websites, maybe some conference websites in this category.
Case 3: "Chicken potpie recipe", "How to be more organised": This is the category where people are trying to game the SEO algos. How the hell do recipe websites with 27 popups, 12000 word essay on the secret family history ends up on top ? There are a huge number of passionately made simple recipe websites but they have to be "found" by us. For the second query I mention about being more organized I think most people are looking for some sort of a review article which looks at some various schools of thoughts regarding discipline, cleanliness pointing to further resources and exploring the why and what to do for this. Here the search engine needs to determine the context of the query which is fairly abstract and then the internal heuristics it uses are supposed to drive it to a meaningful list of websites. Maybe the average joe would like to click cosmopolitan's article but I would never do that. Based on my previous click history maybe google should determine what I kind of links am I looking for. But when they figure that out they'd much faster use this behavioral insight for advertisers. A great search engine is basically a primitive personal librarian, I'd pay a yearly subscription for one.
The internet is vast and it has stuff that I don't know about. How my 7 word abstract query is gonna get me there is the question mark. Also, for a lot of queries the top results can be plagued by spammy/fraud results which are on top because they managed to trick the SEO algos. These bad actors were not as prevalent for 2005 google.