I feel like everyone forgets Yahoo and AOL and MSN existed before Google, not to mention newsgroups and portals before publicly available search engines. It's not like Google suddenly spawned from thin air. It's not as if crawlers|spiders are new, or bad, or something we don't use every single day to our benefit.
The current mistakes in public policy concerning overstepping bounds into people's personal lives are a result of ignorance, but these policies are not new, it's just that people are finally having to confront the elephant in the room that's been there since the first census was taken. Not all information gathering is bad, and much of it has lead to a better world.
The good comes with the bad, and the bad can be dealt with. Imagine if we never established industry or new methods of energy. The way progress has been implemented may be poor, but that's not how things must be destined to continue.
The past was not a saintly time, and the present-future are not hopeless. Things may not be "free" in the lawless sense, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
This is not a new world, it's the old world revealing itself and how things have always been. There will be a decision whether to continue that old world or go on a new path, but this isn't the end if you don't want it to be. Think positive. Live positive. Don't delude yourself with positive thinking, but let yourself be at peace.
This is a great comment, and I agree in most part.
I don't advocate going back to the golden days, that's impossible and naive.
But one thing must be acknowledge, back then, power was distributed among webmasters, various search engines, in general there were various players, google would respect webmasters and ask for their participation(remember when matt cutts was "googleguy"?).
Now it's no longer like that. We have one guy, making videos, telling everyone how they should link to other sites, and what links are good, what links are bad....and nobody seems to question the obvious: shouldn't google work on the WWW's links as they come, and not try to force the links to their advantage??? Why can google do this? Because it's a monopoly. Google is not a church, Google is a publicly traded corporation that does everything in its power to bring cash to shareholders.
Google is a search monopoly that is easy to break : the competitors are one click away.
We just need to raise more awareness about these issues. What IM'ers see as obvious is not obvious to average folks. We know they track us, we know analytics is all over, we know adsense is all over, we know google is watching everything, but an elderly relative of mine uses google chrome and did not know they were watching every URL the darn thing accessed. When I told him, he was mad and now uses opera.
The WWW is the single greatest invention since engines sparked the industrial revolution, and now one company is spying all over the place, controlling everything, and a talking head is telling people how to produce content.
That's not right, that's the anti-WWW in fact. Content should be free, no single engine should control so much WWW traffic and overall we need an alternative to Google. That's all I know. And no, I don't have a solution yet....but there'll be one.
