a tumble

OK, let's try another angle.

Google is a search engine. It's a device by which you ask natural-language queries of the internet. This is extremely useful for obvious reasons, but in case they aren't: outside the social media walled gardens, whose content is basically frivolous, nothing on the internet is discoverable. The internet, as an architecture, contains no provisions for finding things. Search engines are how you turn a title of a paper into a PDF, a title of an obscure book into a list of stores that carry it (or a PDF), a half-remembered news story from ten years ago into the article you read, and more other use cases than any one person can know or enumerate. They are also, more often than not, how you navigate large and complicated websites.

It's possible to imagine a world without general-purpose search engines. In that world, every use case of Google's core product is a separate skill: the tools for turning a title of a paper into a PDF are completely different from the tools for turning the title of a book into a link to buy it, or for finding the 10-K filings of a publicly traded company, or for finding porn.

You are no doubt aware that there are many different websites for finding porn. Imagine a world where everything is like that but worse. Porn is one of the largest market segments in the world, and has one of the largest hobbyist communities in the world – so it's able to direct more resources toward usability and accessibility than almost anything else. You are no doubt also aware of the number of posts on this very website sharing usability tips for AO3, which is a porn website. Imagine a world where you need a completely separate set of usability tips for any given task.

A very common use case for search engines is working around the design problems of DNS. Top-level domains make sense as a technical protocol, but are terrible UX. Gmail is called Gmail, not gmail.com. "Dot-com businesses" solved this name/address mismatch by making their address their name, which worked when it was 1998 and widespread internet access was new, but this was always unsustainable: when everything has .com in its name, nobody sees the .com anymore. (Standard advice for businesses: own the .com of your name. And the .net, and the .org, and every other TLD worth registering, because otherwise, if you come to the attention of the scammers and spammers – and it doesn't take much – they'll register yourco.horse and use it to steal your customers' life savings, which is also terrible UX.)

AOL keywords solved this problem. AOL keywords were also a manually curated directory provided by one single ISP. This was always unsustainable. Instead, we have search engines. The tool you use to turn the title of a paper into a PDF is the same tool your grandma uses to turn Gmail into gmail.com: Google, the flagship product of a company whose flagship product is the general-purpose interface of the biggest advancement in communications technology since the printing press.

Imagine if there was a single company that owned finding information in books, and if the same company also owned TV. That's not Google. They don't own any of that. What they own is a product that you and your grandma both use.

This product makes Google $300 billion of revenue in a year (source: Google, cross-checked against quarterly findings found using Google), or twice as much as the global smart-home product market, and about as much as the most charitable estimates for the global adult entertainment market. It is structurally impossible for Google, as an institution, to care about smart-home product markets. Google would very much like to find other markets to care about, but it can only care about markets that are bigger than porn.

Cloud computing is bigger than porn. (Proof: porn needs servers, but servers don't need porn.) Google has Google Cloud Platform. GCP. It's the third of the Big Three, with about 13% of the market, it comes with an anti-recommendation in the name, it's Google's largest non-advertising segment, and most people have never heard of it. Google's second-largest non-advertising segment is consumer subscription services, like selling YouTube subscriptions to people who don't know how to set up an ad blocker. Expecting Google to care about smart-home products is like expecting a lawyer to fish a dropped penny out of a porta-potty, DeBoer revealed himself to be an out-of-touch boomer the second he bought Google Nest, and the effect of one single company continually launching consumer-grade product lines that it cannot possibly care about on public sentiment toward the tech industry in general (i.e. industry in general) is the kind of negative externality that may lead one to wonder whether or not it would be government overreach for a more credible administration to politely but firmly suggest to Alphabet, Inc., ticker symbol GOOG, that it's time to start thinking about dividends.

That wasn't always what a search engine was. Originally, a search engine was just a way to do ctrl+f on a bunch of html pages all at once.

There was a natural-language search engine back in the day, called Ask Jeeves. Using natural language was its whole gimmick, since it was the only one doing it.

According to the report, since autumn, the 63rd Brigade had been neutralizing dark-skinned Russian mercenaries who approached Ukrainian positions armed. They carried no documents, so identification was impossible.

“That changed just before the New Year, when a barely alive, frozen African man arrived at one of the checkpoints near Lyman. He was unarmed and crying for help. It turned out to be Richard from Uganda,” the brigade said.

The captive stated that he had come to Russia to escape poverty, taking out a large bank loan, after being promised “a good job for good money.” He claimed he was not informed about participating in combat and believed he would work in a supermarket. However, upon arrival in Russia, he and three other Ugandans were confronted with the fact that they were now in the Russian army.

Nabil — who asked that his real name not be used — said he was lured by promises of lucrative employment in fields such as “security” and “engineering”, hoping to earn enough to complete his studies. A few weeks later, he was holed up with four other recently arrived Yemenis in a forest in Ukraine, dressed in military fatigues with Russian insignia, their faces masked by scarves. “We are under bombardment. Mines, drones, digging bunkers,” said one of the men in a video shared with the FT, adding that one colleague had attempted suicide and been taken to a hospital.

It's easy to see how this could happen: imagine there's a directive from management: "Users are complaining about the number of crashes. Reduce crashes by 50% this year, your promo depends on it." What's the easiest way to do that? It's taking all your code and wrapping it in "try { ... } catch { log.error() }" blocks all over the place. Now the crash is gone, and instead whatever operation you were trying to do just silently fails and nothing happens.

The glossy, maximalist, retro-yet-futuristic NBC Experience Store at The Rockefeller Center - New York City, NY (Opened April 27th, 1999)

Designed by JGA, Inc. of Southfield, MI

Scanned from the May 2001 issue of Lighting Design + Application (LD+A) magazine

Anyway, trying a little harder to engage with what memes like that are getting at kind of leads us to a place where we're saying that gender medicine is comparable to cosmetic surgery/treatments for looking younger / "better" / more conventionally attractive. Which I'm not sure is the message anyone defending gender medicine actually wants to be going for? (It's not 100% not valid, but it would seem to be overall the wrong take, I would think.)

Male-pattern baldness is male (biologically), but it's not masculine (culturally).

Also I made one: