> A hypothetical US gov't, benevolent and markedly less corrupt than the current one
If we’re pretending this is taking place in another reality what are we hoping to learn from this hypothetical?
> with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend
It would be simpler for the US govt to build such a search engine like that today as google was a lot simpler back then, however it wouldn’t work because the internet has changed as much as Google has.
If the goal is to make the internet search better via intervention it might be simpler to force Google to share relevant patents for free with competitors and new market entrants, and doesn’t require a benevolent government to work either.
You have some serious rose colored glasses on. 2010 google was insanely easy to manipulate. It was like golden era for grey/blackhat SEO. It didn't even start to get moderately difficult until like 2014-2015. Google of today is significantly less spam infested.
Source: I've been doing digital marketing/SEO since ~2008 and happily abused easy signals to manipulate rankings for fun and profit for many of those early years.
> hypothetical US gov't, benevolent and markedly less corrupt than the current one, passes a Constitutional amendment to nationalize Alphabet, with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend.
And the next one? And the one after that? How about the one after that?
I don't think we can ever go back, and I'm not as convinced of the value of nationalizing Google, but it's clear that the monopolies held by massive tech companies are actively hurting society. Alphabet needs to be broken apart.
I always find it funny how people insist Google is getting worse despite no evidence that this is the case. Google tests every algorithm update they roll out. If it was getting worse they would know.
Also when you nationalize companies they often get less efficient. It's not clear if what you're asking for is possible. And Alphabet owns tons of stuff, not just a search engine. Plus there are tons of different search engines (DuckDuckGo, Bing, Kagi, etc), probably one of them meets your standards.
I'd be opposed to nationalizing Google. There are way too many downsides.
I think, if we're going to be heavy-hitting about this, the more proper thing to do is to force Google to split their search off as a separate, independent company that has additional business requirements imposed on it to rectify the issues.
But I really think that, if search is the worry, the market will eventually achieve its own kind of balance and you'll find an acceptable alternative to Google's that restores much of what has been lost. For me, that's already the case.
Probably the easiest solution is to make mandatory search engine selection screens, and provide a fat grant for Firefox so they don't face an existential threat without Google's money. Puts some pressure on Google to compete since every percent is a billion bucks they lost, and if it's anything like browser selection screens the people choosing other options snowball over time.
Otherwise you need to break Google up just to separate search from ads, lot of complexity in that and adversity from big tech.
You can't have "2010 levels of efficacy" on 2026 web.
I much prefer Google today than in 2010. I very rarely look at web pages (full of all kinds of bad design, unnecessary text, and ads) now. Google gives me the information directly.
Depends on the reason. The government basically nationalized a lot of manufacturers in WW II. During the 2008 Financial Crisis they took over Freddie and Fannie. Look the government has enormous powers that are uncomfortable. But they have them for a reason. Ultimately the government is supposed to be an expression of the will of the people.
Edit:
"annihilated by ~15 years of cynical corporate marauding and product torture" - I'm with ya man, wrote my rant on this topic the other day https://chriswebb09.github.io/our-ai-reality
Firefox needs a national grant instead. Google is too far gone as a monopoly and that would mean setting precendent for other monopolies. Unlikely to happen anytime soon
I think we're well past the time when we should have created an actual public commons instead of pretending that a patchwork of private online services constituted one. The commercial internet sits on a foundation of attention and deception, neither of which is hospitable to truth. I'm not sure that nationalizing Google would change that.
If you're just wanting a better search, you want to talk to the folks around Brave, Mojeek, Marginalia (and especially read all of the Marginalia blog), Greppr, Yep. People who are building their own search indexes. Also give Kagi and maybe Uruky a try, two metasearch engines. Also look into what asciimoo is doing with Hister (and previously SearXNG). There's also the EU Search Perspective project.
Much of this is just about building out the index. (Yes yes, "just", I know folks at Google will yell at me that I have no idea what's required at scale, and they're absolutely right. I also know that Google REALLY do not like people building any kind of competition, no matter how tiny.) Some have done the work, Yep has a huge index they've built from their Ahrefs work. Obviously Brave is already there, it probably already powers the web search for your favorite LLM.
For everyday use, you often don't need the whole index though. You just need your corner of the web indexed, the tiny section that you use frequently.
Rather than nationalizing it, and being subject to whatever government decides... for the internet that you personally want, your own personal index is the most true answer. Only then will it find the information you want, with the rankings that you want.
On a large scale, not that I'm aware of (I'd be interested if that exists!).
But on the small local scale, that's what Hister is, it caches and indexes web pages as you browse the web in your browser. Going via the browser avoids all the problems of bot detection etc, since you are a human visitor. That gives your own search engine of the web that you've already visited, at least:
I'm a staunch leftist and anti-capitalist, so I think I sort of understanding where you are coming from with the question.
If "the state" is indeed a tool used by "the people" to accomplish the will of the the people, then sure, I think nationalization of large, nation-wide or world-wide corporations is probably fine and good. But this requires a totally different world order. It's hard to imagine something called the USA as participating in such an arrangement.
I don't think a "less corrupt" USA government is one that should be taking over the likes of Google, however. Even the more polite version of the USA is one that dominates the world through military force and local communities through a surveillance apparatus (see Flock now, but basically every town in America gives half of its general budget to the police). The data that Google holds needs to be regulated by the government, not handed over to the government.
There's no particular reason why the USA government (or some other country) couldn't spin up its own new search engine service that provided something akin to 2010 Google search, with no advertising to boot. There's no political will to do something like that, but that seems much more imaginable than nationalizing Google/Alphabet, and I think perhaps still entertains your hypothetical.
The problems come from companies becoming so large that competing with them is essentially impossible. Fix that, and the rest will take care of itself.
So the problem is that the quality of its products would fall dramatically and then everyone would move to products offered by other large tech companies…
2010's Google search code has been gamed many times over by sophisticated SEO schemes. So you can't bring it back "as it was". Best you can do is to restore its mission to "organize the world's information", but today's problems (e.g. AI slop) demand a new wave of technological innovation for them just to keep their head above water.
Also, it's funny you brought up politics, as if the current political regime is the last corrupt one we'll ever have. If you have the incentives for corruption in place, you will have more corruption. If you give Google to the government, it will use Google to support that corruption. The Trump era is a great time to be asking, "would I want the government to have even more control?", because there will be another Trump eventually.
No, no, let's nationalize DEC and get our VAXen back! Then we can have AltaVista running atop OpenVMS, the way that God intended! And Windows 13 on Alpha AXP!!! Awesome man! I can't wait for my SGI GPU!
Seriously though, this is a bizarre proposition. Google hasn't been a "Search Company" for decades. Google is not there to search the web for you. Internet users need to grow up. From this Iron Age of the Internet where we bashed the keyboard with "google search" to find whatever we wanted there. Ask any reference librarian, how to intelligently build a toolbox of bookmarks and resources, and use those resources to look up stuff that you want instead.
I do not use Google Search, or Bing Search or any other, except in the dumbest of circumstances. I already know where such searches would've sent me, so I go to those sites and I query them instead. It's not rocket science.
But that ship has sailed and the Days of Search Engines is in a notable sunset phase. It is simply impractical to build and maintain a search engine when LLMs are taking over. The LLM is your search engine now. Learn it, love it, bash it, Bronze Ager.
I am not sure who I hate and distrust more… Google or the US Government. Probably the US Government. To have a hypothetical benevolent us government you would need revisions to history earlier than 1776
The thing that I always come back to whenever some kind of heavy-handed government intervention is proposed: what would the other side use this same power to do? OP explicitly called out a hypothetical benevolent US government, but the government changes every 4 years. Even if there were such a hypothetical benevolent government in power when this happened, 4 years later it could be something entirely different.
> A hypothetical US gov't, benevolent and markedly less corrupt than the current one
If we’re pretending this is taking place in another reality what are we hoping to learn from this hypothetical?
> with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend
It would be simpler for the US govt to build such a search engine like that today as google was a lot simpler back then, however it wouldn’t work because the internet has changed as much as Google has.
If the goal is to make the internet search better via intervention it might be simpler to force Google to share relevant patents for free with competitors and new market entrants, and doesn’t require a benevolent government to work either.
Even without that kagi exists and it’s fine
You have some serious rose colored glasses on. 2010 google was insanely easy to manipulate. It was like golden era for grey/blackhat SEO. It didn't even start to get moderately difficult until like 2014-2015. Google of today is significantly less spam infested.
Source: I've been doing digital marketing/SEO since ~2008 and happily abused easy signals to manipulate rankings for fun and profit for many of those early years.
> hypothetical US gov't, benevolent and markedly less corrupt than the current one, passes a Constitutional amendment to nationalize Alphabet, with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend.
And the next one? And the one after that? How about the one after that?
I don't think we can ever go back, and I'm not as convinced of the value of nationalizing Google, but it's clear that the monopolies held by massive tech companies are actively hurting society. Alphabet needs to be broken apart.
I always find it funny how people insist Google is getting worse despite no evidence that this is the case. Google tests every algorithm update they roll out. If it was getting worse they would know.
Also when you nationalize companies they often get less efficient. It's not clear if what you're asking for is possible. And Alphabet owns tons of stuff, not just a search engine. Plus there are tons of different search engines (DuckDuckGo, Bing, Kagi, etc), probably one of them meets your standards.
I'd be opposed to nationalizing Google. There are way too many downsides.
I think, if we're going to be heavy-hitting about this, the more proper thing to do is to force Google to split their search off as a separate, independent company that has additional business requirements imposed on it to rectify the issues.
But I really think that, if search is the worry, the market will eventually achieve its own kind of balance and you'll find an acceptable alternative to Google's that restores much of what has been lost. For me, that's already the case.
Probably the easiest solution is to make mandatory search engine selection screens, and provide a fat grant for Firefox so they don't face an existential threat without Google's money. Puts some pressure on Google to compete since every percent is a billion bucks they lost, and if it's anything like browser selection screens the people choosing other options snowball over time.
Otherwise you need to break Google up just to separate search from ads, lot of complexity in that and adversity from big tech.
I like the LLM functions. If you brought back the 2010 algorithm it would just be swamped with SEO-optimised spam.
You can't have "2010 levels of efficacy" on 2026 web.
I much prefer Google today than in 2010. I very rarely look at web pages (full of all kinds of bad design, unnecessary text, and ads) now. Google gives me the information directly.
Depends on the reason. The government basically nationalized a lot of manufacturers in WW II. During the 2008 Financial Crisis they took over Freddie and Fannie. Look the government has enormous powers that are uncomfortable. But they have them for a reason. Ultimately the government is supposed to be an expression of the will of the people.
Edit:
"annihilated by ~15 years of cynical corporate marauding and product torture" - I'm with ya man, wrote my rant on this topic the other day https://chriswebb09.github.io/our-ai-reality
Firefox needs a national grant instead. Google is too far gone as a monopoly and that would mean setting precendent for other monopolies. Unlikely to happen anytime soon
So Mozilla suits can piss it up the wall buying Pocket and making snake oil VPNs?
What about Vivaldi?
I think we're well past the time when we should have created an actual public commons instead of pretending that a patchwork of private online services constituted one. The commercial internet sits on a foundation of attention and deception, neither of which is hospitable to truth. I'm not sure that nationalizing Google would change that.
If you're just wanting a better search, you want to talk to the folks around Brave, Mojeek, Marginalia (and especially read all of the Marginalia blog), Greppr, Yep. People who are building their own search indexes. Also give Kagi and maybe Uruky a try, two metasearch engines. Also look into what asciimoo is doing with Hister (and previously SearXNG). There's also the EU Search Perspective project.
Much of this is just about building out the index. (Yes yes, "just", I know folks at Google will yell at me that I have no idea what's required at scale, and they're absolutely right. I also know that Google REALLY do not like people building any kind of competition, no matter how tiny.) Some have done the work, Yep has a huge index they've built from their Ahrefs work. Obviously Brave is already there, it probably already powers the web search for your favorite LLM.
For everyday use, you often don't need the whole index though. You just need your corner of the web indexed, the tiny section that you use frequently.
Rather than nationalizing it, and being subject to whatever government decides... for the internet that you personally want, your own personal index is the most true answer. Only then will it find the information you want, with the rankings that you want.
is anybody selling a white label private web indexer/cacher for normies?
On a large scale, not that I'm aware of (I'd be interested if that exists!).
But on the small local scale, that's what Hister is, it caches and indexes web pages as you browse the web in your browser. Going via the browser avoids all the problems of bot detection etc, since you are a human visitor. That gives your own search engine of the web that you've already visited, at least:
https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
I'm a staunch leftist and anti-capitalist, so I think I sort of understanding where you are coming from with the question.
If "the state" is indeed a tool used by "the people" to accomplish the will of the the people, then sure, I think nationalization of large, nation-wide or world-wide corporations is probably fine and good. But this requires a totally different world order. It's hard to imagine something called the USA as participating in such an arrangement.
I don't think a "less corrupt" USA government is one that should be taking over the likes of Google, however. Even the more polite version of the USA is one that dominates the world through military force and local communities through a surveillance apparatus (see Flock now, but basically every town in America gives half of its general budget to the police). The data that Google holds needs to be regulated by the government, not handed over to the government.
There's no particular reason why the USA government (or some other country) couldn't spin up its own new search engine service that provided something akin to 2010 Google search, with no advertising to boot. There's no political will to do something like that, but that seems much more imaginable than nationalizing Google/Alphabet, and I think perhaps still entertains your hypothetical.
The problems come from companies becoming so large that competing with them is essentially impossible. Fix that, and the rest will take care of itself.
[dead]
So the problem is that the quality of its products would fall dramatically and then everyone would move to products offered by other large tech companies…
I'd feel better if standard protocols and open datasets were maintained.
That way anybody could build their own "old search", or innovate off the global dataset.
The hypothetical situation is a benevolent, honest and competent US government, 100% guaranteed, for all eternity?
That sounds great, regardless of the Google stuff.
The problem is the monopoly not the private nature of the enterprise. Bust that trust.
+1 goggle has WAY too tight a grip on access to the WWW...
Allowing such a consolidation of control over the internet was a huge mistake.
Cray cray
Just don't use google search. I haven't used it in years.
Given how sucktacular Google's basic search has become, I don't see how dropping it into the Swamp can worsen it.
Sorry, but you’re crazy.
There is absolutely no way I can ever go back to vanilla web search vs Gemini.
same, except custom setup, so much better than what they spoon feed
2010's Google search code has been gamed many times over by sophisticated SEO schemes. So you can't bring it back "as it was". Best you can do is to restore its mission to "organize the world's information", but today's problems (e.g. AI slop) demand a new wave of technological innovation for them just to keep their head above water.
Also, it's funny you brought up politics, as if the current political regime is the last corrupt one we'll ever have. If you have the incentives for corruption in place, you will have more corruption. If you give Google to the government, it will use Google to support that corruption. The Trump era is a great time to be asking, "would I want the government to have even more control?", because there will be another Trump eventually.
No, no, let's nationalize DEC and get our VAXen back! Then we can have AltaVista running atop OpenVMS, the way that God intended! And Windows 13 on Alpha AXP!!! Awesome man! I can't wait for my SGI GPU!
Seriously though, this is a bizarre proposition. Google hasn't been a "Search Company" for decades. Google is not there to search the web for you. Internet users need to grow up. From this Iron Age of the Internet where we bashed the keyboard with "google search" to find whatever we wanted there. Ask any reference librarian, how to intelligently build a toolbox of bookmarks and resources, and use those resources to look up stuff that you want instead.
I do not use Google Search, or Bing Search or any other, except in the dumbest of circumstances. I already know where such searches would've sent me, so I go to those sites and I query them instead. It's not rocket science.
But that ship has sailed and the Days of Search Engines is in a notable sunset phase. It is simply impractical to build and maintain a search engine when LLMs are taking over. The LLM is your search engine now. Learn it, love it, bash it, Bronze Ager.
I am not sure who I hate and distrust more… Google or the US Government. Probably the US Government. To have a hypothetical benevolent us government you would need revisions to history earlier than 1776
The thing that I always come back to whenever some kind of heavy-handed government intervention is proposed: what would the other side use this same power to do? OP explicitly called out a hypothetical benevolent US government, but the government changes every 4 years. Even if there were such a hypothetical benevolent government in power when this happened, 4 years later it could be something entirely different.
I think that huge corporations such as Google are effectively an integral part of the US government at this point anyway.