Go to any third world country, peep into their phones and you will realise

- they are using android

- google maps

- youtube

Not to mention Waymo and LLM's literally came out of Google. Google will go down as one of the most important institutions in the last 100 years.

If it weren't Google it would be someone else providing those services, Google Maps didn't invent GIS for the masses (I worked at a GIS company that was widely used in the country I lived way before Google Maps existed).

To me the biggest impact of Google in the history of mankind was making Internet search actually good. Android wasn't invented there, YouTube wasn't invented there, they had the capital to scale those but I don't think it's their greatest achievement compared to Search in the early 2000s.

Google is one the most important institution of the Internet era. Talk all you'd like about "OoOoH tHeY aDvErTiSe" or "tHeiR aLgOrItHm Is GeTtInG wOrSe" but at the end of the day, Google still brought knowledge to more people than anything before (apart from maybe Gutenberg).

More knowledge, more misinformation. Hard to know if a world without google would be better or worse.

Pessimistic way to look at things. If you think misinformation is at the same level as information then you need to give this some thought.

I mean, to steelman their point, there's a lot more misinformation than information on Google. I still personally think that it's a worthwhile trade though