So Google sells ads, obviously, and most of the page real estate for the 1st few (and now more) pages are for ad sales and supposedly related to the users’ search. Wikipedia & Google are 2 totally different functionally. Many times if I’m interested in any product I own or just wanted to know about product usage & info, Google will get me my info faster than anything else. Done. In fact, if users need specific product info, instead of going to the product’s (so-called) help or FAQ files, I will use Google info (craft a search string that works and the Google bots grok) as it’s so much better organized and fast and yes, that’s why users allow being profiled, whether they know it or not. Is our data being sold or shared with advertisers? Yes. Oh, almost forgot, if I need visual details or a demo of any sort, I hit Youtube and usually find exactly what I need to know.
Much of the popular piling on of vitriol toward the giant super tech companies of late is about how personal data is moved about, marketed, sold, abused. Plus now with all this government involvement, as in hearings, investigations, anti-trust actions, etc., we would hope that when this all comes out in the wash that internet users will have greater control over the use of their data.
Remember though by the time D.C. gets done, if they ever do, with new data info regulations, I’m sure somehow someway the D.C. sausage makers will figure out a way to get their cut through some sort of downstream collateral damage to the internet users, (come on use your imagination or have you checked your wallet lately?). IMO. So there are many internet users, like most internet users, me, and others absolutely depend on the internet’s virtual communications, (for more stuff than can be mentioned here) made more obvious during the ongoing pandemic, if the functionality of the internet becomes overly functionally encumbered too much or the creation of not very well thought out changes in communications laws actually happens, well, dang, unfortunately, we have enough to rant about already without paving new and improved roads to hell.
Pray our lawmakers in D.C. know something, anything, about which they wish to legislate in the technical areas. Rumor has it some have trouble finding the off/on switches on their modern e-devices, seriously, I don’t want my butcher to bake my wedding cake. In other words, a better cliche is possibly ‘be careful what we wish for’.
Sorry to make you a victim of this book, though many of us may be somewhat spoiled by all the usefulness of the internet, even the big tech biz concerns, however, how fast would we all get used to not having this modern phenomenon around. The only thing that might be worse is suddenly my morning coffee should disappear, OMG! Oh well, more first-world problems to ponder.
Yeah, you are correct, wiki pages, a real variety of software info products, and very trustworthy for encyclopedic info. I hit a wiki page almost every session I’m on the internet and do donate to that cause. Other than writing that, I’d miss that relatively FREE information tool should it suddenly disappear, as I suspect many others would also.
