<Insert boilerplate disclaimer about your threat model here>
The short answer is no, despite what the VPN sponsor of your favorite YT videos might say. This is actually a good question to ask if you want to assess how up-to-date someone's infosec knowledge is. In a few sentences, you can tell if they're just regurgitating the classic scary myths about public WiFis or have a more nuanced take* that boils down to 'no' (bonus points if they go on a tangent about how cool WiFi deauth attacks are).
In the linked thread, they clearly mentioned that he's an investor in the company:
> Well, a few months ago @Aura_Protects reached out and asked me to show them how I hack – and who better to demonstrate this on than their investor Jeffrey Katzenberg?
The fact that he consented to it is also mentioned in the thread. How is that dishonest? I personally think the attack is interesting on its own, using a recent vuln that was widely reported in the infosec community.
I personally think the thread is more interesting than the video anyway, which is why I linked it. (Also, in the YT video's description, they mentioned that he's an investor in the company.)
This "Google Search sucks" discussion is officially getting boring. We get it, it sucks; we already know. It's been discussed ad nauseum. This article is particularly bad because it's a rehash of (and commentary on) content that already appeared here, with no significant new information (much like the original article it's commenting on, which was also a rehash of HN threads and comments made by people popular with the HN crowd).
Just because you're bored and in the know, doesn't a) mean the problem has gotten any better and isn't relevant and b) hasn't given others, newcomers a place to express their grievance. The fact that it still persists and still gets upvotes shows people aren't done and discussions of alternatives still need to be had.
I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve done so many fairly basic searches and gotten back absolutely awful results. I imagine most of the web isn’t even accessible through. This is an important topic that deserves even more discussion, especially since there isn’t even another solution yet
This. The Internet needs search. I took a screenshot the first time Google showed only ads and no organic search.
It's critical to the functioning of the free market that consumers have accurate information.
The fact that Google is crap is less important. The fact that Google squashes competition and there is no unbiased search engine, is of national interest.
Current situation is because of a combination of Google's monopoly abuse and the fact that US govt does not recognise that search engines are(is) the entry point to a significant market.
If you believe in the free market, then the state of Google search indicates huge inefficiency. A lot of people treat the term free market to mean "I, personally, am free to get rich, however I can, at the expense of everyone else." Which is pretty much the opposite of what it really means. It really means "you are free to join the market and compete on equal terms."
Under those conditions best product/price should win.
It was pleasantly surprising to see the article cite Hacker News as a source ("“Google is dead. Long live Google + ‘site:reddit.com’ ”—became the No. 10 most upvoted link ever on the tech-industry discussion board Hacker News."), which likely inspired the pitch to write the article.
The article still adds value as the reporter got a Google spokesperson to comment, and also brings the issue to a much wider audience outside of Hacker News.
Nothing will change until the discussion enters the mainstream and every boring HN thread on the subject helps bring that goal closer.
I switched to DDG more than a year ago and I can honestly say that I've not had to revert to google search more than a handful of times since. A regular user would probably forget about Google in a breath if only they knew that such an alternative existed.
It may be coincidence, but around the same time that the "Google Search sucks" articles and comments starting becoming more frequent I am now getting pop ups on the Google Search results page to rate the results between 1-5 stars.
I’ve thought about creating HN Tropes, similar to TV Tropes to categorize the repetitive discussions with comments that are easily predicted. I haven’t convinced myself it’d help things, might just fuel the fire.
