The comparison with Facebook is because, yes, we're at a point of choosing which companies ethics you believe in most, and feel most comfortable handling your personal data. Privacy, security, openness, ads, ... at least it does to me.
And yes, I do think for any company out there crawling the web, RSS feeds are a good indicator. Ofcourse, Google algorithms got to the point that they don't really need RSS feeds anymore, but that's perhaps also the reason why quite often their search results kind of suck, as soon as you dive deeper.
The real problem, for all of us out here - is that no-one even bothers making a search engine anymore.
Everyone has given up. And Google can just do whatever they want. And that's exactly what they do.
Yep, with their infrastructure it's a much easier task to build something and take advantage of the scale in multiple ways, I believe GReader was a 20% time project too. I don't think any one has come close to matching the ease and scale that GReader operated at.
Sure their search has improved too, but it's pull instead of the push model that RSS is. The social networks are no substitutes, though Twitter comes closer than FB because it doesn't have to deal with my other network posts when trying to surface content I would be interested in.
Yeah DuckDuckGo is awesome. I have been using them exclusively for the past couple of months for search. In that time I have found their results as good as Google's results for the topics I cluster around.
And yes, I do think for any company out there crawling the web, RSS feeds are a good indicator. Ofcourse, Google algorithms got to the point that they don't really need RSS feeds anymore, but that's perhaps also the reason why quite often their search results kind of suck, as soon as you dive deeper.
The real problem, for all of us out here - is that no-one even bothers making a search engine anymore.
Everyone has given up. And Google can just do whatever they want. And that's exactly what they do.