Google contributes to society.
Search helps people find information. YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created. Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
There's a lot of bad, but no contribution to society? That's a bit much.
Disclaimer: Ex-googler (left 2 years ago).
> Without Google Translate I'd have had a much harder time in a recent trip to Japan.
I haven't used Google Translate in years. You do know there are alternatives, don't you?
I do. I try them from time to time, they weren't better.
I didn't say they were better. Just that without Google Translate, I doubt you would have had a much harder time in your recent trip to Japan because you could have used them, and they aren't particularly worse :-).
It's not just about whether you yourself use Google Translate, it's that - much more than anywhere else I've ever travelled - Japanese people will regularly use Google Translate to communicate with you, usually by typing or speaking into their tablet and then showing you the machine translation.
Actually in quite a few places there (mostly in Kyushu) they used a bespoke handheld device or DeepL.
Try out the big LLMs for translating and explaining translation (e.g. ChatGPT). Much better than Google translate in my experience.
I don't think switching to an LLM is exactly in line with what GP was trying to say :)
> YouTube is quite possibly the most prolific source of learning ever created.
That's bizarre.
They are actively enshittifying search and YouTube. So if these things are good for society, and Google is making them worse , it feels like we shouldn't be giving them too much credit.