I think it's too early to say that it did. Scholar has 10.5k hits for articles from this year alone...

Well the other services (except for email, obviously) are largely run by volunteers and don't even have ads (spam notwithstanding).

Now I'm not sure that I follow. Sure, there's lots of stuff that lacks the polish of countless missing man-hours, but we've all come a really long way since the 80s/90s. I'm sure we'll get there if we don't fuck up before that.
I've also seen lots of examples of features that were unimportant to the contributors, but since there was an itch to scratch e.g. in getting recognition from their users, a similar level of rigor was applied to satisfy them.
(Certainly, there's lots of negative examples too, but the point stands, that there was little "physical" value that some devs received for their work and yet still the projects thrive(d). I was, of course, assuming that you meant money when you said "paying for things" in your original post.)

I agree that the tools are currently insufficient (though quite powerful, e.g. Protege), but I also believe that it's quite possible to achieve a high level of accuracy by combining better tools, dividing the problem space and working on killer features that require this higher level of abstraction.
Ideally, people (at first for industrial applications) would recognize the need for a proper machine-readable representation of the different states of a specific environment, so that eventually the different ontologies could be mapped to each other.
An exhausting (i.e. universal) categorization of all possible states (of everything) is largely unnecessary, as even now, when we communicate with each other, use the respective vocabulary of the specific topic/area/system and only (comparatively) rarely need to "interface" or interesect with other areas/vocabularies, e.g. when we want to draw parallels to a similar concept in a different system. With time, I'm sure we'll could even get to a meta-ontology and evolve our language and understanding accordingly.

Thanks for the WDC link. This is awesome!

Could you please explain, how a statistical approximation can trump an exact model? I think that big data & co. is a step in the right direction with the means that we currently have available and that we'll get there eventually. There's too many benefits that would result from doing it properly to neglect the required effort.

FTFY. The semantic web is a vision that has little to do with what you described:

(From the related Wikipedia article.)

It's Eternal September all the way down.

Bullshit. The Internet was a fine place before youtube and google and continues to be so now. It just became more convenient, for everyone. Including the parasites.
Go look at other segments of the Internet: email, ftp, irc, jabber, torrents... dominated by quality-oriented mentality!
Look at linux (the systemd debacle notwithstanding;) ), BSD, the open source community in general... Sure, a lot is paid for, but even more is driven by enthusiasm first and foremost.

This is a great hack. Thanks a lot for the link!

The obligatory Tripp Crosby

So, you're saying that it's so simple to get SHA256 collisions that thousands of people getting sued for torrenting can fuck these copyright companies right over?
I don't think I quite believe you and last time I checked I needed quite a server farm to (reliably) produce one collision in a meaningful amount of time.

Who cares?
Fortunately, these days Germans don't have an army capable of attacking anyone, unless it's with broomsticks. So they'd have to live with it.

They could also pivot towards the EEU and/or SCO, who'd both probably be welcoming Greece with open arms.

You're forgetting Rubles, which is a serious oversight currently.
Also, Greeks do have their own oil, if they start drilling. They have their own electricity too. It'd be difficult, but possible.

Wrong. I wouldn't work with a plan that forces me to cut my own legs (sell state-owned, important infrastructure to the likes of Telekom, Vattenfall, etc.) either, instead I'd look for a proper way out (grow - not shrink).

Yeah, also check that the wifi is off... No shit.