Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
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Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#2Here's what I get for "iPhone price": http://i.imgur.com/VOE0Q1q.png which shows the actual prices.
The thesis of the post seems to be that it's a bad idea to have one search engine because people will reverse engineer it. That's true, but the billions of dollars flowing into Google means they throw the smartest people at staying ahead of SEO. It seems pretty effective.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#3Here's what I get for "iPhone price": http://i.imgur.com/VOE0Q1q.png which shows the actual prices. The thesis of the post seems to be that it's a bad idea to have one search engine because people will reverse engineer it. That's true, but the billions of dollars flowing into Google means they throw the smartest people at staying ahead of SEO. It seems pretty effective.
For that query I get a range of prices (sponsored result) ranging from £0.00 to £300. Obviously, the £0.00 result is going to get the click-through despite the £300 option being likely to be the better deal?
The organic results (below the fold) seem to be worse than would have been the case 5 years ago.
SEO has been replaced with chuck money at adwords and hope some of it works.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#4Google is not the only search engine available. Bing has still a big market share in the US, Yandex in Russia, and Seznam in the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, the dominance of Google often means that SEO follows their ideas but often we see SEO masters adjusting to these search engines too because they want to reach also their users.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#5Personally, when I know that a certain topic is of high value to advertisers, I don't even bother googling anymore, and try to find someone qualified instead. For example, I recently was trying to look up theory behind working out, how differenr muscles work, how nutrition works and all that - but there're so many people who're trying to sell their courses, apps, books and stuff, that I have no idea how to go around looking for unbiased and at least semi-scientific source of information.
Edit: I would be thankful for pointers as to why this comment was downvoted, so I can increase quality of my content in the future.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#6I work on Google Search. Having one search engine per country doesn't seem like the correct approach to the problem.
> Every country has a mammoth collection of valid results for your query.
Having seen the corpus of content available from each language, this is categorically false. Consider Wikipedia, which is a fairly ubiquitous information source on the web that provides answers to tons of searches. English documents: 5.4M, Romanian documents: 376k.
Perhaps the solution to the OP's woes is more tools for filtering. This post conflates the ideas between language and country. Search typically returns to you results and search features that are in the query language. Today's solution where filtering is done through query refinement and query operators seems to cover a lot of use cases already.
Further, by having an integrated product, ML models can learn behaviors specific to certain locales where those behaviors differ from region to region, and balance with more universal behaviors that apply to more than one region.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#7I work on Google Search. Having one search engine per country doesn't seem like the correct approach to the problem. > Every country has a mammoth collection of valid results for your query. Having seen the corpus of content available from each language, this is categorically false. Consider Wikipedia, which is a fairly ubiquitous information source on the web that provides answers to tons of searches. English docume…
Agree and, as I work for Seznam, especially agree on the ability to train models properly to satisfy local users. Not to mention that the user can choose what should be the language of the results.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#8The internet is quite independent of countries and regions. Sure, sites are localised and internationalised but the idea of an "[insert country here] internet" is meaningless. One of the major reasons that the internet is successful is that it is effectively borderless.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#9> Sooner or later the internet will have to be decentralized.
It sounds like a pipe dream. Centralisation exists for a reason: it's far easier to coordinate complex efforts within a single organisation, rather than a host of unreliable entities. Supposedly, we develop a protocol where we share the responsibility of crawling, indexing, and searching the whole web. Isn't is unrealistic to expect that millions of computers (an optimistic estimate considering number of Google servers dedicated to Search) would voluntarily want to participate in the effort? Who ensures redundancy, speed, and abuse handling?
If a single company commanding the whole power is untrustworthy, a million entities having no stake in the game is multifold more.
Re: Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore
#10Google works surprisingly well with languages other than English. I've been looking for Russian-language originals of some of Chekhov's short stories and plays, and pasting, e.g., "Чехов чайка"into the search bar finds the full text of The Seagull (on a .ru site) with no problem. I'm not sure how having a Russian-only search engine helps here.