151–160 of 489 posts
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> Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition Considering we're on the precipice of a global authoritarian-populist cycle, there are non-market consequences to such concentration, too.
What makes you think we're on this precipice?
WE are on the mercy of few SV companies and whatever they decide or push is our fate.
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Publishers already host their own AMP content. Google caches that content, but anyone can go to the publisher's URL and get it directly. Disclaimer: I work for Google and have some involvement with AMP.
If by "anyone" you mean "my tech savvy friends at google" then yes. I've seen many friends end up on a google-hosted AMP version of a webpage, unable to complete whatever ticket purchase etc they needed because whatever autoAMPifyer the origin site uses produced half broken pages. These users have no idea what AMP is or why the page doesn't work (or that they could have reached the origin site directly if they click…
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Bing works fine. The more people use them, the better they'll get. DuckDuckGo mostly feeds off other engines, but is also good. I personally don't really recommend StartPage because you can't get away from Google's opinionated ranking on a site that provides Google results. But in short, use other search engines and they'll get better. Stop giving Google your search behavior, it's what they use to keep themselves on…
You realize Bing supports AMP and has an AMP cache as well, right? And if you use DDG, you're effectively using Bing. BTW, Cloudflare has an AMP cache as well....
DDG uses multiple sources, including Bing and Yandex. They also have their own efforts like their knowledge graph-type data features, which are open source and can be contributed to.
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Unless I'm missing something, it does: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
You're right, I was imprecise in my brevity. Speed is definitely a signal in ranking. I'm mainly grousing at classes of results -- like the "Top Stories" carousel -- that are only available to AMP pages, and rather difficult to organically rank above. The AMP results also get more vertical real estate, flashy thumbnails, publisher logo images, etc. For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results whe…
This being the case, I think even if building fast webpages may not allow one to circumvent AMP in the instant, it is still a strong way of removing much of the grounds for its existence.
"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it. That genie i…
The key difference is that there are alternatives to iOS, which isn't even a majority share of the market. Google, by contrast, has a far larger share of the search engine market than Apple has of the mobile device market. That means it's more of a concern by default.
If we are talking about search, you can stop using google by typing bing.com or duckduckgo.com in your url bar any time you want, and every major browser supports changing the default search engine, even Chrome.
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Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.
Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I beli…
At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).
For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question.
Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected.
I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for.
Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.
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Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.
Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless. That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I beli…
It seems to expect more precise queries, while Google is geared toward "close enough" searches. I've found that DDG is often preferable when I have an exact phrase in mind. Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.
The main issues I have with DDG are that it doesn't seem to prioritize recent results (which can be good, but usually isn't) and it fails at local results, which is basically by design.
"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it. That genie i…
Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages." You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that…
Nothing should be doing its own scrolling. Everything should let the native scroll do its thing. Computers work for me and should work the way I expect. I expect the default native scroll.
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The appstore-only policy is probably what has kept iOS from having any noteworthy large outbreak of malware. Unfortunately, the Darwin kernel as well as the various iOS frameworks have huge glaring security vulnerabilities patched in every minor update. A free-for-all unvetted code-exec option would open the floodgates for deceptive downloads and compromised iOS devices. Of course, it also makes good business sense f…
noteworthy large outbreak of malware Depends on how you define noteworthy and large. The xcode backdoor thing was in 500.000.000 downloads.
Also, don't forget the whole xcode backdoor fiasco happened because people were installing side-loaded xcode distributions instead of getting it from the mac store. So even where sideloading is and should remain allowed - on the mac - people will click big red "I know what I'm doing" buttons without knowing what they're doing. And that's for people who really should know what they're doing - developers!
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Pointing out a seeming contradiction in an advocate's advocacy is not an ad hominem.
But rebutting an argument by attacking the character of the person making it, is.
Not all people are good. And not all smart people argue logically.