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To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

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Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#111

Post by Xixi »

peteretep wrote: post #3

I don’t want to break Google’s monopoly on search. Google’s search is fantastic. It’s their advertising business knowing too much about me I care about.

I kinda disagree. 15 years ago you could generally type anything and expect the first search result to be the legitimate one. Now you have to dig through the list of SEO optimized scams (or at least dubious websites). Albeit it improved somewhat over the last couple of years.

Example: if you type "broadway shows phantom of the opera", the first non-ad link redirect to www.broadway.com. But www.broadway.com doesn't do anything: they just buy tickets from the legitimate website (www.telecharge.com in that case) with an extra ~$30 fee per ticket tackled on top. I won't go as far as to claim that Google is ok with it because broadway.com must spend tons of money on ads, and not telecharge.com... but I'm suspicious.

Counter example: "green card lottery" now points to the official us gov websites, while few years ago it was scams after scams all the way down.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#112

Post by dalbasal »

noahl wrote: post #61

Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…

I would assess Google (& FB's) "crown jewel" as, ultimately, their market share, which is related to your points... and causation runs both ways.

The user data helps/ed Google create the superior UX, as you say. The reach is what makes Google & FB valuable to advertisers. A search engine with 0.1% of Google's user volume cannot charge advertisers 0.1% of Google's as revenue. Returns to scale/reach/market-share are very substantial in online advertising.

I'm glad we're talking though. Those tech giants are too powerful.

Ultimately, the old antitrust toolkit is near useless today, for dealing with tech monopolies. It's not obvious what "break up Google" even means. There are strong network effects and other returns-to-scale. It's a zero-marginal cost business, which was rare enough in the past that economists a ignored it.

We need fresh thinking, a new vocabulary, new tools, but we do need to deal with it.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#113

Post by marcosscriven »

tyingq wrote: post #89
detritus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think. This is what makes me wonder why we don't have a LOT of competing search engines. Perhaps i'm vastly under-estimating the technology and difficulty (I could well be - it's not my domain) but it surely it can't be THAT hard to spawn Google-like weighted crawl-based search results? It's a long-since solved problem - heck, pageRank's first iterat…

SEO spam, and poor quality content I would guess. Google has bolted on a ton of ML over the last ten years to fight it.

I feel for certain topics, especially anything to do with tutorials or coding, even Google falls foul to SEO content. Just Google ‘android custom ROM ’ for instance. There’s stock pages for all of them, identical save for the phone model, and clearly not applicable.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#114

Post by taf2 »

ailideex wrote: post #98
__s wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foreign propaganda usually doesn't label itself as such. Nor does this article have to be from such a source. Merely inspired by the noise being made

Are you suggesting that we should discard criticism of google because Russia and China is anti google? China does not like Trump either, so should we not criticize trump because of China? And I don't even get why you say China and Russia is anti Google. They are anti-information more than anti-google. If google allows them to control what information people get they will have no problem with Google. They are further…

No - but I do think we should be sure we read deeper and question who's motivating a certain position. Ask is there a source of truth that can confirm someone's position. For example, I can see google's search business controls about 90% of the search traffic. I see browser usage around 63%. For advertising (google main source of income) I see they don't dominate they share market with Facebook and more recently a lot of talk about Amazon's position being strong to take more of that market.

See: https://www.statista.com/chart/17109/us-digital-advertising-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/20/amazon-advertising-business-...

That said maybe my sources are not good? But it's better to think is someone being truthful or trying to manipulate me with a specific position...

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#115

Post by dekhn »

Making the index available would be very valuable for scientific research. when I was a googler, we used the index (and google scholar's index) to do all sorts of interesting science projects (DNA search, gene search, etc) But we couldn't publish the results for various reasons. If the index (or a fragment of it) was available sitting in parquet files (or possibly a better format for indices) you could easily sit around doing spark jobs to extract all sorts of interesting web data.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#116

Post by asark »

tyingq wrote: post #89
detritus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think. This is what makes me wonder why we don't have a LOT of competing search engines. Perhaps i'm vastly under-estimating the technology and difficulty (I could well be - it's not my domain) but it surely it can't be THAT hard to spawn Google-like weighted crawl-based search results? It's a long-since solved problem - heck, pageRank's first iterat…

SEO spam, and poor quality content I would guess. Google has bolted on a ton of ML over the last ten years to fight it.

And yet most Google results that don't point at one of a handful of major sites are SEO spam :-/

The spammers won. Google gave up and settled for "we like the right kind of spam—the kind that took a little effort, and makes us money".

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#118

Post by aerovistae »

nova22033 wrote: post #106

Caveat: The author is not a technologists Robert Epstein (born June 19, 1953) is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1981, was editor in chief of Psychology Today, He has also made some questionable claims about google manipulating search results to favor Hillary Clinton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein#cite_note-15 His r…

Perhaps the author should consider that Hilary Clinton is a perfect human being.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#119

Post by i_cant_speel »

rocgf wrote: post #104
dkyc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, Google has a huge index, but most queries aren't in the long tail. I'm not quite sure about that. 15% of Google searches per day are unique, as in, Google has never seen them before. [1]. That's quite an insane number. [1] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

Wow, 15% unique searches is indeed quite an interesting figure. With that said, what OP said is definitely not disproved. Just because 15% of searches are unique, that doesn't mean the most relevant result is buried in the tail end. I mean I can think of loads of my own searches that are probably unique or rare, but lead to the same popular results because of typos, improper wording etc. Without some clear numbers on…

Especially with voice searches. People are searching entire sentences rather than specific keywords which are much more likely to be unique.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#120

Post by traderjane »

scarface74 wrote: post #87
mbrumlow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft said the same thing about internet exploror and it's operating system..

And when it all came down to it, it didn’t matter. Chrome didn’t become dominant on the desktop because of government intervention and Safari didn’t become important because of DOJ either. Apple and Google competed. Government intervention is rarely the right answer. A bunch of people who are both beholden to lobbyists and ignorant to technology won’t produce the outcome people think it will. Besides, the last thing…

That which the market does not naturally provide... does one just morally expect?
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