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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

#221

Post by naravara »

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…

>20 years of experience fighting SEO spam

I think we've reached an equilibrium state on this that has significantly degraded the educational quality of search engine results.

The total garbage SEO spam we used to get is gone, which is nice, but what it's been replaced with is technically relevant but mostly manipulative advertising. Product searches will basically give you a bunch of no-name blogs who are almost definitely paid off by one vendor or another.

Even actual inquiries are inundated with search results that do answer the question, but do so in extremely cursory and incomplete way. Or, in the case of recipes, Google seems to prioritize results that give you long, meandering narratives before they actually talk about their recipes. It has some very weird ideas about what people actually want when they search.

One of the most annoying things is how impossible it is to actually find the website of a local business, especially a restaurant, by Googling. Your hits are always Googles' own cobbled together dossier on the restaurant first, then some combination of Yelp, Grubhub, Postmates, AllMenus, etc. pages. If the restaurant has a website you can't tell and it's probably way on the bottom or on a second page of results.

In the past it was a handful of very decent results amidst a sea of total garbage SEO spam. Now it's a sea of mediocre content farm stuff, but it ranged from difficult to impossible to actually dig into detail on things anymore. The old spam we could at least dismiss as crap within a fraction of a second of seeing it. The new spam you have to actually read most of it before you realize it doesn't have what you're looking for.

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

#222

Post by dmix »

jorvi wrote: post #152
dalbasal wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

'Break Google up' would mean you'd have: * an Office suite / enterprise company (Google Cloud + Docs + Gmail + Business) * a phone company (Android) * a search company (Google Search + Advertisement) * and a media company (Google Play Movies, Music, Books and YouTube) The names would probably become different in time, but you get the gist. Amazon and Microsoft could be broken up much the same way, in neat categorical…

Almost all of those businesses tie back into their main business which is advertising.

Who is going to sell those ‘neat silos’ cheap advertising to survive with no other business model? Google?

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

#224

Post by luckylion »

harryf wrote: post #131
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…

Via API access you'd be effectively getting access to the index _plus_ the derivative search quality improvements _based on_ user data, even if you're not getting user data itself. That would certainly open the door to competition, especially on a niche basis e.g. you want to build a platform dedicated to drones - you can combine drone reviews and news with videos plus e-commerce results. The result could be awesome…

> That's probably a key issue here though. Providing an API potentially makes it easier for spammers to identify ways to boost their content in a well automated manner.

How so? Unless you give reasoning for the scores, or provide live updates etc, just putting an API on search wouldn't change much - you can APIfy search now, there are multiple services offering it as a service. Granted, at some point it's getting expensive, but for SEO research, you're probably not running a million queries.

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

#225

Post by whalabi »

Similarly I've been considering lately that the only real easy to break Facebook's monopoly is to target it's network effect, by forcing it to interoperate on some standard protocol, like ActivityPub.

So, say, people could use Google+ (if it was sticking around) to see Facebook content without giving data to Facebook.

Not sure how that would work with Twitter, I guess they'd just show media and clips of text posts.

Honestly I think I'd love it - just choose your favourite social network and only use one.

Up to each network to implement an interface that makes sense.

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

#226

Post by packet_nerd »

tryptophan wrote: post #103
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…

>2) 20 years of experience fighting SEO spam. Tangential - but does anyone else feel that google results are useless a lot of the time? If you search for something, you will get 100% SEO optimized shitty ad-ridden blog/commercial pages giving surface level info about what you searched about. I find for programming/IT topics its pretty good, but for other topics it is horrible. Unless you are very specific with your s…

Someone linked to an interesting site talking about how to make homemade hot sauce here on HNs. I partly read it and thought it was a great clean site and something I wanted to try. Later going back to find it again I literally spent hours searching, even though I'm pretty sure I remembered some of the exact phrases. For some reason recipe related search results are really really terrible on both Google and Bing.

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

#228

Post by empath75 »

dalbasal wrote: post #211

So... this article is a good example of how ??!? it gets once you move from "We gotta do something about these tech monopolies" into the "what should we do?" phase. How exactly "do* you break up a Google or a FB so that (only one possible reason, but the one cited here) they don't control too much media/mind share?^ Laws usually want to be general, and my suggestion doesn't necessarily lend to that, but I'll suggest…

> How exactly "do* you break up a Google or a FB so that (only one possible reason, but the one cited here) they don't control too much media/mind share?^

The problem isn't so much that google has a monopoly on search as that they abuse the monopoly to force their way into new businesses. Force google to spin search off as a separate entity from the rest of the company.

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

#229

Post by aurbano »

GordonS wrote: post #195
b_tterc_p wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people do this? Or do you mean queries forwarded by home assistants trying to parse inputs?

Heh, yes, they do. Which is a reminder that devs are not "typical" users. As a developer, I search using keywords; for example, if I was looking for property for sale in Inverness, I might search for "property Inverness", whereas I've seen and heard "typical" users use something like "find me a 2 bedroom house with a garden for sale in the North of Inverness" - much more verbose, and containing stop words and phrases…

I do the same as you, but was just thinking that if most users search using full sentences then Google will spend most effort optimizing for that, so maybe we're the ones getting the worse results?

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

#230

Post by lallysingh »

jorvi wrote: post #152
dalbasal wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

'Break Google up' would mean you'd have: * an Office suite / enterprise company (Google Cloud + Docs + Gmail + Business) * a phone company (Android) * a search company (Google Search + Advertisement) * and a media company (Google Play Movies, Music, Books and YouTube) The names would probably become different in time, but you get the gist. Amazon and Microsoft could be broken up much the same way, in neat categorical…

Apple's already on it's descent, and at most you'd break off their cloud services, which would immediately die without the support line from the hardware.
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