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The world needs more search engines

0x65.dev

111–120 of 549 posts

Re: The world needs more search engines

#111
post #44

>And empires must fall Why?

I am not a historian, but I cannot think of any empire where there was no coercion. I read it in this context: Empires must fall, because "Absolute power corrupts absolutely". Disclosure: I work at Cliqz.

In fairness, you'd also need to concede that there has never been a single independent village where there was no coercion. Mankind's history is mostly a story of how we have related to each other in forced groupings. (Forced by Mother Nature's many threats in the prehistoric past, but still, forced.)

So is it necessary that every grouping of man, "must fall", because there exists "coercion" in those groupings?

Just as a matter of full disclosure:

My own view is that any grouping must fall only when the grouping provides no, or very little, actual benefit to it's constituent members. Western Rome fell when people in Lutecia, Londonus, or even Ravenna were no longer deriving real benefit from being inside the Roman polity. Which arguably was long before Odoacer finally had enough and put an end to the charade.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#112
How do you design regulation that holds the giants accountable, doesn't impair smaller companies' ability to enter/innovate in the space, and isn't quickly corruptible by the (well-resourced) companies you are trying to control?

We're better served by breaking them up and enforcing and strengthening the pro-competition laws on the books. The government has a pretty mixed record with regulating industry, and a far more impressive record of investigation, enforcement, and prosecution - corporate break-ups are far more in the wheelhouse. Regulation requires constant vigilance, whereas a breakup is self-executing once the case is won.

It's not anti-success rhetoric, so much as an acknowledgement that tech has become increasingly concentrated and anti-democratic. The Sherman Act was passed in 1890 - these aren't "knee jerk" solutions - they've worked effectively in the past to curb corporate abuses.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#114

This seems like a pretty blatant advertisement for their company's "Cliqz Browser". You should at least acknowledge your bias by being transparent enough to show you have a vested interest. It's really disingenuous otherwise, and makes it hard to take what you have to say at face value.

If anything it is likely that it will be the other way around in the near future.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#115
post #71

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them…

I was around too. The problem is you think the Google of 2000 is the Google of 2019. It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game. It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.

[deleted]

Re: The world needs more search engines

#118
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beat me to it! Very happy here as well. I also love the bang short cuts. I am actually at the point where google is clearly inferior. I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your qu…

I’ve tried switching to ddg a number of times in the past. Every time the same thing happens: “This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once” Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch back to google because what’s the point? I really do hope to one day get off of google though.

I use StartPage.com which is based on Google but strips the private data.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#119
post #71

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them…

I'm not sure applying antitrust laws (which have been in place for longer than anyone has been alive) to a monopoly (which has been acting monopolistic for years) qualifies as knee-jerk.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#120
post #73

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…

> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with…

Why do you think Google Search still knows who you are when you search in Incognito mode? (Or, in Firefox, if you open a private browsing window.) How would it know?

There are advertising companies that use fingerprinting for ad targeting, but Google doesn't.

(Disclosure: I work at Google on ads, speaking only for myself)

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