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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#121

Post by hnuser77 »

Cliqz plans to make money by, in the future, "deliver[ing] sponsored offers to users based on their interests and browsing history...processed locally based on a remote repository of offers, with no personally identifiable data sent to remote servers"

This is the reason they're pushing their browser and their extension. Privacy wise, this method sounds OK if they really don't send the data (or what ads you see personally) out. I don't mind seeing ads if they are somewhat relevant, non-obtrusive, and not stalking me across the internet.

My first impression about Cliqz search is that it is somewhat viable, but the index is pretty shallow. There are actually a few other search engines with their own index not mentioned by the article (Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu):

* Mojeek. Sometimes really good for obscure sites when you want to "grep the internet" but seems very vulnerable to blogspam and other SEO. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to query this one yet.

* Yippy. Pretty decent index. Cool feature: categorizes search results with a tree on the side, so if you search for "cobbler" you can just remove the pie or shoe results depending on what you're looking for.

* Gigablast / private.sh: private.sh is the new Gigablast proxy run by PIA. Shallow index as well, haven't used it as much.

The search engine market will be up for grabs if Google keeps getting worse at the same pace.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#122

Post by slowenough »

tasubotadas wrote: post #9

>And empires must fall Why?

Why? Because they hit a ceiling of the paradox of development. Development introduces problems that their current system cannot fix, and they face crisis: either breakthrough the ceiling or fail. Usually breakthrough is associated with figuring a new ways to extract more energy from the environment (industrial revolution).

Re: The world needs more search engines

#123

Post by [deleted] »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #109
bko wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: The world needs more search engines

#124

Post by mikl »

keepper wrote: 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 during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity.

They were well behaved when they had competition to worry about. Once they effectively achieved a monopoly, ethics slowly got relegated to the back seat. They started leveraging the search monopoly to take over other industries, to undermine the open web, to engage in political censorship (hello Project Dragonfly) and much more.

Everything you say here is an excellent argument why search should not be a monopoly. We need competition to keep the search engines honest. Regulation won’t help, since orgs like the FCC are vulnerable to regulatory capture, and there’s no other way to "hold them to a higher standard" than taking your business elsewhere. As long as you continue using their products and thus earning them money, they don’t have any reason to care what you think about their business practises.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#125

Post by KirinDave »

keepper wrote: 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…

It's not so much the "anti-success" wars as that Google's story is a microcosm of the "tendency towards monopolies" that ultimately plague the upper end of capitalism.

Even as a Google Employee I agree that the concentration of marketshare and infrastructure that Google has distorts the market. But without radical intervention either by normal humans collectively or by governments using legislative and military power to shape corporations into their vision (again, probably collectively to be effective) the problem can't go away.

At the very least, we need to stop pretending that pointing our the problems of rent economies and monopoly tendencies in capitalism is not "an anti-success rhetoric" but rather a candid and informed discussion. Markets do not function well (defined as delivering utility to the largest number of people, we could of course define this in other ways) when you need to render the player's assets on a log scale.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#126

Post by weinzierl »

purple_ducks wrote: post #47
shadowgovt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was an interesting choice of paraphrase. Does the author realize it's part of a gag where the characters go on to list all of the ways that the Roman government had materially improved quality of life for the people under its rule and thereby make their rebellion seem farcical? ;)

Clearly the author does realise this as is evident by the rest of the sentence, which was included in the quote.

That doesn't make sense. In the movie the joke is clearly on Reg, the guy who says the words "What have the Romans ever done for us?". I still think the author didn't really get the joke...

Re: The world needs more search engines

#127

Post by lawrenceyan »

jefftk wrote: post #61
lawrenceyan wrote: post #15

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.

It seems more like an advertisement/justification/explanation for their search engine?

Yes, according to the post, the "primary benefit" of using Cliqz is so that you can get access to their search engine, which is exclusive to their browser.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#128

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

abbadadda wrote: post #97

> There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model. Does this mean the article is insinuating that DuckDuckGo is dependent on another search engine? Is this true? Or are DDG results organic?

There are prolly only 3 global English language indexes. Google, Bing, Yandex. DDG uses vague language to make themselves look like they are actual search engines, which would make you think they actually index the web.

The truth is they rely largely on Bing and Google results and mostly just rerank them. That's why it's hard to take their PR seriously.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#130

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

soup10 wrote: post #50
shadowgovt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that rhetoric somewhere else, and I expect having Google pay for it will go about as well as having Mexico fund a wall across the border with the US. But the European taxpayer should absolutely pay for it.

making a search engine is not that hard or expensive, getting users to switch to it after decades of relying on and trusting google is

Making a search engine was not hard 20 years ago. But now the internet is filled with so much more crap that it actually is.
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