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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#151

Post by mikl »

xixixao wrote: post #134
arrosenberg wrote: post #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 mor…

My biggest problem is: How do you break up a software system? I understand how you break up a company that mines ore, produces steel, builds railways, runs transportation - those are all separable ventures that can negotiate contracts almost as easily as when they had a single owner. But the tech giants run a single system: Amazon in the delivery, FB in the social graph (DB), Google in the knowledge graph. Those woul…

Split the search from Adsense. Allow the search company to only sell ads on its own properties so they can’t reestablish ad-hegemony. For good measure, ban them from making their own browser.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#153

Post by weinzierl »

tpllaha wrote: post #135
weinzierl wrote: post #82

I looked into the Cliqz browser a few years a ago. Back then they claimed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome. What I found back then is that they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers. They outright lied about that in their terms. For me their mission is pretty clear: Google ate Burda's ad cookies and now they are trying to get their hands into the cookie jar again. Given that…

They have an autosuggest feature in the browser which shows search results as you type. Goes without saying that this requires a request per keystroke. If each request contained a unique user id, that would be concerning, but that is not the case. that the search query itself goes to their servers is just common sense, but those requests are anonymized. (Disclaimer: I'm a former employee)

Oh, the requests contained much more than the keystrokes and I looked into the anonymization claims as well. I'd have to dig out my Wireshark traces to tell you exactly what was transmitted, but I'm pretty sure it was enough to id the user. And by the way Cliqz never claimed that the anonymization happens at the endpoint, from what I remember they were very proud of their proprietary anonymization technology in the backend.

And just one more thing: In Google Chrome at least I can turn off auto-suggest. This was not possible in the version of the Cliqz browser I tested.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#154

Post by entangledqubit »

While I am curious about their search tech, it would be nice if they posted a blog post about their business model so we can understand their incentives up front.

While I'm wishing, it would be nice to hear about how they anonymize their logs. Their privacy notice only really mentions scrubbing associated IP addresses - which may not be sufficient.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#155

Post by rolph »

softwaredoug wrote: post #28

What would a different search engine do to differentiate it from Google? If the answer is privacy, that’s a niche already occupied by DDG. What other ways could a web search engine differentiate itself to be worth customers using more than one?

allow the end user to tweak the search criterion easily. there are times when i dont want the "most relevant" results. i want things like historical order or alphabetic order. or even in order of ISBN number.

i really miss using an image itself for query terms.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#156

Post by detaro »

dewey wrote: post #140

Was looking at that Cliqz company out of curiosity and while browsing their job page ( https://cliqz.com/en/about/careers/campaign-manager ) saw this: "MyOffrz is opening a brand new marketing discipline: Browser Based Performance Marketing. This innovative technology makes it possible to show users discounts, special offers and valuable information with true added value within the browser. As a 100% subsidiary of Cl…

Their entire premise is that they can do an ad-financed product with less invasive tracking. Obviously, that involves advertising people.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#158

Post by bogwog »

jefftk wrote: post #120
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

So you're confirming that Google tracks you without using fingerprinting methods? That's not really surprising considering how much they data have on people.

It's also a good example of their monopoly position; Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, advertising and analytics code on almost every website, ownership of multiple of the most popular websites and services on the internet puts them in a unique position that no one could ever hope to compete with realistically. Competitors have to rely on imperfect fingerprinting whereas Google can probably detect you with more accuracy than a DNA test.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#159

Post by david-gpu »

xixixao wrote: post #134
arrosenberg wrote: post #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 mor…

My biggest problem is: How do you break up a software system? I understand how you break up a company that mines ore, produces steel, builds railways, runs transportation - those are all separable ventures that can negotiate contracts almost as easily as when they had a single owner. But the tech giants run a single system: Amazon in the delivery, FB in the social graph (DB), Google in the knowledge graph. Those woul…

Say Alphabet and its myriad of ad-supported services, such as Youtube. Instead of serving first-party ads, they would need to serve third-party ads, or charge their users, or a combination of the two (e.g. freemium model).

The facebook conglomerate could similarly be broken into Instagram, Facebook, etc. Each would get a portion of their current ad business unit.

In terms of software, each baby Facebook could get a flexible royalty-free license to all the software currently owned by Facebook, and they would be free to derive from it to differentiate over time.

If there is a will, there is a way.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#160

Post by lucb1e »

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…

To be fair, that example query is more of a personal assistant kind of question. If I want to know who played in that movie, either I know which site has that information (IMDB) and go there directly, or I search for something like "actors spiderman movie ".

If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.

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