I want alternatives too - they are good for the consumer.
This article was negative to the point of being unreadable. This is not how you disrupt.
The world needs more search engines
171–180 of 549 posts
Re: The world needs more search engines
#172>And empires must fall Why?
Because they only serve their own systemic survival and we have other systems of power and governance that can do more on top of this.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#173It’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…
> they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity
Were. When though? The founders said in their original university paper that selling advertising was wrong and would inherently corrupt a search engine. Of course once they realised how much money was being made in search, that fundamental tenet of don't be evil lapsed before the phrase was even coined.
History and Google's progress of updates seems to have borne their claim out. Google is worse than it was, in good measure as they have twisted results to push more sales. It's a shopping search first and foremost, and frankly not a very good search any more. With an obscene overreach of data gathering that is almost impossible to evade. Every opportunity to gather data they gather more. Remember the Google war driving guy who "accidentally" gathered all that extra wifi info from streetview cars? Entirely by accident. How many believe in that "accident" who isn't on Google payroll?
So no, I don't see it as anti-success, more that they became far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive - e.g. demanding everyone train the self-driving fleet to pass a captcha. Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition.
Given they have the data, and the holy trinity of search, advertising and monitoring, regulation is not enough. Split off advertising or analytics and monitoring, or break it up some other way. That's to serve the public interest, not as some anti-success crusade.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#174Some feedbacks about the product.
I made some typical searches I do in my job. They returned reasonable results. Impossible to know if they are better or worse than Google. I need some days of usage. I'll do my best to keep using it this week.
Maybe autodecting the language would help. It gave me a German page without any obvious way to change to English.
I went to the settings, changed the language and discovered that it wants to know my country. I left Germany because it looks like profiling and I don't want to help them at it.
Then I disabled every feature (news, weather, etc). I'm interested into a search engine, not into a portal from the 90s.
However I'm afraid that Cookies Autodelete and other privacy extensions will delete those settings and I'll have to do it again. I'll probably hide them with uBlock Origin. For the language a URL ending with something like ?lang=en would be great for bookmarks.
And finally, do we need more independent search engines? Yes, definitely.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#175How 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…
Just to continue picking on Google:
Google has:
- Android OS
- Nest
- Search
- Advertising
- Chromebooks
- Pixel
- YouTube
- Google Cloud
There are clear lines where they could be broken up.
I’m not saying they should be broken up.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#176How 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…
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
Fair point - there are certain cases where software platforms are too valuable and complex to break up, and should be regulated like utilities with rules for fair play. Amazon shouldn't be able to use it's marketplace data to monopolize entire categories, Google Search needs to be a public platform, with regulated rates for API access (which Google itself will have to abide by).
You don't have to break up many software systems to prevent the worst abuses. Facebook can keep the knowledge graph, but they can't keep WhatsApp or Instagram. Amazon can keep their store, but they can't own a FedEx competitor or AWS - those need to be broken off. Google can keep Search, but Ads, Doubleclick, Analytics, Waze, GCP, Google Home - all of that needs to be broken up.
Some of the resulting businesses may have to update their model or may not remain profitable, but historically break-ups have resulted in an increase in value for the new businesses.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#177Was 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…
Hey, I work at Cliqz. We have an advertising model, but it does not rely on any personal data. We have also experimented with paid products and we would love for it to be a viable option. Unfortunately, experience suggests that very few people are willing to pay. So we are exploring many options; what they all have in common though is privacy by design. We do not, and do not want to collect personal data.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#178Hmm, cliqz.com is in the blocklists of several DNS servers I'm using, so are they the underdogs we need to cheer for against Google et al, or are they some shady spammers as determined by the community of adblock list maintainers?
Re: The world needs more search engines
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is factually incorrect: https://beta.cliqz.com
You're right, instead of saying exclusive feature I should have stuck with 'primary'. I can see how those two words have different enough meanings to cause confusion.
Though it's important to remember that not everyone on here has English as their first language, and we should generally be considerate of that when reading people's comments.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I would think that undergoing a rebellion or civil war after which the form of governance changes marks the end of an empire, even if the territorial lines are not redrawn.
Depends on how you look at it I guess. The history of the Chinese empire had periods of relative stability, separated by periods of rebellion, civil war, and strife, sometimes hundreds of years long. There were even periods where the empire was ruled by outsiders.
At the end of any given dynasty, it would be hard to say whether the empire is truly crumbling, or merely transitioning to a new dynasty. Who knows, maybe 1,000 years from now communism and the period of strife in the 20th century will just be seen as an unstable period preceding a dynastic transition.