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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#241

Post by clarry »

Aeolun wrote: post #201
hu3 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keystrokes + IP = NSA knows exactly what I'm typing. This "feature" should be off by default on any software that claims to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome.

Can you ID someone positively by their typing patterns and an IP?

You most likely can. Just listening to people type on a keyboard gives a very unique feel with each person. Try it sometime, listen to family members and colleagues type or find some youtube video. I can ID all my family members and some coworkers by the sound of their typing.

Obviously, if you can get the content of what they're typing, it gets much easier still. I think I've seen papers where they ID programmers based on the code they've produced. This applies to other types of writing too.

You can build a model from keystroke timings and figure out people's SSH passwords too. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec01/full_papers/song/...

Re: The world needs more search engines

#243

Post by turk73 »

mikl wrote: post #124
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…

When they started doing partisan Democrat shit like screwing with legitimate searches to place their favored information at the top or just simply diminish the importance of other points of view, they went evil big time. We can't survive this and still be free people. We will end up like China and it doesn't matter how we got there. If corporations are doing this to us, then corporations are the enemy of the people.

And look, the brave kids in Hong Kong are the ones we ought to be emulating RIGHT NOW because if we wait until we are as weak as them, we're screwed, just like they are. The reason they are fighting now is because they finally realized they have no future but a gunshot to the back of the head and a quick fall into a ditch, covered over by a bulldozer. That is your future under collectivism--the boot on your neck forever with no escape, which is what modern day China is right now.

The only way to avoid it is to have INDIVIDUAL rights and have government and its fascist corporations treat you like an individual and value your rights. Corporations are doing the collectivizing that our government can't do, but imagine a corporation with the power to kill you. That's the course America is on right now.

If you want my true opinion, I don't think we get back out now without bloodshed. The oligarchs believe us to be doormats and without push back we are doormats.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#244

Post by FabHK »

beatgammit wrote: post #234
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…

Have you considered using !sp (StartPage) instead? It essentially does "incognito mode" for you.

Can use the !s bang in DuckDuckGo.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#245

Post by ma2rten »

1024core wrote: post #198
pythux wrote: post #3

Absolutely love this quote from the article: > Paraphrasing Monty Python: “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall. I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search busine…

> We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole. There are plenty of alternatives. But people don't use them as much because they are worse . Consider Bing ( http://www.bing.com/ ). It is backed by a company even bigger than Google. MSFT's market cap is 1.155T; Google's is 899B. MSFT is 30% bigger than Google. Why h…

I have spent a few billion dollars and they were not successful.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#246

Post by nostrademons »

zozbot234 wrote: post #212
xixixao wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How do you break up a software system? Turn the relevant parts of it (the ones which are affected by network effects, or other barriers to entry) into an open platform that can be accessed on an equal basis. That's quite a bit easier than breaking up a mining company. For example, Android is already "broken up" from this POV, since the likes of Amazon can use AOSP to create their own Google-free platform, and appli…

What's the relevant part of building a search engine that's affected by network effects?

Is it the index itself? There's already a fairly decent open-source equivalent to that in the form of Common Crawl, which has been out since 2011. People (including me) have tried to build search engines off of it, but it never seems to work quite as well as Google.

Is it the computing infrastructure? That's already been commoditized and offered as a service by multiple providers - AWS, Azure, GCP, SoftLayer, etc.

Is it the serving infrastructure? Commoditized by ElasticSearch, which uses many of the same techniques as Mustang and in many ways does it better.

Is it the ranking algorithm? It used to be that Google would agree with you. However, the ranking algorithm changes basically continuously - the one in use now is very different from the one that was used when I left in 2014, which was different from the one where I learned how it worked in 2011. I've heard the new one is heavily machine-learning based: given a suitable training set and some learning-to-rank papers you could construct something similar.

Is it the log & clickthrough data? Imagine the privacy advocate conniptions if that were open-sourced. AOL got in huge trouble when they open-sourced their click-logs circa 2002.

Is it the evaluation system? Mechanical Turk exists, and Google's rater guidelines are public.

I'd argue that the real competitive advantage of Google now is the brand and associated consumer habits, and it's really hard to break up a brand. Same reason Coca-Cola remains dominant 150 years after they started selling cocaine-laced sugar water. This is a recurrent problem in the economy today - brands fuel not just Google, but also other giant monopolies like Coke, Nike, J&J, P&G, DeBeers, McDonalds, Wells Fargo, and so on, and in many cases the companies that own them get to practice some exceptionally bad behavior. But short of reaching into each consumer's head and getting them to consider each purchase on purely rational factors, I don't see how to fix this.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#247

Post by FabHK »

lucb1e wrote: post #160
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…

Indeed. I'm happy to forego Google and then (in cases like this) click once more to figure it out myself.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#248

Post by wczekalski »

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…

As many people point out, breaking up is a reductive measure. The whole legal and technical process of breaking Google up would be 10 years? Maybe longer? I heard some tech journalists give those numbers; don't quote me on that.

If you really want to change the landscape and make it actually feasible, force companies to expose APIs or impose standards on them. Both of these are very hard things to do in practice but at least they give a hope of a better future - increasing competition.

Breaking up big tech, depending on the specifics, will cause either worse productivity or (in the best case) change nothing.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#249

Post by ddingus »

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 is not anti success. Tons of us got good value and watched Google do great things.

Now that they have that success, lacking threats, the value is evaporating.

Lots of people do not care how much others make. If the value is there, world better, game on!

But, getting very large amounts of money and those things aren't really happening and lots of people will definitely express negatives about it.

As they should.

I see links are back in my search results now. But my trust is not back with those links. I have found all the other search tools I need and am using them, encouraging greater success.

These companies with almost impossible to think about type large amounts of money can be doing better by people. Expecting that makes great sense.

And where that is not effective, seeking various remedies does too.

Competition, use of the State, protest, all on the table.

Anyone concerned about the potential impact of those things is completely free to avoid them. Just make sure the value to people is there and they won't really care about the money.

Knee jerk, break them up helped create this net we are seeing consolidated and increasingly devoid of value.

People calling for that again is understandable.

Finally, breakups are super expensive. A real, material threat of that happening makes for a real, material cost and risk assessment, which can justify hedging all of that with better value to the people too.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#250

Post by clarry »

smolder wrote: post #205
hu3 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keystrokes + IP = NSA knows exactly what I'm typing. This "feature" should be off by default on any software that claims to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome.

It's been my impression that privacy from the NSA is, realistically, not something any commercially viable web company can offer you. An exception can probably be made for a site that operates outside of US influence serving customers outside US influence.

Uhh, most products can offer plenty enough defense against opportunistic blanket surveillance (but broadcasting your keystrokes is probably not going to help there). Protection against targeted attacks is a whole different story.
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