is it just me or the site can't be reached?
The world needs more search engines
251–260 of 549 posts
Re: The world needs more search engines
#252We all get a vote on this. I moved to firefox, duckduckgo and protonmail, but still use youtube (with ad blocker).
Re: The world needs more search engines
#253Earlier 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…
>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.
Doesn't this run counter to private property though? Or what would you have happen when Google says "no"?
Re: The world needs more search engines
#254Absolutely 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…
Maybe the solution is not in the free market, but by taking the background of pubmed and create a search.gov.
No ads, no algorithms, no bullshit ranking and metrics, no tracking, just pure boolean search with a heavy handed spam filter and jam packed with features for the sake of utility and not engagement.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Isn't "project dragonfly" the Google search engine version for China? Google was trying to comply with the law. It's a law you might not agree with, but come on. The reason all these governments want Google split up is more censorship, not less. From torrents to negative reporting on EU commissars. From everyone's interpretation of hate speech to pages pointing out that sometimes social services are the abusers in ch…
How would breaking up a company help censorship? Surely it's easier to censor one entity than many.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
> So you're confirming that Google tracks you without using fingerprinting methods? That's literally the opposite of what s/he just said. The person you're responding asked "How would it know?", implying that they (while being on the Google ads team) think there is no way to know without fingerprinting (or cookies from non-incognito mode).
Right: fingerprinting is the general term for using something other than client-side storage (cookies, local storage) to determine identity. Incognito mode and other private sessions intentionally don't preserve client-side storage.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#257I think it's strange that companies like France (and Germany, UK, Japan, etc) don't pass a law saying "Only French companies may service web search requests originating in France". Web search is basically going to be a monopoly, so they might as well try to ensure that the vast economic rents created by the monopoly go to one of their one companies.
There is a very strong national security argument here: you don't want your citizens' web searches to be controlled by a foreign company, even if you're nominally allied with the country, because of the immense political power that control of web search entails.
This kind of policy would unite the populists on both the left and the right. The left would like the idea of redistributing money away from big American technobillionaires to local businesses, while the right would appreciate putting the interests of the nation first.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
google records: ip address, browser fingerprinting. Try visiting from tor
For spam / bot / fraud detection, yes. For ad targeting, no.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#259This is cool. But some criticism. UI seems a bit janky. Results are good but visually presented in a way it's hard to tell each result card from the next. Cliqz is a bad name, even tho you may want the world to be a cyberpunk dystopia where renegade hackers control the outposts of civilization, Google has not fallen yet, pick a name the 99% can relate to. And get Machiavellian ... if you're really gonna beat Google,…
[disclaimer I work at Cliqz]
We are all ears on ideas on how to beat Google :-)
But on a serious note; i do not think that the aim is to beat Google because of Google but because on the monopoly they have on the access to the information. And that's why we are building a potential alternative there.
Attacking from a different domain, might beat Google on that area, or let's go wild here, perhaps even on revenue, but would not fix the problem we wanted to fix to the begin with.
"Replicating" 99% of the functionality with a quality to be good enough is a very valid option IMHO. Otherwise if one decides to leave Google, where do they go? If they do not want to advertise on Google, where do they go? There are too few alternatives, there are many names, but most of them are aggregators (full or partial). That said, if besides Bing, there would be 4 or 5 like them (or better), then yes, I concede that Cliqz as is, would make no sense.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 commodit…
"Search" isn't a problem. Monetization ecosystem is.