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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#371

Post by jonathankoren »

clarry wrote: post #241
Aeolun wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

Now do it with random network jitter.

The main problem here is that even if you could do it, why would you? There are over 3.4 billion Internet users in the world. Given that people share IP addresses and even browsers, what's the actually gain identifying someone through typeahead search keystroke jitter? This would spend a lot of effort, and and then tell you what that a cookie doesn't?

I can't imagine that it's actually worth the effort.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#372

Post by LMYahooTFY »

helpPeople wrote: post #65
freediver wrote: post #56

It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page. I see two problems with their approach: 1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset. More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and…

The search results have gotten noticably worse in the last year. When a Wikipedia/encyclopedia article is what I'm looking for, why is Google showing articles? Wikipedia used to be the top result.

SEO is my first guess?

I've noticed things on the spectrum of articles blogspam crowding out the top results in many queries, and that it's substantially more difficult to find forum content discussing related topics to the query. It's a shame, as I think there is often more interesting content on such forums.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#373

Post by green1 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #340
green1 wrote: post #279

There is no way Google doesn't use fingerprinting, or something even more advanced/creepy. I never sign into Google, use private browsing by default and use VPNs (not to hide, just for various location reasons), and Youtube's recommended for you is full of stuff unrelated the current video I'm watching that I've seen before with different IPs and locations/VPNs. Edit: LMAO at the sudden attempt to bury this post with…

As another person who works at Google, I'm pretty sure we don't do this. There's obviously no way I could know for certain. It's a big company. There could be some secret part of the organization that does shady stuff in the shadows. As far as your concerns go, YouTube is still somewhat separated. I can't really speak for Google. I have almost no clue what YouTube is doing. But, this sounds more like a coincidence or…

Maybe Google is different (and this is not about ads), but I don't believe for one second that I'm being tracked on Youtube by anything other than fingerprinting (or some other method unrelated to IP and cookies).

I don't even particularly care that much, but it's still creepy, and I'm genuinely surprised to see denials because I thought fingerprinting was pretty standard these days.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#374

Post by toast0 »

bagacrap wrote: post #240
Aeolun wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google search is not funded by ads any more, they’ll suddenly have a serious problem.

I don't think it would be possible to split off AdWords from Search. Search would either partner with AdWords or roll its own ads and then we'd be back to square one. When Bell Telephone was split it was cut along geographic lines. That would also not work on a tech company for obvious reasons --- software knows no borders. I don't know of a sensible way to break up tech giants because the efficiencies of scale creat…

So, as part of the deal, you prohibit the companies from engaging in the businesses that you broke up. So search, inc can't expand to ads, and adwords can't expand to internet search.

Search, inc is still going to want ads, presumably, so they'll contract with someone. Setup rules for the contract. Maybe require at least N ad providers with each getting a minimum of Y% of pageviews, and contract terms have to be FRAND.

Strongly restrict personal information passing between the companies.

Or, i guess you could go all Bell on them and divide the US into different territories and have Pacific Google and Southewestern Google and what not. Would be kind of weird to geofence search and ads though.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#375

Post by kwhitefoot »

weinzierl wrote: post #126
purple_ducks wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They're German, many Germans are great Python fans. I think you can safely assume they have seen the Life of Brian and analysed it carefully. And yes they got the joke.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#376

Post by tcd »

jefftk wrote: post #333
sgt101 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using random Mac addresses?

The MAC address is not sent to the server, or accessible to web pages client-side, so that wouldn't matter.

It is if you're using Chrome or got any Google related properties installed on your PC.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#377

Post by jonathankoren »

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…

> 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.

That's called typeahead search, and that's how it has always worked since the invention asynchronous HTTP requests.

If you know of someone that sends a trie down to the client containing every possible completion a priori, I'd like know about it.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#378

Post by 3xblah »

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…

"... so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user."

The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance.

If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are looking for "9 times out of 10".

If all people submitting queries on the web are somehow convinced to visit only one website and submit a majority, (hypothetically let's say 93%) of their queries there, then it should be no surprise when that website "magically" starts becoming more "predictive" than other websites in returning "exactly" what searchers are looking for and becomes "by far the best at search".[1]

The question raised by the blog post is whether enabling such "magic" is worth the trade-off of also creating a "panopticon" in that single website. Giving this level of visitation and query traffic to a single website makes any competing website (working off less than 7% of people's queries) seem irrelevant, maybe even pathetic.

Without the enormous traffic, I would surmise the glory of the "empire" (to use the author's chosen term), and its appeal to "followers" (e.g., those who marvel at its "magic"), might dissipate rather quickly.

1. Especially the part of "search" that involves dealing with repeated, similar queries for popular information.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#379

Post by unlinked_dll »

bagacrap wrote: post #240
Aeolun wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google search is not funded by ads any more, they’ll suddenly have a serious problem.

I don't think it would be possible to split off AdWords from Search. Search would either partner with AdWords or roll its own ads and then we'd be back to square one. When Bell Telephone was split it was cut along geographic lines. That would also not work on a tech company for obvious reasons --- software knows no borders. I don't know of a sensible way to break up tech giants because the efficiencies of scale creat…

However Bell was broken up in a consent decree that didn't have to do with its monopoly over the networks, not explicitly at least.

Bell was broken up because they owned Western Electric and used it to vertically integrate the telco stack for the entire country.

A hypothetical breakup of Alphabet could mirror the breakup of the Bell system, as Alphabet controls the data collection -> advertisement stack. Spin off Search + AdWords as an independent business, while services targeting data collection services that feed it (Chrome/Chromium, Android, GSuite, Google Home, etc).

Personally I could see a lot of consumer benefits.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#380

Post by ridgeguy »

unnouinceput wrote: post #236
Aeolun wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. Also search WW2 war stories about radio operators, this technique dates back since then. US Pacific operators always knew which Japanese radio operator was transmitting Morse codes by listening to their typing patterns. And if a human was able to do it, imagine the accuracy of computers in this regard.

I was a ham radio operator for several years. It was easy to ID my frequent contacts by their morse code transmission patterns, and they me. An operator's pattern was called their "fist".
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