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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#411

Post by mrweasel »

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…

When DDG doesn't yield the results I'm looking for, I will frequently try Google, but more and more I find that if DuckDuckGo can't find the results that I want, then neither can Google. What Google can do however, is annoy me with results that it knows to be wrong, because it is excluded the most specific part of my query. Google will remove the bit that absolutely had to be in the query, to get more hits on the majority of the remaining words.

In the end, I think most people could use either Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo and be happy with the results. It's just that we're stuck on "Google is the best search engine", and while that may be true in some technical sense, many of the other search engines are just as good for most of us.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#412

Post by nojvek »

3xblah wrote: post #378
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 look…

There’s some truth to that but Google also has a massive knowledge graph. For imdb and freebase like queries they can give very accurate answers as cards. Other humans don’t need to teach every single fact. They just need to teach how to extract and organize facts from a site.

When you see google giving you a one/two word answer as a card, that’s very likely coming from it’s knowledge graph.

What we need is more of this open knowledge graphs. Google and Wolfram Alpha are both closed sources but have deep understanding in niche domains.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#413

Post by DavideNL »

visarga wrote: post #118
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried switching to ddg a number of times in the past. Every time the same thing happens: “This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once” Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch back to google because what’s the point? I really do hope to one day get off of google though.

I use StartPage.com which is based on Google but strips the private data.

"Startpage is now owned by an advertising company" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

Re: The world needs more search engines

#414

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #403

Because you can inject your ad network ( https://myoffrz.com/en/fuer-nutzer/ ) more easily if you have your own search engine, people like Google don't let you use your own ads on their results generally. I don't disagree with the premise, after all I was part of a team that tried to do the same thing (well, without the ad network) and discovered that the adtech business has become so corrupt (not that it is all corr…

Curious what you mean by "corrupt" here. I'm genuinely curious as I've never worked at a company in ad-tech before, so it's always fascinating got me to hear from insiders.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#415

Post by garaetjjte »

It's hard to take their "privacy by design" seriously. It is the same Cliqz that partnered before with Mozilla to run "experiment" exfiltrating browsing history (!) of 1% of new installs in Germany: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

I thought Mozilla would loss all their credibility after this, but somehow they still market as privacy-focused..

Re: The world needs more search engines

#417

Post by weberc2 »

mrweasel wrote: post #411
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…

When DDG doesn't yield the results I'm looking for, I will frequently try Google, but more and more I find that if DuckDuckGo can't find the results that I want, then neither can Google. What Google can do however, is annoy me with results that it knows to be wrong, because it is excluded the most specific part of my query. Google will remove the bit that absolutely had to be in the query, to get more hits on the maj…

I’ve found the opposite. For the last year, I have to resort to Google more and more often. DDG was on par with Google when I started using it a couple years ago, but it has managed to get worse and worse over time. Note that I’m specifically claiming DDG’s performance has degraded; not just that it has remained the same while Google’s has improved.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#418

Post by pheug »

nostrademons wrote: post #246
zozbot234 wrote: post #212

Earlier 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…

> Is it the log & clickthrough data?

It's a huge advantage and critical ingredient for ranking in all major websearch engines as far as I know. Google gets billions of queries and clicks every day. Your startup? Pretty much none of that. How are you going to train your ranking algorithm with no 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.

Right, logs with such level of detail as individual user sessions would never get public for this reason, too much legal risk. But even simple aggregated datasets of the form "how many clicks did this query-url pair get" would be very useful to bootstrap a competitor and can be anonymized much more effectively.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#420

Post by t0astbread »

buboard wrote: post #267

Google's business is advertising, not search. That's where their monopoly lies and that's where competition is needed. We probably don't need many other search engines. There is only so many improvements to be done in search. Over the years, information has been distilled. Google's main use is as a misspelling corrector, a wikipedia shortcut, a DNS shortcut, a keyword lookup for the news of the day and a product matc…

I think I get what you're saying but I'm not sure this is the right approach. It's accepting diminished rights in exchange for a stable compromise versus fighting for an absolutist solution at the risk of breaking the whole system.

And personally I'd rather have no internet at all than an internet that's a weird murky tracking soup where a hundred different parties are creepily looking over my shoulder, knowing more about me than what I would tell even my closest friends and family.

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