Search engines are not just about quality of results. A reason to use Google is that it's what everyone else uses, so by using it you also get for free a picture of what kind of results everyone else is getting
The world needs more search engines
441–450 of 549 posts
Re: The world needs more search engines
#442Nah, two or more search engines all being the product of US big techs won't solve the problem. EU should have its own search engine. They should subsidize this effort and have Google pay for it.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/18/technology/google-eu-fine-a...
Google already payed a bit, now EU can begin :D
Re: The world needs more search engines
#443We don't need more search engines like google, we need a new kind of engines that will supersede google/bing/etc and break the following axioms:
* search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine
* search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)
* search creates information bubble (that user cannot control) because it tires to satisfy user's expectations
Most likely this new 'google-killer' will be:
* open source, because user should trust the code
* self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS. Our search preferences have ultimate value, no one should have an access to it
* more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine (something like WolframAlpha)
* background reasoning - this engine can work continuously and utilize your own computational resources on notebook/PC and bring you brand new search insights that google never will be able to deliver (because they cannot dedicate a lot of computational resources for each google user).
Sounds good, isn't it?.. Maybe this kind of software already exists, could someone point me out?
Re: The world needs more search engines
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source? It’s in their best interests to also use it for ad targeting (in a plausibly deniable way so they don’t get in trouble). We’ve seen them using dark patterns to coerce users into opting into more data collection, and another advertising company got caught using phone numbers for ad purposes even if they originally promised to only use them for 2FA, so why should we trust them this time ?
Source: I work on ads at Google, and if we were doing this I'm pretty sure I'd know. If it was being used for targeting it would be practical to run an external study demonstrating that.
> external study demonstrating that
I hope you understand the reticence of taking any statement coming from a Google employee defending Google with a grain of salt. You have defended Google in the past only to fall silent when presented with the actual study contradicting you. [0]
It not that you aren't/can't be right, just that the "source" suggests some bias and Google's track record does not work in their favor.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#445Earlier 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?
Yes, just like you can recognize someone by their footsteps. Most likely you don't even need the IP.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#446It 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.
it’s useful for google to demote wikipedia in favor of showing more diverse results. wikipedia is very very very easy for you to just search directly before turning to google
Re: The world needs more search engines
#447There needs to be a new search engine focused on the niche of people who hate the current ad spam/SEO results that Google currently returns. A query like "best headphones" returns results like "The Best Headphones for 2019 | PCMag.com". They've clearly optimized for the mass user base, since the average person is probably fine with a result like that. But I'm willing to bet no one on HN would ever click a link like t…
The discussions button would be 90% of my search if was available. Maybe a filter for popular boards like reddit or hn would be a game changer.
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Re: The world needs more search engines
#448I feel the problem most people have when thinking about monopolies is if a monopoly produces a product that people like right now (e.g. they like the features, they like the cost), people don't see the monopoly as a problem and even will even defend it thinking it's great ("I love company X, they make amazing products, they deserve their success!"). The problem with monopolies is when the company decides to e.g. pric…
Hi, Marc from Cliqz (and one of the authors of the linked article): We at Cliqz do try and others (like mojeek in the UK or Seznam in Czech) are trying as well. But yes, it has very high costs. We did a lot of (I find smart) technical shortcuts (and will explain how in the next days in our blog), but it is still an investment. The main hurdle is however distribution. As said in the article, Google spends 1/4 of their…
search is not close to being a natural monopoly. you are vastly underestimating how strong google’s execution has been. perhaps because you need to convince yourself that you could compete, “if only” ...
Re: The world needs more search engines
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
"... 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…
Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently, but if all of the results in the result page suck then that's not going to help. Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.
> Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers.
Not directly, but it does mean that, say, the second 50% of people that ask the same question will get a better answer than the first 50%.
Google has been able to build fairly accurate instant results based on which sites users were clicking on before. I'd say that a majority of simple general knowledge queries are solved by quoting the first 3 sentences of the wikipedia page that match the search query.
But let's say that there is no easy match to show a quick result for. But after 1000 queries, 98% of users clicked on one particular site on the first page and never went back to the search results. Google then A/B trials how many clicks result from showing that website at the top of the results page in an instant result window. If clicks drastically drop, that's a sign most users are satisfied with that result. They were only able to do that, because of the 1000s of times people typed that query and interacted with the site.
So I'd say that yes, having common questions asked over and over again does help you find the answer that users are looking for.
The funny / scary part here, is that this may not be the correct answer. But it's the answer that satisfies the most users, and is therefore the one that will keep the most people coming back to the Google search engine.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#450It'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..
Hi, Marc from Cliqz. This one haunts us (in HN and also in my dreams). Let's first get one thing clear: It was a terrible blog post. Second: The 1% who had Cliqz installed were actually safer than the ones without. Why? If you use a (most) browsers every keystroke in the URL bar gets send to Google. This is how autosuggest works. This was and is the case with Firefox also. Cliqz in the functionally implemented in Fir…
Obviously using search engine sends search queries to it.. okay. But that experiment was sending most of browsing history, without explicit opt-in. Collecting browsing history from users of popular browser without asking them is just evil. (and it seems you still defend that decision)