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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#461

Post by vivekd »

runarberg wrote: post #396
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…

You are wrong. When a product makes the world a worse place—say fridges that deplete the ozone layer—the right thing to do is to ban the product. In the case of petroleum fueled cars, they are significantly contributing to a massive climate emergency and should be banned regardless of the existence of a superior product. In the case of the Google search engine... Well in the case of the Google company, it should be f…

That's such a vague standard - every single big company has people claiming they make the world a worse place, are we going to break up nestle, every oil company, every agribusiness and pharmaceutical and car company along with google? That could make the world a much worse place

Re: The world needs more search engines

#463

Post by summerlight »

scarface74 wrote: post #456
summerlight wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire ecosystem running on iOS/OS X. This is exclusive on Apple produced hardware, which effectively forms a single relevant market as you cannot easily substitute this with others even if there's a small but significant and non-transitory increase in price. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_but_significant_and_non-...

So is that how you define monopoly now? Does that make all of the console makers monopolies over their platforms? Does that mean that Apple also has a “monopoly on voice assistants that can be used with AirPods”? Does it also have a monopoly on apps that can be run on the “HomePods”? Does every smart TV manufacturer with their own OS also have a “monopoly” on their ecosystem? Let’s go further down the rabbit hole. Do…

This is not how I defined a monopoly, but a well established practice done by DoJ of the US. Defining a relevant market is not that clear and simple as you described, but it's more of an economical, data-driven process. Look up for hypothetical monopolist test.

I just explained one possible scenario how this could be defined as a relevant market and you're now throwing a bunch of random assumptions on my comment. I would read the link thoroughly (it explicitly mentions DoJ?) and study more on the history of the antitrust law and its applications before doing such.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#464

Post by heisenhuegel »

netfl0 wrote: post #12
meerita wrote: post #5

I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.

Beat me to it! Very happy here as well. I also love the bang short cuts. I am actually at the point where google is clearly inferior. I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your qu…

Bangs are nice in DDG. In Cliqz, there is also limited support, but you have to put it at the end ("test !g"): https://beta.cliqz.com/

Re: The world needs more search engines

#465

Post by [deleted] »

wasdfff wrote: post #254
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The world needs more search engines

#466

Post by biasedOpinion »

wasdfff wrote: post #254
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…

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.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, all opinions are my own.

>just pure boolean search

So if I just repeat the word Facebook a hundred times in my personal website, I'd rank higher than facebook.com when people search for "facebook"?

I think simple boolean search works for things like searching books in a library, where you can assume good faith from all the authors. But in the web you can't do that. It's just too easy to game.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#467

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

FabHK wrote: post #291
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are prolly only 3 global English language indexes. Google, Bing, Yandex. DDG uses vague language to make themselves look like they are actual search engines, which would make you think they actually index the web. The truth is they rely largely on Bing and Google results and mostly just rerank them. That's why it's hard to take their PR seriously.

DDG's main selling point is that they respect your privacy. I could not care less where they get their results from. As such, I continue to take their "PR" seriously.

All I'm saying is it's pointless to consider them a realistic competitor of Google, Bing etc. when they basically punt over the most crucial infra aspect of being a search engine and when their service is more akin to querying the Bing API from a headless browser and mildly rearranging the results.

It's also clear that they try to obfuscate this fact by claiming "more than 500 signals / sources", which means they feel that being more upfront about the truth would work against them.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#468

Post by scarface74 »

summerlight wrote: post #463
scarface74 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is that how you define monopoly now? Does that make all of the console makers monopolies over their platforms? Does that mean that Apple also has a “monopoly on voice assistants that can be used with AirPods”? Does it also have a monopoly on apps that can be run on the “HomePods”? Does every smart TV manufacturer with their own OS also have a “monopoly” on their ecosystem? Let’s go further down the rabbit hole. Do…

This is not how I defined a monopoly, but a well established practice done by DoJ of the US. Defining a relevant market is not that clear and simple as you described, but it's more of an economical, data-driven process. Look up for hypothetical monopolist test. I just explained one possible scenario how this could be defined as a relevant market and you're now throwing a bunch of random assumptions on my comment. I w…

So if it “well defined” by the DOJ, you should be able to find a specific example where a minority vertically integrated platform vendor was declared a “monopoly” and specific remediation steps were enforced. Not a Wikipedia article.

If that were the case, every single console maker since the mid 80s would be declared a monopoly. Why hasn’t that happened?

Re: The world needs more search engines

#469

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The world needs more search engines

#470

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

3xblah wrote: post #433
nojvek wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I am not a Google search user so I am not sure what they are doing with "cards", however it sounds as though they are trying more to themselves become a "secondary source" (versus, e.g., just providing some "context" around the matched terms). The goal being that the user never has to leave the Google website. For example, say the film credits for Spiderman is a "primary source", and a cast list for Spiderman derived…

You might find this philosophically objectionable but the truth is that most people go to Google to find answers, not "primary or secondary sources", and are therefore better served by the answer fished out and presented to them.

It's also another matter that so much of the internet is now filled with copy-pasted crap and artificially inflated content that it's actually hard to find what you are looking for on the so-called primary source webpages. If I want to find George Clooney's age, I don't want to sift through a 2000 page ad-ridden Page3-esque gossip blog about him.

At the same time, when I want detailed info about something, I will go in and try to read through the primary material.

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