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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#471

Post by type0 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #188
david-gpu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say Alphabet and its myriad of ad-supported services, such as Youtube. Instead of serving first-party ads, they would need to serve third-party ads, or charge their users, or a combination of the two (e.g. freemium model). The facebook conglomerate could similarly be broken into Instagram, Facebook, etc. Each would get a portion of their current ad business unit. In terms of software, each baby Facebook could get a f…

They should break Alphabet up into 26 different companies, each getting a different letter.

This is the best logical conclusion so far

Re: The world needs more search engines

#472

Post by greggman2 »

jefftk wrote: post #120
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with…

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)

Was this proof that google ads uses fingerprinting?

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331960/why-is-stack...

Re: The world needs more search engines

#473

Post by 3xblah »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #470
3xblah wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For such a simple question, why wouldn't you just use Wikipedia?

In any event, neither a blog nor Wikipedia would likely be a "primary source". Maybe something like a driver license would be a primary source.

It could be that you have a "philosphical objection" to "copy-pasted crap and artifically inflated content". I wonder if Google could have a role in encouraging the continued existence of this stuff. The effective opacity it creates seemingly justifies having an entity like Google.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#474

Post by jefftk »

greggman2 wrote: post #472
jefftk wrote: post #120

Earlier 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)

Was this proof that google ads uses fingerprinting? https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331960/why-is-stack...

Reading the link, it sounds like that's (a) fraud detection and not targeting and (b) a third party, IAS, that the advertiser is including in their ads

Re: The world needs more search engines

#475

Post by ummonk »

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…

I don’t think it played a role here but note that incognito mode doesn’t mask your IP so the results will still be somewhat personalized.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#476

Post by phendrenad2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #325
phendrenad2 wrote: post #318

Search engines are really a relic from back when everyone had their own webpage. Now everyone posts their content on a handful* of sites - Medium, Reddit, StackOverflow. I think what we need is an inversion of the search engine model... instead of a web crawler scouring the web for new pages, these handful of companies (Medium, Reddit, thousands more) should register with the search engines and push sitemaps regularl…

> Search engines are really a relic from back when everyone had their own webpage. Now everyone posts their content on a handful of sites but: > since the internet is so vast now that only Google/Microsoft/Yandex can afford the server/bandwidth fees to crawl it. Is it a vast space that search engines need to crawl, or are there only a handful of sites that matter?

There are a handful of vast sites that matter.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#477

Post by ummonk »

3xblah wrote: post #473
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For such a simple question, why wouldn't you just use Wikipedia? In any event, neither a blog nor Wikipedia would likely be a "primary source". Maybe something like a driver license would be a primary source. It could be that you have a "philosphical objection" to "copy-pasted crap and artifically inflated content". I wonder if Google could have a role in encouraging the continued existence of this stuff. The effecti…

I can’t just enter my question in to Wikipedia and get an answer back, as I can with google as the default search bar. Why would I use Wikipedia when it is more work than googling?

Re: The world needs more search engines

#478

Post by lolinder »

lucb1e wrote: post #160
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…

To be fair, that example query is more of a personal assistant kind of question. If I want to know who played in that movie, either I know which site has that information (IMDB) and go there directly, or I search for something like "actors spiderman movie ". If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop…

Like it or not, NL queries are exactly what most internet users want. Without them, any search engine is doomed to remain a niche product used exclusively by the very privacy-conscious.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#479

Post by saalweachter »

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…

> The article rightly points out that Google is a new "Cambridge Analytica"...

One of the most amusing patterns, both in newspapers and on HN, is how often whenever Facebook does something wrong, the response is "this is why Facebook and Google should be regulated/destroyed/broken up".

Re: The world needs more search engines

#480

Post by CivBase »

I love DDG. In my experience, Google still usually does a better job but DDG is good enough 90% of the time and bang searches make it trivial to handle that remaining 10%.

I recognize that there is still room to improve DDG's search quality. However, I wonder if DDG or any competitor can ever get as good as Google without collecting user data and using that to contextualize searches.

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