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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#531

Post by chinesempire »

shadowgovt wrote: post #348
chinesempire wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, if you use a custom definition for everything and cherry pick informations, everything is possible. But no, it wasn't just the end of the government, it also meant losing almost 30% of its territory. https://imgur.com/r/mapporn/Cdi6KOL > In the same sense that the US and UK are empires. UK was an empire, and it's already fallen, it is now on the brink of losing even the Kingdom and becoming an Island hosti…

I'm going by the Wikipedia definition, to wit: "An imperial political structure can be established and maintained in two ways: (i) as a territorial empire of direct conquest and control with force or (ii) as a coercive, hegemonic empire of indirect conquest and control with power." The US and China are the latter. The UK's power has slipped, but it's still in this category with extraterritorial colonies. A specific e…

But the Chinese Empire has already fallen and changed radically, U.S.S.R. is not the same thing as the Russian Empire, even though they shared most of the same territory.

The point was that every empire falls sooner or later and that it happened to China as well.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#532

Post by summerlight »

scarface74 wrote: post #502
summerlight wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I already told you that the market defining process is a very case-specific one and big techs now are unprecedented. Why are you trying to find applicable prior arts on such cases? You asked how Apple can be monopoly on a market and I gave you o…

I already told you that the market defining process is a very case-specific one and big techs now are unprecedented. Why are you trying to find applicable prior arts on such cases? Maybe because I don’t believe that people can randomly make up definitions instead of citing precedent? There has been multiple antitrust lawsuits and investigations on Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft for their gaming consoles while their exe…

> Maybe because I don’t believe that people can randomly make up definitions instead of citing precedent?

While you're trying to frame my argument as "make up definitions", the reality is not; this is a standard practice since 1982. Spend your time on searching and studying the topic, not mine. This is an area of vast complexities and I don't think it's effective to spend my time to enlighten you.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/operationalizing-hypothetical-mo...

> where was the government intervention? Where were the consent decrees? Lawsuits?

Your ignorant in the topic doesn't necessarily mean an actual lack of a prior. In Nintendo v. Atari case, there was not much arguments on the market definition, but its practice was illegal or not. Yes, I've been talking only about the market definition and you're intentionally conflating the concept of the relevant market definition and antitrust violation. Don't do that. And please don't even try to say "come up with evidence". You can spend your time on studying this.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#533

Post by dang »

green1 wrote: post #527
dang wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP comment was teetering on the edge of that rule, and maybe toppled onto the wrong side. But your comment was way over from the beginning. I'm not aware of high karma affecting how we do HN moderation. We ask people not to break the rules when we see them breaking the rules. Sometimes we reply to everyone in a thread who did that, but not always—perfect consistency isn't possible. Nor is it necessary, because so…

> But your comment was way over from the beginning. Honestly bemused by this. How is the following single sentence way over the line , other than the parts I quoted (which amount to about half of it)? So your personal experience does nothing less than illustrate Google's tracking to an "obvious" degree, but my personal experience is simply "making a sweeping judgement" and "confusing this with knowledge for the sake…

That wasn't a simple question. It was a sarcastic lashing-out. You've omitted your own punch line ("Thanks for clearing that up") in order to make it sound more neutral than it was.

The difference is that the GP was not primarily bilious and was making a point about something else, even if it crossed into personal territory slightly. Your comment was only about how pissed off you were about that. When threads get to this nasty meta place ("so your foo is nothing less than a bar while my baz is simply a bing. thanks for clearing that up"), conversation is dead. Letting downvotes and flags trigger you into adding indignant edits is another tell-tale sign.

I know that it smarts to get burned by another comment and yes, the GP should have been more thoughtful, but users here need to work on metabolizing such feelings rather than just pumping them back into the thread. Otherwise we just end up with nastiness. Anyone who wants to work on themselves in that way is welcome here, but if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The world needs more search engines

#534

Post by arrosenberg »

icotyl wrote: post #383
arrosenberg wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google/Facebook/Amazon have been acting anti-competitively for quite a while. Vertical integration, concentrating industry through M&A, shady data practices. A democratic country has an interest in ensuring that our labor and goods markets also remain open, competitive, and democratic in nature. We've made this choice as a country repeatedly throughout our history, and it's time to do it again.

Many companies across many industries vertically integrate. Should they all be broken up? “Shady data practices” is hand-wavey and non-specific. What do you mean? Many companies today (again, across All industries) have had issues with keeping user data secure, selling it to untrustworthy third parties, not giving users transparency or controls in what information is shared, etc. Google’s track record in these areas…

To a substantial degree, yes. Vertical integration reduces the dynamism of the market.

I used a cover-all term, because there are too many to really name. Facebook is a co-conspirator in defrauding American elections, Amazon uses their data to kill small businesses, Google has been repeatedly fined in the EU for using search anti-competitively. Those are just 3 tech companies, and doesn't get into how data is used abusively by credit agencies, banks, and other financial institutions.

Regulating industry is a fools errand, and part of how we wound up here. Breakups are the only self-executing, corruption-resistant solution.

Are our tech companies the most competitive at in the world? The largest companies have been cutting off our startups at the knees for a decade, so we have no idea how competitive we could actually be. It doesn't really seem like our big tech companies have to compete much at all these days, actually.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#535

Post by scarface74 »

summerlight wrote: post #532
scarface74 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already told you that the market defining process is a very case-specific one and big techs now are unprecedented. Why are you trying to find applicable prior arts on such cases? Maybe because I don’t believe that people can randomly make up definitions instead of citing precedent? There has been multiple antitrust lawsuits and investigations on Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft for their gaming consoles while their exe…

> Maybe because I don’t believe that people can randomly make up definitions instead of citing precedent? While you're trying to frame my argument as "make up definitions", the reality is not; this is a standard practice since 1982. Spend your time on searching and studying the topic, not mine. This is an area of vast complexities and I don't think it's effective to spend my time to enlighten you. https://www.justice…

The person who makes the argument has a responsibility to show citations.

And your citation were about hypothetical arguments, and went to show more of my point. All throughout the article it speaks about the government’s arguments being “defective” and still doesn’t show a single example where a vertically integrated minority player was called a “monopolist” nor where government imposed remedies or sanctions were implied.

In fact, Atari vs. Nintendo affirmed that Atari did in fact violate Nintendo’s copyright when it tried to circumvent Nintendo’s control over its platform.

So in fact, you still haven’t come up with a single precedent where Apple could be considered a “monopolist” on its own platform or where they are violating “antitrust”.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#536

Post by maremp »

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…

In my experience, this was true maybe a year ago or before. But nowadays ddg is quite good at providing what I was looking for. If it can't, google isn't much better either, but makes it look like it is, making me spend more time sifting through the information all over the place. The "People also ask" is a huge distraction, why is that immediately after the first result? It can be maybe at 5+ place, but not at the top.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#537

Post by lucb1e »

jefftk wrote: post #524
lucb1e wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask you a personal question: how do you feel about working on ads for Google, given that a lot of people find Google's tracking practices (to make personalized ads possible) questionable at best? Did you specifically choose that team, or was that just were Google needed more hands? Personally, Google ads give me mixed feelings. I see how personalization is useful for everyone involved and, so long as only ma…

> how do you feel about working on ads for Google I've written some about this: https://www.jefftk.com/p/value-of-working-in-ads "Many people would put ad tracking on this list of downsides: sites pass information to data brokers that build custom profiles for each user and allow personalizing ads. From my perspective, however, while having this information collected seems a bit creepy, it allows showing ads I'm more…

Thanks for the response.

> I chose this team because I thought the work would be interesting and I liked the people on it

That is fair! I guess most people would make that decision if you already know people there and you think you'll enjoy the work as well.

> none of these countries would go to war targeting civilians

Not as if people in the army are somehow exempt from tracking though?

As for whether Google would share it in the first place: I don't think the government cares much what Google thinks if they're willing to kill (us) over something. Laws can be made by the same people that decide on this. I don't mean to pose it as a simple matter, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works in principle.

Now that I think of it: aren't "national security letters" exactly this? "It has something to do with the safety of the country, just give us that data [e.g. Lavabit private key]"?

Of course, the chance is remote in the first place. Much more likely, if it is ever used for this kind of purpose in the first place, it'll just be posturing and threats, and people will protect themselves better before it ever gets to armed conflict. Just imagine, though, if you're not in the USA, China, or Russia, and one of the three (the most democratic one of the tree, it is fair to add) has the rest of the world's data. That's kind of uncomfortable when I pause to consider it.

> how well that is mapped to the kind of identity the military would care about.

While not readily available, I expect that it's not hard to find a few datapoints to filter them out. Following someone for 10 minutes as they go through traffic and matching the coordinates against location history data is probably enough to find a subset of 1-5 possible accounts. But I doubt physical following is even necessary to find enough datapoints to find them in the data.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#538

Post by kbyatnal »

ngold wrote: post #432
kbyatnal wrote: post #262

There 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.

Yep, same for me. Did you put your email in the link above? I'd love to chat more about this and show you what I've been working on

Re: The world needs more search engines

#539

Post by heisenhuegel »

input_sh wrote: post #435
lucb1e wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I type "name of the movie !imdb", which takes me straight to IMDB's search results for that name. !bangs are the main reason why it's always going to be difficult for me to switch from DDG to anything else.

https://beta.cliqz.com has some support for bangs. Not as many as DDG but adding !g (google), !s (startpage), !d (duckduckgo), !so (stackoverflow), !w (wikipedia), etc works for me. Needs to be at the end, not at the start.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#540

Post by solso »

theamk wrote: post #508
solso wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim: "Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search." is, and I'm sorry to say, a make-believe Google's quality is better than anyone else, that is a fact. Let's go to the point. [[I work on Cliqz, and in search]] Do you know how much Google pays apple to be the default search engine? According to you, nothing, because people will go to Google because it's the best. We…

This logic is only valid if you assume Apple cares a lot about their users getting the best search results. I don't think this is the case. Instead, Apple has a thing to sell -- "position of default search engine" -- and it is selling it to highest bidder. I bet if Bing would offer 10 Billion, they'd make Bing default instead. Hey, if DDG could offer them 10 Billion, I am sure they would set it as default, easily ign…

Forget about Apple for a second, they will sell whatever to anyone, for sure.

But please focus on Google, which is the one putting the money!

Why Google pays so much money if they already have the best product and what the users want? Are they just giving B10$ as charity?

There are many reasons for doing that, but none of them is aligned with the make-believe statement that "build a better product and people will come"

I would agree that is a necessary condition, but by no means sufficient, which is kind of sad.

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