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Facts about Google and Competition

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Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#41

Post by pedalpete »

gibwell wrote: post #36

The whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by humans employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.

Can you give a concrete example of this? What 'criteria' is chosen by humans? Do you mean stuff like are the key terms in the h1 tags? I would still consider that an algorithm doing the ranking, and PageRank also is the major factor in deciding what gets returned, and though a human wrote the mathematics, they aren't scoring each page individually to quantify the value of each link.

Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#43

Post by drakaal »

charleslmunger wrote: post #17
drakaal wrote: post #2

I work at http://samuru.com we have about 70% unique searches. With out the hordes of default install users who type in the product slogan of every commercial, or try to get the Jeopardy questions before the clock runs out, we don't have a great cache hit ratio. Combine this with the fact that Google is doing more and more to get Cache Collisions in their results (returning results that don't contain all the words in…

Interestingly, I searched "android securerandom" on both, and Google has the first result as the javadoc and the second as a blog post explaining a serious vulnerability in it and how to mitigate it. The same search on samuru has no results about the vulnerability.

Do the search again. We have two indexes, a shallow one for things we have never seen and a deep one for things people have searched for. The results have changed likely since your first search. This would not be an issue if we had only 15% new searches.

Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#44

Post by vdaniuk »

gibwell wrote: post #36

The whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by humans employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.

Oh no, you are wrong. Machine learning algorithms that are used by Google learn by observing behaviours of users and the results of this learning is essentially a black box of parameters and weights for the target function. Certainly they analyze the data and add some parameters manually, for example, manual review process but most of the work is done in the opaque black box. So your statement that "Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement" is not accurate.

Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#46

Post by confluence »

Maybe I'm just a cynical, skeptical bastard, but if you have to actively state that you have serious competition, then I can quite reasonably assume that you are, in fact, a total monopoly.

Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, my friends. Let the doublethink engulf your senses, and may the newspeak slip off your tongue, for it is clear that Big Brother is watching, and it appears that he is deathly afraid of the EU. May the DOJ have mercy on his soul.

Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#47

Post by mfarid »

I feel Google will get replaced soon. The fact that search is getting more personalised is hurting me more than anything else. We dont get unbiased results. The User experience will definitely die down with this !!!

Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#48

Post by stinos »

drakaal wrote: post #2

I work at http://samuru.com we have about 70% unique searches. With out the hordes of default install users who type in the product slogan of every commercial, or try to get the Jeopardy questions before the clock runs out, we don't have a great cache hit ratio. Combine this with the fact that Google is doing more and more to get Cache Collisions in their results (returning results that don't contain all the words in…

Was using Samuru from July - half September this year. While I applaud the way it just searches for what I ask for, no more no less, there was just one major issue that made me turn to DDG: loads too slow. The way I use it is as default search engine in Opera. So to search, I do Ctrl-T, start typing query, hit Enter. After the Enter it sometimes took more than 5 seconds to show the results. I don't know why that is but it's just too long in comparision with others, sorry. It seems better now, but it's still slower than the competition.

Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#49

Post by bluecalm »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #42

Google Search is broken. Even Verbatim search starts to look fishy. Search for 'engine oil' and you will find 'health benefits from using fish oil'. I'm tired.

Interesting, I searched for "engine oil" and I don't get anything about fish oil in 5 first pages of results. First two hits are the most relevant as well - wikipedia entries.

Re: Facts about Google and Competition

#50

Post by martin-adams »

gibwell wrote: post #36

The whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by humans employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.

While I wont speak for gibwell, I'm interpreting what is saying that Google do set the criteria of what metrics deem a higher or lower ranking page.

For example:

- More time users spend on a page indicates it's more relevant

- More high quality inbound links indicates higher quality content

- Content seen as spammy are considered can lower page rank

The fact is that Google don't discriminate based on the rules they set out within their algorithm. When Google say their algorithm does the choosing, it does, but it's the same algorithm used across the whole internet, giving a fair competitive landscape. That's the theory at least.

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