25 Things I Hate About Google • Hacker News Board

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#11

Post by Pahalial » Sat, Mar 19, 2011, 5:46 PM UTC

I had to stop at the 'hate' for cached pages. He doesn't really expand on it at the linked article, either: http://daggle.com/search-engines-permissions-moving-forward-...

In fact, he does not put forth any argument at all. There is talk of the fact that it was indeed ruled 'fair use', and he essentially just disagrees and considers it evil, and expects that to have some weight.

I fundamentally disagree: it is fair use, I have personally found the feature useful more than once, and I really just don't see it as evil. As he mentions, publishers extra-concerned about their content and copyright can opt out; for everyone else, it has let the web be a little more stateful. Letting people disappear controversial content from pages early on in a public backlash just does not strike me as having any benefit.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#12

Post by dstein » Sat, Mar 19, 2011, 6:02 PM UTC

I tend to agree. SEO is a disease that makes Google lots of money, but is destroying the ability to find anything. Keywords simply do not work anymore. I have a feeling that there are probably 5-10 startups out there working on this and at least a few are going to come up with some seriously compelling alternatives. The search+ads sector is absolutely RIPE for disruption.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#13

Post by dexen » Sat, Mar 19, 2011, 6:14 PM UTC

rokhayakebe wrote: post #7

karolisd wrote: post #6

What's keeping someone from making a search engine that doesn't have these flaws?

Assumptions. Engineers are confident that building a search engine requires thousands of servers, indexing the entire web, coming up with some super complex algorithm etc... Maybe we need a couple of guys who do not know their limitations and are ready to approach search from a different angle.

Perhaps the author of DuckDuckGo[1] did not know about those limitations...

As far as I know, this search engine uses both own crawlers and some external sources of data. One person team did it.

----

[1] http://duckduckgo.com/

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#14

Post by neild » Sat, Mar 19, 2011, 7:14 PM UTC

dexen wrote: post #13

rokhayakebe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assumptions. Engineers are confident that building a search engine requires thousands of servers, indexing the entire web, coming up with some super complex algorithm etc... Maybe we need a couple of guys who do not know their limitations and are ready to approach search from a different angle.

Perhaps the author of DuckDuckGo[1] did not know about those limitations... As far as I know, this search engine uses both own crawlers and some external sources of data. One person team did it. ---- [1] http://duckduckgo.com/

By "some external sources of data", you mean "Bing". DDG's primary data source is Bing, via the Yahoo search APIs.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#15

Post by sullivandanny » Sat, Mar 19, 2011, 7:22 PM UTC

Pahalial wrote: post #11

I had to stop at the 'hate' for cached pages. He doesn't really expand on it at the linked article, either: http://daggle.com/search-engines-permissions-moving-forward-... In fact, he does not put forth any argument at all. There is talk of the fact that it was indeed ruled 'fair use', and he essentially just disagrees and considers it evil, and expects that to have some weight. I fundamentally disagree: it is fair u…

I don't believe it is fair use to make an entire copy of someone else's material, if you've made no transformative change to it.

I understand there is an opt-out. My post on daggle.com goes into great depth about that. However, I don't think that's the way Google should operate.

Google just assumed that it was OK to reprint material through its cached pages; many have felt that was presumptuous. So far, they've been OK with it -- but it remains something that colors them as evil in some quarters.

I get you don't agree with that, but others do view it that way. And it sure jumped out to bite Google when it levied allegations that Bing was copying Google.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#16

Post by chris_j » Sat, Mar 19, 2011, 8:29 PM UTC

#16 Blogger Being Free

The author suggests charging a token amount (eg $1) in order to discourage junk. This would certainly have discouraged me from using my (Blogger) blog to send pictures and news home to family and friends when I go travelling. Not that paying a nominal fee would be a problem in itself. Rather, the administrative overhead of making the payment would have driven me to Wordpress or something else. The cost of making a small payment is not just the value of the payment, it is the cost in terms of time of making the payment and the time spent checking my credit card statement. I certainly can't agree with this suggestion, especially when Blogger has so much competition.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#17

Post by tblueski » Sat, Mar 19, 2011, 9:30 PM UTC

One other one. Showing page results that don't have all the words listed on that page that were within my keywords.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#18

Post by nostrademons » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 2:22 AM UTC

karolisd wrote: post #6

What's keeping someone from making a search engine that doesn't have these flaws?

Most of these flaws are trade-offs, where if you fixed it, you'd create a worse problem.

This is most obvious in the ones where Danny's judgment itself may not match many of the readers of the article. For example, I love cached pages (as a user. As a Google dev, I kinda hate them). They've been so useful in cases where a website has unexpectedly gone off-line or becomes overloaded. But Danny's a publisher, and as such, each cache hit is one less pageview that his website gets. His interests are opposed to those of users, and Google, as the party in the middle, has to arbitrate between them. There's no right choice that will avoid pissing off one or the other.

Or take one of his LOVEs: "An end to overwhelmed product launches." A direct result of that has been that it's become much harder to launch things, and there is correspondingly less innovation coming out of the Googleplex. Every service needs to build for scale from day one, and that means that you have to pay that tax and iterate more slowly even if your service won't get any users. If a startup tried that, they'd never get off the ground.