11–20 of 236 posts
Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google – and Apple could fix it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743634 - Oct 2023 (11 comments)
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I feel like something as fundamental to society as the internet should have a public index, no?
The idea sounds nice but politicians controlling an index would be an abject disaster.
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Being only tangentially familiar with the indexing bots…what legal barriers are in place to prevent a competitor from impersonating a google indexing bot? Is it just a matter of the google bot originates from x subnet so that’s the only one webmasters allow? What’s to stop a competitor from running their own bot but sending user-agent: totally-the-google-indexing-bot-and-not-a-competitor?
Source addresses: the Google bot traffic comes from a small set of Google-owned IP address blocks. Third parties bake this into things like Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules. For example, Azure App Gateway WAF has a policy category for “known bots” which includes Google but excludes your tiny AI startup. It’s a moat built by giant corporations to keep tiny players in their place. Google "helpfully" publishes their…
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The idea sounds nice but politicians controlling an index would be an abject disaster.
Competitive markets > Governments > monopolies
One way Google maintains their monopoly is that many websites block all bots except for the Google indexing bot. This makes it literally impossible for anyone to make a competing search engine because millions of doors are slammed in their face. There is no practical way to negotiate access at this scale either leaving no options for small startups — e.g.: AI-based search! One possible anti-monopoly measure would be…
Respectfully disagree in Google's case. Indexing is not their only advantage - having full, unfettered access and control over email, maps, Android play, cloud, and the other myriad divisions plus knows what else via side deals is too much and fully justifies breaking up the business.
Your suggestion works if we were still 2002-ish, before they got too big
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Adobe is just as bad if not worse, and their software has historically been the only reason to suffer through windows. Now that Linux (and Mac) are closing the gap for gamers, less and less people will be forced to suffer through the flaming shit show that is Windows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like something as fundamental to society as the internet should have a public index, no?
The idea sounds nice but politicians controlling an index would be an abject disaster.