The world needs more search engines • Hacker News Board

Re: The world needs more search engines

#101

Post by tpmx » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #83

tpmx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU represents close to 50% of potential/projected revenue to Google in the next 10 years, is my guess. That's what I meant when I wrote "loads of leverage".

It's not that simple. In a scenario where google was shut out of the EU you'd have a lot of pissed off citizens, and google knows this.

I don't think it's in the basic values of the European Union to suddenly block Google. We're talking increasing taxation, over a 5-20 year period, that kind of thing. We're not North Korea or the PRC.

Or in some other other gradual way. Anyway: it's not a binary over-night thing based on a whim of some dictator.

Either way, I fully trust the competency of the people running these things; they have proven themselves in the past. I'm writing that as a Swedish citizen who is a little bit skeptic about whole the EU thing. This part though - I trust these EU bureaucrats. My impression is that there's a team of very sharp people working on this.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#102

Post by jefftk » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

I played with the search engine some, and I'm surprised how behind their crawl is for my blog and some blogs I follow. For example, it looks like it last indexed www.jefftk.com in August 2017, compared to Bing and Google which crawled it this month. www.benkuhn.net looks like Summer 2017. pedestrianobservations.com looks like April 2019. apenwarr.ca looks like January 2019. No preview for danluu.com or sideways-view.com.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, not on search)

Re: The world needs more search engines

#103

Post by hollerith » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

abbadadda wrote: post #97

> There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model. Does this mean the article is insinuating that DuckDuckGo is dependent on another search engine? Is this true? Or are DDG results organic?

DDG depends very heavily on Bing.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#104

Post by ummonk » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #69

netfl0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beat me to it! Very happy here as well. I also love the bang short cuts. I am actually at the point where google is clearly inferior. I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your qu…

I’ve tried switching to ddg a number of times in the past. Every time the same thing happens: “This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once” Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch back to google because what’s the point? I really do hope to one day get off of google though.

For me it helped to switch over my mobile browser in addition to desktop. It's much more of a hassle to type !g so I try to make do with ddg and only use !g if I really have to. After a month or so it seems like my choice of search queries has adapted to better make use of Bing's algorithms, and when I do find myself trying !g, half the time it results in even worse results.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#105

Post by changchuming » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #43

lostlogin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it fell.

[flagged]

I would think that undergoing a rebellion or civil war after which the form of governance changes marks the end of an empire, even if the territorial lines are not redrawn.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#106

Post by Hackbraten » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

sildur wrote: post #11

Hackbraten wrote: post #4

Thanks but no thanks. I don’t trust a browser nor a search engine if an ad imperium paid for it and gives it away for free. Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers?

> I don’t trust a browser nor a search engine if an ad imperium paid for it and gives it away for free. Yeah, that’s why I don’t trust chrome or google search.

Good point!

Still, I was referring to the Burda conglomerate. Why would we want to replace one ad giant’s tech with that of another (more regional) ad tycoon?

Re: The world needs more search engines

#107

Post by chinesempire » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #24

mylons wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because they’re often brittle and create closed systems

This feels like tautological reasoning. Brittle empires fall. The Chinese empire has a history (including mutations to its government) spanning thousands of years.

> the last Chinese dynasty — the Qing dynasty — fell in 1911–1912, it marked the end of the nation's incredibly long imperial history.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#108

Post by q4Zar » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

use brave and switch you search engine to duckduckgo

Re: The world needs more search engines

#109

Post by DyslexicAtheist » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

> 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 ads that fit your profile.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#110

Post by soup10 » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #57

soup10 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

making a search engine is not that hard or expensive, getting users to switch to it after decades of relying on and trusting google is

I would actually argue that making a good search engine with quality and responsiveness worldwide rivaling Google web search turns out to be an architecturally hard problem. A basic web crawler is not. A semantic web crawler and associated search engine capable of mapping real human input to useful information and dealing with the heterogeneous structure of data on the web, with low millisecond latency? Bing has been…

It's a much more well understood problem now than it was when google was founded and the tools and platforms available to assist are light-years beyond what was available then. Many failed search startups have shown again and again that marginally better results are not the deciding factor in using a search engine, it's what's the installed default and how trusted the brand is.