121–130 of 630 posts
1. The definition of the word "monopoly" is not applicable to this situation.
2. Property expropriation reduces the competition within the society, while also being unethical.
Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…
> Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think. This is what makes me wonder why we don't have a LOT of competing search engines. Perhaps i'm vastly under-estimating the technology and difficulty (I could well be - it's not my domain) but it surely it can't be THAT hard to spawn Google-like weighted crawl-based search results? It's a long-since solved problem - heck, pageRank's first iterat…
Google for general search. Duckduckgo fir general if you want something a bit more private but not extreme enough to run your own spiders. Bing mostly for porn search - not being snarky some people do consider it to have better results.
Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…
>2) 20 years of experience fighting SEO spam. Tangential - but does anyone else feel that google results are useless a lot of the time? If you search for something, you will get 100% SEO optimized shitty ad-ridden blog/commercial pages giving surface level info about what you searched about. I find for programming/IT topics its pretty good, but for other topics it is horrible. Unless you are very specific with your s…
Caveat: The author is not a technologists Robert Epstein (born June 19, 1953) is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1981, was editor in chief of Psychology Today, He has also made some questionable claims about google manipulating search results to favor Hillary Clinton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein#cite_note-15 His r…
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/10/11903028/hillary-clinton-googl...
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/jun/23...
(Disclosure: I work at Google, but this opinion is my own)
Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…
>2) 20 years of experience fighting SEO spam. Tangential - but does anyone else feel that google results are useless a lot of the time? If you search for something, you will get 100% SEO optimized shitty ad-ridden blog/commercial pages giving surface level info about what you searched about. I find for programming/IT topics its pretty good, but for other topics it is horrible. Unless you are very specific with your s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when it all came down to it, it didn’t matter. Chrome didn’t become dominant on the desktop because of government intervention and Safari didn’t become important because of DOJ either. Apple and Google competed. Government intervention is rarely the right answer. A bunch of people who are both beholden to lobbyists and ignorant to technology won’t produce the outcome people think it will. Besides, the last thing…
That which the market does not naturally provide... does one just morally expect?
The slap on the wrist from the DOJ didn’t lead to decreasing dominance on Microsoft. Google/Facebook/Apple competing did.
A search engine is not life or death. Google doesn’t stop anyone from creating a website and reaching consumers other ways.
It occurred to me that the two most powerful things Google has to work with are records of clicks, and the time users spent on the webpages Google returned. I've argued against Google monopoly before because I can throw together a web crawler and search engine in a weekend, so it's not like it's a hard market to enter.
> According to W3Techs, Google Analytics is being used by 52.9 percent of all websites on the internet
This is the real problem though. When a search engine sees a new query, it uses everything it's got to assert which pages the user wants, but with Google Analytics, they can test their assertions constantly to see if a user actually wanted that web page. Then your future queries could be compared against previous queries that were validated by a user spending several minutes of active time on the returned page.
I'm sure Google's algorithm is great and all, but I really think this is what sets them apart.
Making the index available would be very valuable for scientific research. when I was a googler, we used the index (and google scholar's index) to do all sorts of interesting science projects (DNA search, gene search, etc) But we couldn't publish the results for various reasons. If the index (or a fragment of it) was available sitting in parquet files (or possibly a better format for indices) you could easily sit aro…
Web index, while important, is by no means most important part of search engine (which I had say is relevance). The OP article is written by someone who has little clue that search engine involves massive amount of technologies besides index and even relevance - everything from spell correction to recommendations to query rewriting to answers to segment specific searches like images/video/maps/local/product/news/entertainment/events, so on and on and on. This is above and beyond the gigantic infrastructure needed to run all these at scale, speed and cost effectively. All of these needs to work harmoniously with each other and designed keeping in mind weaknesses and strength of each component. For example, index for news must be refreshed almost in real time and relevance needs higher emphasis on location.
Search is not free and no one has figured out if someone just can provide index and someone else can provide relevance and everything can just work as efficiently as before (data point: each query consumes 0.3 Watt-hour of energy at Google).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the value of Google is the algo. The index is worth little. But it's worth something. Giving DuckDuckGo direct access to Google's index, including the ability to train models on said index, would improve the competitive landscape.
Or, you know, they could innovate by themselves instead of relying on Google to do all the heavy lifting?
I disagree. To break the Monopoly a new & innovative way to search needs to rise, not just a clone or "Google wanna be" like Bing/DuckDuckGo etc. So, somebody gotta do what Google did 20 years ago.