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Building a Search Engine from Scratch

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Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#131

Post by detaro »

lisper wrote: post #129
detaro wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine few people using DDG would use Bing instead, so there is little income loss from people moving Bing->DDG. If the choice is "provide DDG with a search API, get increased reach for your ad-program through an audience that otherwise wouldn't touch bing" vs "do not provide DDG with a search API, either a competitor does or DDG is way worse and everyone uses Google", why is the latter the better choice for MS?

Even if that were true, why would not MS just re-skin Bing as a tracker-free search engine? Or acquire DDG?

Make Bing tracker-free, loose (assumed) income from less precise targeting of all the current Bing users, just to maybe capture a part of DDGs market, large parts of which are going to be distrustful of Microsoft? Seems not obviously better than keeping Bing as is and being involved with DDG.

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#132

Post by lisper »

detaro wrote: post #131
lisper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that were true, why would not MS just re-skin Bing as a tracker-free search engine? Or acquire DDG?

Make Bing tracker-free, loose (assumed) income from less precise targeting of all the current Bing users, just to maybe capture a part of DDGs market, large parts of which are going to be distrustful of Microsoft? Seems not obviously better than keeping Bing as is and being involved with DDG.

I didn't make myself clear. I didn't mean to get rid of Bing. MS could keep the Bing brand exactly as it is, but also present the same product under a different brand that competes directly with DDG. In other words, MS could be DDG. Never in its history has MS tolerated the existence of a competitor if there was something they could do about it, which in this case they obviously could. Why start now?

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#133

Post by detaro »

lisper wrote: post #132
detaro wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make Bing tracker-free, loose (assumed) income from less precise targeting of all the current Bing users, just to maybe capture a part of DDGs market, large parts of which are going to be distrustful of Microsoft? Seems not obviously better than keeping Bing as is and being involved with DDG.

I didn't make myself clear. I didn't mean to get rid of Bing. MS could keep the Bing brand exactly as it is, but also present the same product under a different brand that competes directly with DDG. In other words, MS could be DDG. Never in its history has MS tolerated the existence of a competitor if there was something they could do about it, which in this case they obviously could. Why start now?

I'd guess a different brand attached to Microsoft would not have much more acceptance than Bing.

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#134

Post by lisper »

detaro wrote: post #133
lisper wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't make myself clear. I didn't mean to get rid of Bing. MS could keep the Bing brand exactly as it is, but also present the same product under a different brand that competes directly with DDG. In other words, MS could be DDG. Never in its history has MS tolerated the existence of a competitor if there was something they could do about it, which in this case they obviously could. Why start now?

I'd guess a different brand attached to Microsoft would not have much more acceptance than Bing.

They would not have to pretend. Marketing a separate brand with its own identity is a common practice. How many people who stay at a W hotel or a Ritz Carlton or a Sheraton are aware that these brands are actually owned by Marriott? How many people who stay at a Waldorf Astoria know that it's owned by Hilton? These are not secrets. 80% of the world's economy is controlled by fewer than 1000 companies [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#135

Post by palerdot »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #125
mda wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is not a real search engine, I think this project is way more impressive than DDG.

DDG absolutely is a search engine; It’s a system ( engine ) that lets you search . From Wikipedia[0]: > A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search (Internet search), which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. Just because they don’t do the crawling like Google and Bing…

This is tautology. In that case, everyone can just put up their own html page with a search box, proxying the results from Google or Bing, and can claim that they have built a search engine ...

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#136

Post by iudqnolq »

lisper wrote: post #134
detaro wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess a different brand attached to Microsoft would not have much more acceptance than Bing.

They would not have to pretend. Marketing a separate brand with its own identity is a common practice. How many people who stay at a W hotel or a Ritz Carlton or a Sheraton are aware that these brands are actually owned by Marriott? How many people who stay at a Waldorf Astoria know that it's owned by Hilton? These are not secrets. 80% of the world's economy is controlled by fewer than 1000 companies [1]. [1] https:/…

And then a few days later see a HN top story that NewPrivateSearchEngine is a secret Microsoft conspiracy to destroy the world? I doubt it would go over well.

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#137

Post by lisper »

iudqnolq wrote: post #136
lisper wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would not have to pretend. Marketing a separate brand with its own identity is a common practice. How many people who stay at a W hotel or a Ritz Carlton or a Sheraton are aware that these brands are actually owned by Marriott? How many people who stay at a Waldorf Astoria know that it's owned by Hilton? These are not secrets. 80% of the world's economy is controlled by fewer than 1000 companies [1]. [1] https:/…

And then a few days later see a HN top story that NewPrivateSearchEngine is a secret Microsoft conspiracy to destroy the world? I doubt it would go over well.

If you're going to indulge in that level of paranoia, how do you know that DDG is not itself a secret Microsoft conspiracy to destroy the world? If you don't know the terms under which DDG licenses Bing's search results, how do you know that those terms don't give MS complete control over DDG?

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#138

Post by iudqnolq »

commoner wrote: post #62
adventskalender wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many real alternatives exist, though? DuckDuckGo is based on Bing, afaik. So there are Google and Bing - any others?

There are also Baidu and Yandex, which dominate China and Russia, respectively. https://www.baidu.com https://yandex.com Qwant is a France-based search engine that has a similar privacy focus to DuckDuckGo. https://www.qwant.com Million Short tries to find sites that other search engines miss. https://millionshort.com Wikipedia has a more comprehensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

It isn't clear to what extent Qwant actually makes their own results.

In 2013 they said they were temporarily using Bing results they purchased as "training data" [wikipedia].

They haven't given any updates on that I could find (in English, at least), but they recently proudly announced they have 20B pages in their index in an article on their partnerships with Microsoft [betterweb]. Google's index is 1500 times larger, so I'm not sure how competitive their own index is [goog]. And, if they no longer needed to rely on Bing results, wouldn't they announce that?

[wiki]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant

[betterweb]: https://betterweb.qwant.com/how-microsoft-tools-strengthen-q...

[goog]: https://venturebeat.com/2013/03/01/how-google-searches-30-tr...

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#139

Post by iudqnolq »

lisper wrote: post #137
iudqnolq wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then a few days later see a HN top story that NewPrivateSearchEngine is a secret Microsoft conspiracy to destroy the world? I doubt it would go over well.

If you're going to indulge in that level of paranoia, how do you know that DDG is not itself a secret Microsoft conspiracy to destroy the world? If you don't know the terms under which DDG licenses Bing's search results, how do you know that those terms don't give MS complete control over DDG?

I think I was too snide in my comment and it wasn't clear.

I meant that if Microsoft launched a privacy-focused product and hid their involvement with it they would receive extremely negative publicity on the sort of websites people who use privacy-focused products read.

Completely leaving aside the harm that would cause to the Microsoft brand, it would also be completely useless. Essentially no one would switch from DDG to Microsoft's (hypothetical) shady clone.

Your hotel examples aren't relevant because people searching for hotels and people searching for private search engines don't evaluate details about corporate ownership the same.

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#140

Post by [deleted] »

palerdot wrote: post #135
colejohnson66 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG absolutely is a search engine; It’s a system ( engine ) that lets you search . From Wikipedia[0]: > A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search (Internet search), which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. Just because they don’t do the crawling like Google and Bing…

This is tautology. In that case, everyone can just put up their own html page with a search box, proxying the results from Google or Bing, and can claim that they have built a search engine ...

[deleted]
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