Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 207 posts

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#141

Post by prophesi »

saltysalt wrote: post #130
jfindley wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the index is the easy part. Transforming user input into a series of tokens which get used to rank possible matches and return the top N, based on likely relevence, is the hard part and I'm afraid this doesn't appear to do an acceptable job with any of the queries I tested. There's a reason Google became so popular as quickly as it did. It's even harder to compete in this space nowadays, as the volume o…

I am definitely not trying to complete with Google, instead I am offering an old-school "just search" engine with no tracking, personalization filtering, or AI. It's driven by my own personal nostalgia for the early Internet, and to find interesting hidden corners of the Internet that are becoming increasingly hard to find on Google after you wade through all of the sponsored results and spam in the first few pages..…

There may be a free CS course out there that teaches how to implement a simplified version of Google's PageRank. It's essentially just the recursive idea that a page is important if important pages link to it. The original paper for it is a good read, too. Curiously, it took me forever to find the unaltered version of the paper that includes Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives, explaining how any search engine with an ad-based business model will inherently be biased against the needs of their users[0]

[0] https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~stan/csi5389/readings/google.pd...

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#142

Post by dust-jacket »

saltysalt wrote: post #17
01jonny01 wrote: post #2

Google quietly announced that Programmable Search (ex-Custom Search) won’t allow new engines to “search the entire web” anymore. New engines are capped at searching up to 50 domains, and existing full-web engines have until Jan 1, 2027 to transition. If you actually need whole-web search, Google now points you to an “interest form” for enterprise solutions (Vertex AI Search etc.), with no public pricing and no guaran…

I built my own web search index on bare metal, index now up to 34m docs: https://greppr.org/ People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.

This is mad but cool. Keep at it.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#143

Post by Hackbraten »

mrweasel wrote: post #102
Hackbraten wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand Kagi's blog post correctly, then here's what happened, chronologically: Kagi makes deals with many search engines so they can have raw search results in exchange for money. Google says: no, you can't have raw search results because only whales can get those. Only thing we can offer you is search results riddled with ads and we won't allow you to reorder or filter them. Kagi thinks Google's offer is un…

I don't really see any mentioning of a new API, beyond their Vertex AI thing, and I don't know how comparable that might be. Also it is capped at 50 domains (by default). It is perhaps a clever legal workaround. They must sell access to their index, but the verdict didn't state how much of it you can buy access to at any one time. So they put a limit of 50 domains, because that accommodates everyone who's not a searc…

> I don't really see any mentioning of a new API, beyond their Vertex AI thing

I was referring to the following statement about full web search where they don’t mention a 50-domains limit:

> if your use case necessitates full web search, contact us to express your interest in and get more information about our full web search solution. Your transition to an alternative solution needs to be completed by January 1, 2027.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#144

Post by snackbroken »

cubefox wrote: post #101
direwolf20 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll go adversarial interop through SerpAPI, just like Kagi does. SerpAPI will get the money instead of Google getting it.

"Why we’re taking legal action against SerpApi’s unlawful scraping" https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

What's their angle here? Courts have been over the "Is scraping websites that don't want to be scraped OK?" question plenty of times. From

> SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others (like images that appear in Knowledge Panels, real-time data in Search features and much more), and then resells it for a fee. In doing so, it willfully disregards the rights and directives of websites and providers whose content appears in Search.

it sounds like they are somehow suing on behalf of whoever they are licensing content from, but does that even give Google standing?

I guess I'm asking if they actually are hoping to win or just going for a "the process is the punishment"+"we have more money and lawyers than you" approach.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#145

Post by thewebguyd »

echelon wrote: post #28
doublerabbit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi

No wonder Kagi is angry. Google is a monopoly across several broad categories. They're also a taxation enterprise. Google Search took over as the URL bar for 91% of all web users across all devices. Since this intercepts trademarks and brand names, Google gets to tax all businesses unfairly. Tell your legislators in the US and the EU that Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against registered trademarks (+/- some ed…

> If you own a trademark, Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against you.

This is frustrating even from a consumer perspective. Before I ran adblock everywhere, I couldn't stand that typing in a specific company I was looking for would just serve ads from any number of related brands that I wasn't looking for that were competitors.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#146

Post by embedding-shape »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #139
01jonny01 wrote: post #2

Google quietly announced that Programmable Search (ex-Custom Search) won’t allow new engines to “search the entire web” anymore. New engines are capped at searching up to 50 domains, and existing full-web engines have until Jan 1, 2027 to transition. If you actually need whole-web search, Google now points you to an “interest form” for enterprise solutions (Vertex AI Search etc.), with no public pricing and no guaran…

I know that duckduckgo uses Microsoft Bing Custom search and honestly it is a much more robust system since you don't have to worry about Google axing it. https://www.customsearch.ai

Instead you worry about Microsoft axing it? Sure, it might take 3 years instead of 6 months, and the shutdown period would be 1 year instead of 1 month, but hardly either are long-term solutions.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#148

Post by saltysalt »

1718627440 wrote: post #134
saltysalt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you used the return key instead of clicking on the search icon? Seems to be a bug with the return key, I'll fix that this weekend sorry.

True, didn't occur to me, that I should click on the icon instead. Once I have clicked on the search icon once, enter also works. When I input a short query (single letter) it sometimes just shows a blank page, but maybe that is just HNs hug of death. Consider putting the query term more prominently in the front of the URL, so users can edit it. Also from the startpage, the URL in the URLbar isn't updated. As I alrea…

Appreciate the detailed feedback! A lot of the JS trickery and URL shenanigans I'm doing is to prevent bot spam attempts, which was a real problem in the beginning.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#149

Post by contagiousflow »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #140
jonplackett wrote: post #47

Are search engines like Kagi completely screwed by this or is there a way for them to keep operating?

Kagi is backed by russia so they will be fine.

What do you mean "backed by"

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#150

Post by Hackbraten »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #140
jonplackett wrote: post #47

Are search engines like Kagi completely screwed by this or is there a way for them to keep operating?

Kagi is backed by russia so they will be fine.

You’re probably referring to the fact that their search results include entries from Yandex. That’s something entirely different from being “backed by Russia.” If anything, they pay Russia, not the other way around.
Post reply on HN