The index is a vast majority of their infrastructure. Queries just do not make sense from external infrastructure; the bandwidth just isn't there.
To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
161–170 of 630 posts
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#162Yes please, a new Golden Age for Black Hat SEO!!!
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#163Okay, 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…
It's so weird how about 1/3 of the time on DuckDuckGo, I add a !g in frustration .. half the time I still get nothing and I end up posting on Stackoverflow but half the time I get a little more useful information.
Google custom tailors results for each and every machine. Even if you're not signed in, Google uses your browser fingerprint, the OS it's reporting and location/IP data to custom fit results. There is no "stock" google result.
This is something DuckDuckGo et. al. can't do if they want to focus on a privacy model. DDG does offer location specific searches, which can be helpful.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially with voice searches. People are searching entire sentences rather than specific keywords which are much more likely to be unique.
Do people do this? Or do you mean queries forwarded by home assistants trying to parse inputs?
> Do people do this?
The calling card of the developer realising that real users never act like you expect :)
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of cherry picking, I wouldn't use vox as reliable source for bipartisan data.
Or politifact...
tomweingarten can't see past the tip of his ideological nose. It's gonna be such a shocker to him when his megacorp gets shattered into a million little pieces.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#166Would definitely make Siri and Alexa more relevant if they had access to Google knowledge graph
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
And really, that seems like a good cutpoint to me. Search might be a natural monopoly. But advertising sure isn't. A lot of their ad stuff came via acquisition; what was bought can be spun off or sold again.
Why would search be a natural monopoly? Compute time and network bandwidth is less expensive now than it's ever been.
But the profit one can gain from crawling sure grows non-linearly with the number of pages consumed.
Thus, small businesses are less likely to reach the threshold of the index size required to make profit ratio comparable with that of their bigger competitors.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ad business would pay the search business for ad placement. The search business would also be free to auction ad space to other providers.
> The search business would also be free to auction ad space to other providers. Doesn't that make them an ad business?
I agree, to me it seems like that really does not change anything except it mandates one more middle man.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
SEO spam, and poor quality content I would guess. Google has bolted on a ton of ML over the last ten years to fight it.
And yet most Google results that don't point at one of a handful of major sites are SEO spam :-/ The spammers won. Google gave up and settled for "we like the right kind of spam—the kind that took a little effort, and makes us money".
I did a search earlier today on Google for "north face glacier" - turns out that the company North Face has a Glacier product so as far as I can tell that's all the search results contain.
Searching for "north face glaciation" did help as the first page of search results did have one entry on the topic I was actually searching on!
Maybe they should have a "I'm not buying anything" flag!
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#170Caveat: 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…
The comments he made are not just questionable, they're outright wrong (and a great example of the problem with cherry-picking data): 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)
Google's claim that the algorithm is generic is demonstrably false. Type in "hillary clinton e" and there is no suggestion for "email", type "donald trump e" and email is the first suggestion. Given the news content that we know is out there, that can only be the result of adjusting the results for clinton specifically (if anything, we would not expect "email" to be autocompleted for trump). This is not research that tells us what exactly Google is doing, but you cannot deny the example.