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To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

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Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#171

Post by beatgammit »

muro wrote: post #155
jorvi wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Break Google up' would mean you'd have: * an Office suite / enterprise company (Google Cloud + Docs + Gmail + Business) * a phone company (Android) * a search company (Google Search + Advertisement) * and a media company (Google Play Movies, Music, Books and YouTube) The names would probably become different in time, but you get the gist. Amazon and Microsoft could be broken up much the same way, in neat categorical…

For Google, you missed the part that makes most money.

Most of those products don't make money by themselves, they exist to keep people in the ecosystem, providing more data for the real moneymaker.

The biggest blow to Google wouldn't be to break it up into lots of small companies, you just need to separate the advertising business from everything else and you've effectively neutered the monopoly. Google's genius isn't in hiring the best engineers to providing a ton of services, it's in convincing people that they're not an advertising company, and that is where Facebook has been falling out of favor recently (I'm guessing that's why they bought Instagram, and why Google bought YouTube).

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#172

Post by tantalor »

ngngngng wrote: post #127

Fun timing to read this, this last weekend I was playing around with making my own search engine to understand better how ElasticSearch and Lucene work. 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 w…

> but with Google Analytics...

No: "Search does not use Google Analytics for ranking" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLmO1GE4GvI

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#173

Post by djsumdog »

briandear wrote: post #138
nova22033 wrote: post #106

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…

> He has also made some questionable claims about google manipulating search results to favor Hillary Clinton. Despite it being off topic, can we define why those claims are questionable? Is their data proving those claims wrong? Because with all the Google political controversies over the past few years, and given the political donation history of Google employees, it’s highly plausible that search results are manip…

What about Project Veritas? People claim the statements by Google employed were taken out of context, but I've gone back, listened to them, looked at the videos, and it's hard to think in what context anything they said is acceptable.

Even if the specific engineers and managers in the video clips don't have the level of authority to make the changes they're talking about, it's still chilling that their attitude could be common in Google and they see political ends of their great power as being some kind of great responsibility; instead of respecting the idea of equal/diversity of opinion.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#174

Post by tw1010 »

noahl wrote: post #61

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…

Devil's advocate:

Some argue (not necessarily me) that Google isn't necessarily purely optimizing for quality using that 20 year click-and-search log, that they're accepting some inefficiency by biasing for political (left-leaning) gain or "censorship by obscurity". If competitors could more easily build alternatives, which, say, didn't have those biases, then arguably that'd put more competitive pressure on Google to not use their monopoly for bad stuff.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#175

Post by beatgammit »

Nasrudith wrote: post #122
detritus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is because people just stick with their best usually instead of using a variety of search engines. It becomes rather winner takes all. 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.

And searx.me if you want to be even more private, and you can run that yourself if you so choose.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#177

Post by steve76 »

have_faith wrote: post #164
b_tterc_p wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Search is nothing. They already have the brand, browser, and devices.

If someone wants an online ad, they go straight to google. Not any other network which is probably shadow owned by them, like my ability to buy food is their secret gay fraternity hazing scheme.

I suggest you take a look at the fraud associated with Adsense bans.

They make a ton of money, and then, drive you into the poor house by just not sending your check. Pretty much, Google knows we took your life savings. Fuck you. Die.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#178

Post by Broken_Hippo »

vanderZwan wrote: post #102
dkyc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, Google has a huge index, but most queries aren't in the long tail. I'm not quite sure about that. 15% of Google searches per day are unique, as in, Google has never seen them before. [1]. That's quite an insane number. [1] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

How many of those are confirmed to be of human origin?

Probably quite a few. New things happen. Politics, wars, famous folks, movies, music, diseases, scientific studies, products, brands, model numbers for products, fads and slang. I'm guessing there are other things as well.

Some of the new things are probably variation as well - as others have mentioned, sentences and voice commands can give lots of new stuff.

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#179

Post by kevindqc »

klntsky wrote: post #151
nova22033 wrote: post #106

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…

> It is somewhat difficult to get the Google search bar to suggest negative searches related to Mrs. Clinton Would be nice to know whether it was because of the search history bubble he lived in or not.

Someone mentioned you can't get any suggestion for Hillary Clinton Email.

If I type "Hillary Clinton Emai" I don't even get a suggestion for email :/

Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

#180

Post by sct202 »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #134
i_cant_speel wrote: post #119

Earlier 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?

I often do full sentences and then start deleting words from it if it doesn't work.
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