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Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#21
post #8

Does anyone else use the phrase "I'm going to google XYZ" while referring to actually searching it up on Kagi, DDG, or another search engine?

Yes, but more in the past than now, simply because almost everybody seems to use google itself.

For example I'd hear people say "I'll Google that", then use Yahoo when they were still a major search engine.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#22

The statistics in this article sound like garbage to me. Google used by 90% or the world? ~20% of the human population lives in countries where Google is blocked. OTOH, Baidu is the #1 search engine in China, which has over 15% of the world’s population… but doesn’t reach 1%? These stats are made measuring US-based traffic, rather than “worldwide” as they claim.

Google is only blocked in places where it would already be hard for a company with morals to work in, if not outright blocked as well. This probably represents traffic globally, excluding those places.

Instead of downvoting blindly, please state which countries are currently blocking Google that would willingly allow Kagi, a AI/Privacy focused search engine company to exist in their domain? The results may surprise you!

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#23
post #3

> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results Crazy for a company to admit: "Google won't let us whitelabel their core product so we steal it and resell it."

Seems like an open question as to whether that violates any laws.

Another way to look at it is that if you publish a service on the web, you have limited rights to restrict what people do with it.

Isn't that the logic Google search relies on in the first place? I didn't give permission for Google to crawl and index and deep link to my site (let alone summarize and train LLMs on it). They just did it anyway, because it's on a public website.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#24
> Building a comparable one from scratch is like building a parallel national railroad..

Not too be pedantic here but I do have a noob question or two here:

1. One is building the index, which is a lot harder without a google offering its own API to boot. If other tech companies really wanted to break this monopoly, why can't they just do it — like they did with LLM training for base models with the infamous "pile" dataset — because the upshot of offering this index for public good would break not just google's own monopoly but also other monopolies like android, which will introduce a breath of fresh air into a myriad of UX(mobile devices, browsers, maps, security). So, why don't they just do this already?

2. The other question is about "control", which the DoJ has provided guidance for but not yet enforced. IANAL, but why can't a state's attorney general enforce this?

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#25

Sounds like we need a nationalized search engine company then?

I wouldn't trust a nationalized search engine company. That said, there are projects like Common Crawl and in Europe, Ecosia + Qwant. I personally would like to see a search enginge PaaS and a music streaming library PaaS that would let others hook up and pay direct usage fees.

> and in Europe, Ecosia

I tried. It's just not good enough. Quick example: yesterday I set up a workstation with Ubuntu, wanting to try out wayland. One of the things I wanted was to run an app (w/ gui) from another (unprivileged) user under my own user. Ecosia gave me bad old stuff. Tried for a few minutes, nothing useful. Switched to google, one of the first results was about waypipe. Searched waypipe on ecosia. 1 and a half pages of old content. Glaringly, not one of those results was the ubuntu.manpages entry on waypipe. shrug

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#26
post #8

Does anyone else use the phrase "I'm going to google XYZ" while referring to actually searching it up on Kagi, DDG, or another search engine?

I've been using Kagi for the past few years, but I try to use a brand-agnostic language talking about web search; e.g. "I'm gonna search [the web] for it"; "Use your favorite search engine to look it up".

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#27

The statistics in this article sound like garbage to me. Google used by 90% or the world? ~20% of the human population lives in countries where Google is blocked. OTOH, Baidu is the #1 search engine in China, which has over 15% of the world’s population… but doesn’t reach 1%? These stats are made measuring US-based traffic, rather than “worldwide” as they claim.

I guess they'd argue that the people in China don't count, because people in China don't get to choose Google. But yeah, the stats they use from "StatCounter" are clearly not representative for what the world uses.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#29

If google is serving 90% traffic & others are unable to enter - Doesn't that mean google is doing something right for the customer and others are unable to outcompete it? Isn't this how life works?

Google is allowed to be big, be better and win users. But happy customers is not the full test of monopolization. The real question is, "Could a meaningfully better search engine realistically displace Google today?” If the answer is no, then competition is broken
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