201–210 of 630 posts
All three are terrible at serving me up websites to buy crap when I typically want to learn about something. I would love a filter that says "Don't try to sell me anything"!
I believe Google's biggest advantage is in their marketing & that the word "Google" now is a synonym for search.
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…
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'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…
So... I think there are two issues with this. (1) This doesn't actually reduce market share, since each of these are basically different market categories. (2) Almost all the revenue is from search. That company is the revenue generating arm for the other ones.
You are right though, it doesn't deal with the dominance of the search directly. My hope is a complimentary effect to the above also happens: Google no longer gets gobs of personal data from its other services, allowing other search engines to approach its efficacy.
As is clear I'm not really a fan of direct intervention in a single market, I see it as more of a problem when these giants muscle their way and control more and more markets, creating a vicious feedback loop.
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…
> 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…
Outside of ad revenue, search has always been seen as something of a "charity" effort for the internet. It's "boring" infrastructure work that can be critically useful but doesn't really make money directly on its own. No one wants to pay a "search toll" and there's no government agency in the world that the internet would trust as a neutral index to run it as actual tax-basis infrastructure.
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…
>2) 20 years of experience fighting SEO spam. Tangential - but does anyone else feel that google results are useless a lot of the time? If you search for something, you will get 100% SEO optimized shitty ad-ridden blog/commercial pages giving surface level info about what you searched about. I find for programming/IT topics its pretty good, but for other topics it is horrible. Unless you are very specific with your s…
There are 2 issues, I think.
Firstly, the SE-optimised spam, which has become very good as masquerading as genuine content.
Secondly, Google has dumbed search syntax down a bit, and often seems to outright ignore double quoted phrases, presumably thinking it knows better than I what I want.
As a dev, I do accept I may be an outlier though - with the incredible wealth of search history and location data that Google holds, it seems likely things have actually improved for typical users.
From the article: "But what about those nasty filter bubbles that trap people in narrow worlds of information? Making Google’s index public doesn’t solve that problem, but it shrinks it to nonthreatening proportions. At the moment, it’s entirely up to Google to determine which bubble you’re in, which search suggestions you receive, and which search results appear at the top of the list; that’s the stuff of worldwide…
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'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…
So... I think there are two issues with this. (1) This doesn't actually reduce market share, since each of these are basically different market categories. (2) Almost all the revenue is from search. That company is the revenue generating arm for the other ones.
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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…
I'm not ruling out the possibility that google actually is manipulating search results, but this is not proof of that.
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> 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.