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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

#271

Post by jldugger »

jorvi wrote: post #203
dalbasal wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, my thought was that by breaking everything off from everything else, these silo'd services would suddenly have to compete with the rest of their market at fair terms, instead of being propped up massively by other division(s), and thus would lose marketshare to a multitude of fresh and established competitors. You are right though, it doesn't deal with the dominance of the search directly. My hope is a complimen…

> Yes, my thought was that by breaking everything off from everything else, these silo'd services would suddenly have to compete with the rest of their market at fair terms

I think it's instructive to look at the rest of the market. How is Mozilla funded? Basically a single gigantic contract with Google. Even Apple accepts payment from google to become the default, and it's not cheap: https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en... The same logic applies to pretty much anything Alphabet spins off -- there's little difference between ownership and those contract.

About the only competition this setup produces is the ability for Mozilla to walk away to a competitor bid, which they did for like a year before bailing out at the first opportunity. There's a huge incumbency bias in these contracts. The first parallel that comes to mind is employer provided health insurance. Everyone gets to bid, but the incumbent knows the claims history far better than the competition and we'd only expect them to lose bids to companies overly optimistic about that history. Google knows how valuable various traffic sources are, but their competitors have to guess, and only when their guess is higher than Google's does it pay off. Does anyone think Yahoo winning Firefox was a good deal? I haven't seen any analysis to support that.

> 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.

Wouldn't the most profitable thing for these broken up companies be to sell their slice of the personal data pie as many parties as possible? This seems like a net loss for privacy. How much extra would it be worth to set up an exclusive arrangement?

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

#272

Post by Loughla »

Nasrudith wrote: post #160
ng12 wrote: post #85

I don't understand why we are talking about this. Google is far from the first "monopoly" that I would like to see broken up. My guess is that Google's not lobbying effectively.

Because their even more monopolistic competitors are pissed, journalists are pisses because the world changed on them and they have to compete, combined with radicals with a persecution complex and a "no the children are wrong" attitude towards their opinions being unpopular. The tech break up push is one big hypocritical circle jerk from every party.

This just sounds like pissed off rant. Can you draw out your statements a little and explain them?

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

#273

Post by jldugger »

detritus wrote: post #78
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…

> 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…

> Why aren't all the big companies Doing Search?

They are.

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

#274

Post by EdSharkey »

Sebguer wrote: post #244
djsumdog wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Project Veritas has historically operated by guiding people into saying something ridiculous, either by themselves acting ridiculous (and convincing the person they're talking to that they're crazy) or just driving the conversation to ridiculous areas. Maybe this Google 'expose' is the first time they're not guilty of that, but anyone who still finds them credible after their last several blatant mischaracterizations…

The jester's job is to criticise the tyrant in his own court. Just enjoy the show.

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

#275

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

arethuza wrote: post #169
asark wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

This has been the problem with results for the past few years. E-commerce gets priority in all things and you have to wade through pages of useless links if you want actual content about what you are searching for.

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

#276

Post by Kovah »

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…

Totally agree. Googles' golden egg is not the index but the datasets containing searches done by the user (together with location data from Android and Maps, and speech data from Assistant).

As far as I remember Google is actually shrinking its index in terms of number of indexed websites because 90% of the internet are irrelevant for the majority of searches. Basically "quality over quantity" if you can say that.

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

#277

Post by twblalock »

dalbasal wrote: post #211

So... this article is a good example of how ??!? it gets once you move from "We gotta do something about these tech monopolies" into the "what should we do?" phase. How exactly "do* you break up a Google or a FB so that (only one possible reason, but the one cited here) they don't control too much media/mind share?^ Laws usually want to be general, and my suggestion doesn't necessarily lend to that, but I'll suggest…

I have zero faith that any new social media ecosystem that emerges in the absence of Facebook would be more secure, or more private -- especially if the new ecosystem consists of multiple independent services sharing data (and if it doesn't turn out that way, that means a new monopoly emerged).

A single large company is also easier to regulate than a bunch of smaller ones.

If you are concerned about monopoly power over social media, go ahead and break up Facebook. If you are concerned about privacy and the security of social media data, you are probably better off regulating Facebook and raising high barriers to anyone who wants access to Facebook's data.

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

#278

Post by bodono »

mrep wrote: post #268
bodono wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try "hillary clinton emai". From a fresh chrome session in NYC I get nothing, not a single autocomplete result. On the other hand "donald trump emai" gets: * donald trump email * donald trump email address * donald trump email list * donald trump email newsletter * donald trump email list signup And just to drive the point home I tried "root_axis emai" and got "root_axis email". Try anyone else and you get similar re…

Seems to go both ways though as I'm not getting any auto completion results for "donald trump stormy daniels" either. I'm guessing they scrub things that are highly sensationalized in the news.

"stormy daniels" doesn't get any autocomplete results for me even without trump, my guess is this is more about adult search terms getting blacklisted rather than political. For example "donald trump e j" gets "donald trump e jean carroll", E Jean Carroll recently accused Trump of a serious sexual assault and this is autocompleting.

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

#279

Post by IshKebab »

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…

The long tail is important, even if it's a small percentage of search's (which it isn't anyway).

Same reason people won't buy electric cars with 100 mile ranges, even if they very rarely travel more than 100 miles.

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

#280

Post by dehrmann »

tryptophan wrote: post #103
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…

>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…

w3schools still outranks mdn a lot.
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