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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

#32

I don’t want to break Google’s monopoly on search. Google’s search is fantastic. It’s their advertising business knowing too much about me I care about.

I'm not so sure about search being fantastic anymore. I'm frustrated with how most times Google will completely ignore the exact query terms and return very clickbaity/popular links from medium/quota/etc. It's been happening for a bit now and usually for any serious search, I'll compare results with duckduckgo just to be sure.

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

#34
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many just call them duck or ddg now. They bought duck.com

It might have been for free, it's unclear they bought it https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18137369/duckduckgo-duck...

They added an intermediate page around July 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20180721002315/https://twitter.c... and probably saw that 99% of people clicked on the DDG link.

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

#35

[flagged]

> Bloomberg seems owned by some behind-the-scenes communist group

Bloomberg, LP is owned and controlled by Michael Bloomberg [1]. I can't believe I have to write this, but Michael Bloomberg is not a communist. (Nor is the author's proposal remotely communist.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P.#cite_note-6

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

#36
post #16

I don’t want to break Google’s monopoly on search. Google’s search is fantastic. It’s their advertising business knowing too much about me I care about.

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.

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

#37

This idea is a pipe dream. It would be nationalizing property, it's never going to happen in the US. If you want to enforce anti-trust actions against google's app store policies, I'm all for that. But forcing them to give away property is insane.

The difference in this case is that the usual defenders of private property rights and libertarianism feel as though Google is suppressing them removing the usual roadblock to this kind reform.

This is a rare instance where anti-corporate leftists and dejected right wingers could actually do something substantive together.

In most cases I would agree with you the defenders of private industry are pretty fierce in the US, but all that ideology sort of dissipates when you feel like you are being oppressed (whether or not, or to what degree it is true).

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

#38

If DuckDuckGo can change their stupid name they will gain market share overnight.

Many just call them duck or ddg now. They bought duck.com

Did they buy it recently? I recall Google owning it for a bit through an acquisition? Yeah it certainly would be nice if ddg rebranded and pushed duck as it's name.

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

#39

This idea is a pipe dream. It would be nationalizing property, it's never going to happen in the US. If you want to enforce anti-trust actions against google's app store policies, I'm all for that. But forcing them to give away property is insane.

> This idea is a pipe dream. It would be nationalizing property The author references precedent in the 1956 consent decree with Bell Labs [1]. If anything, that was more extreme. AT&T developed those patents. The author's proposal doesn't involve Google surrendering its algorithm. Just the index it compiled from public resources using a publicly-subsidized Internet infrastructure. All without content owners' permissi…

What about the computing and infrastructure resources that Google dedicated to build the index, and continues to dedicate to keep the index up to date?

This is a failed model. There is no incentive for Google to continue to update the public version, and it would quickly fall out of date while Google focuses on their own internal copy. It’s a solution suggested by lawmakers who fundamentally don’t understand how computers work.

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

#40

No sure if relevant but I've hated google's search for a unique reason: I find it horribly slow, especially compared to what it used to be. It's so slow, I've designed + partially implemented an alternative for my own use: https://github.com/Jeffrey-P-McAteer/dindex I've only tested with 1000 records, but the query times are all <200ms.

How does your performance scale? If it scales linearly in records, you're going to have trouble if you're only below 200ms on 1k records. If it scales logarithmically, there are still a couple orders of magnitude between a comprehensive index like Google's and your 1k record index, which is still going to give you trouble.

In short, 200ms is slow, not fast.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy to be faster than 200ms (I'd need to look closer into fuzzy text searching algorithms to be able to make an educated guess here); I'm just saying it's not fast enough.

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