I lean pretty far left, but this proposal makes me really uneasy. It seems very coercive and ham-fisted. I think instead, Bing should consider opening its index up. It'd be a massive PR coup, they wouldn't lose anything of much value, and anyone who put the index to better use than them would help them by breaking Google's stranglehold over search.
To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
321–330 of 630 posts
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What about the computing and infrastructure resources that Google dedicated to build the index How is this different from the 1956 consent decree? AT&T spent money developing its patents. But on the basis of longstanding law around public interest, it was forced to license them to third parties. (Note: not give them away.) > and continues to dedicate to keep the index up to date? The author explicitly contemplates,…
Conflating AT&T to Google is incredibly misleading. AT&T had become a defacto monopoly approx. 20 years prior to that consent decree, not to mention being subjected to an anti-trust lawsuit ten years prior to the decree. The article makes the conceit of equating an online data store to the telephone infrastructure. Google is not preventing other companies from indexing the internet in any way, shape or form. There is…
> Google is not preventing other companies from indexing the internet in any way
AT&T wasn't blocking anyone from laying interstate copper. It's just prohibitively expensive to do so. The analogy, down to the network effects, is quite apt.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google gave it to them. The sceptic in me saw it as future evidence against being a search monopoly "we even helped our rival you guys"
That's cynic, not skeptic. If Google kept duck.com you would say they were protecting their monopoly. When your model of blameworthiness says that every possible choice is wrong, your model is wrong.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#324Making google's index public may not be as simple as sharing a file.
We don't exactly know how google indexes or ranks pages. It might be a completely different way of looking at indexing, it might be optimized for google's use cases such that we don't even have the software or the hardware to instantiate and search through it.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#325This suggestion is about as intelligible as saying back in 2006: "To break Microsoft's monopoly in the OS market, make it's kernel source code public". (i.e. Absolutely useless)
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#326So although everyone likes to believe google is a monopoly it’s far from it. You have choices- bing, biadu , yandex, DuckDuckGo... there is also nothing about googles search position that prevents you from building a competitor. What we do have is peter thiel backing an administration that’s anti google, Russia, China that are anti google. Why? it’s a source of truth that challenges their lies. We also have an emerge…
Being a monopoly isn't actually the issue. Having a dominant market position is. This is where European competition law works well.
Google definitely has a dominant market position.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 15% of Google searches per day are unique, as in, Google has never seen them before. That is impossible, and therefore wrong (I'm wrong, please see below). To know if a search is unique, as in Google has never seen them before, Google must be able to decide if a query it receives was seen before or not. Even if we assume Google needed only one bit for each message it has ever seen, and assuming it only saw 15% of n…
Where are you getting these numbers? Google says they get ~2 trillion searches per year. 40 trillion searches over 20 years (way too many) would be 2^44 searches. https://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trilli... (And they don’t even need to store all searches for all time for this, thanks to Bloom filters.)
The whole point was that 2^1471 is wrong.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not "research" period. Using one arbitrary search comparison to draw conclusions about the nature of a system that processes billions of queries a day is pretty weak. Additionally, I don't get the same results you do. "hillary clinton e" does not bring up emails, nor does "donald trump e" bring up emails (the first results I see are election, education, england visit, ex wife). I'm not ruling out the possibil…
That's the point: this is not research, but whatever is going on at Google, the explanation has to account for examples like these. It's simply one observation that you cannot discount. I just tried searching again a few times with new private windows, and "email" alternates between first and fourth suggestion for trump. But the more important point is the absence of the suggestion for clinton: we know it's been in t…
When I type "Donald Trump R" I don't see any autocomplete for "Donald Trump Russia" despite plenty of news coverage on this topic. So what? This isn't proof of anything. I can indeed discount "one observation" because it is literally a single search query used to draw a conclusion about an insanely complex system that processes billions of queries a day. I am open to the possibility that google is manipulating search results, but to demonstrate this you need to account for many other possible search queries that produce seemingly unexpected results. Dissecting one politically charged query and claiming it is proof of google's malfeasance doesn't make sense. Anyone can string together a couple strange query results to support their own subjective narrative about what should appear and the supposed sinister machinations behind the query results.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#329Okay, 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.
> Basically "quality over quantity" if you can say that.
This is even more depressing. Google was such a wonderful tool for us nerds because we could finally find those usenet posts, personal blogs, tech mail lists, etc. of all the esoteric subjects that had been hard to find previously. Before Google, you'd use lists of curated links (e.g. Yahoo) for a given topic that had been traded back and forth between various sites and other interested netizens.
It's apparent that Google is becoming worse and worse for these types of searches, while it concentrates of more popular queries like "When is the next on" or "What is the current sports-ball score" or "How big are Kim Kardashian's boobs".
Just like Craig of Craigslist recently came out with an article saying the internet has actually made the news media worse, not better for informing citizens - something he did not predict correctly - it's apparent that Google is pushing us in the same negative direction in the ability to find quality information on non-consumer knowledge.
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/14/craigslis...
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not "research" period. Using one arbitrary search comparison to draw conclusions about the nature of a system that processes billions of queries a day is pretty weak. Additionally, I don't get the same results you do. "hillary clinton e" does not bring up emails, nor does "donald trump e" bring up emails (the first results I see are election, education, england visit, ex wife). I'm not ruling out the possibil…
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…
When I type "Donald Trump R" (or Ru or Russ etc) no autocomplete results contain the word Russia despite plenty of news coverage. When I type "Donald Trump Epstein" no autocomplete results. Must be a conspiracy by google to protect the president... or drawing conclusions based on individually cherry-picked autocomplete results is like drawing conclusions from numerology.