To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by nova22033 » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

drevil-v2 wrote: post #140

tomweingarten wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Speaking of cherry picking, I wouldn't use vox as reliable source for bipartisan data.

speaking of cherry picking, I wouldn't use autocomplete suggestions as a source for bias. Has anyone on this thread claimed bias in the search results?

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

#352

Post by bodono » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #330

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…

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.

The same thing happens with Russia for "barack obama rus" "hillary clinton rus", "george bush rus", etc. - none autocomplete for me despite the fact that there was lots of news items relating those politicians and russia during their careers. However Clinton is the only one that doesn't appear to autocomplete for email, suggesting that it is specific to her. When I type "donald trump epstei" I get "theo epstein donald trump" (for some reason the word order is flipped), which would suggest to me that epstein is not blocked in the way you suggest, and it's just that not enough people are searching that term, or that the autocomplete algorithm hasn't caught up to the latest news on epstein and trump yet. However "donald trump e j" does autocomplete to "donald trump e jean carroll", which is relating to a serious scandal for the president. This isn't cherry picked I'm afraid, it really does look like intentional blocking of "hillary clinton email" from autocomplete.

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

#353

Post by tsss » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #188

jorvi wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

(2) is one of the most important points. We have to stop Google from cross-financing new products from other revenue streams so they can no longer undercut or buy all competitors. Google Maps is a good example. They ran it for super cheap a long time to drive out competitors and now rack up the prices.

In contrast to most people here, I think breaking up Amazon is far more important to Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and many other tech companies. Only Google is as bad.

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

#354

Post by verisimilitudes » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

vinaypai wrote: post #339

nothis wrote: post #334

I don't mind google search. Let them have search, they're obviously the best at it. What I have a problem with is literally every other service they provide. Google shouldn't own the most popular browser, the most popular video streaming platform, the most popular map service, the most popular operating system and (one of the?) most popular email services. Why is a single company allowed to have control over essentia…

What's stopping you from using Bing Search, Open streetmaps, hotmail, Firefox etc.? Google doesn't "control" anything you don't let it.

Very few people seem to host their own email infrastructure, even when using their own domain, and I find myself unable to contact businesses and individuals because of gmail's rules that almost never let my messages through.

This isn't even touching on that Amp email garbage that they're pushing.

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

#355

Post by nojvek » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #345

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…

> 1) a record of searches and user clicks for the past 20 years From what I can tell, Google cares a lot more about recency. When I switch over to a new framework or language, search results are pretty bad for the first week, horrible actually as Google thinks I am still using /other language/. I have to keep appending the language / framework name to my queries. After a week or so? The results are pure magic. I can…

Going back to OPs point. Google is real good at associating search query to search result. Every time you search and click on something, google learns that association.

So it could very well be that as more users adopt the new language/framework in the first couple of weeks they have taught google those associations.

Google isn’t a search company. They are a distributed machine learning company that make most of their money from learning what people want and showing relevant ads to them.

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

#356

Post by _v7gu » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

tomweingarten wrote: post #124

nova22033 wrote: post #106

Caveat: The author is not a technologists Robert Epstein (born June 19, 1953) is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1981, was editor in chief of Psychology Today, He has also made some questionable claims about google manipulating search results to favor Hillary Clinton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein#cite_note-15 His r…

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)

Here is the trend data where google autocompletes two results while not autocompleting other two. The trend data groups the results pretty clearly, however the autocomplete engine does not agree.

If the trend data is not being used for the autocomplete results, what is? And why?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=hillary%20...

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

#357

Post by dumbfounder » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

"High-volume users (think: Microsoft Corp.’s Bing) should pay Google nominal fees set by regulators. That gives Google another incentive for maintaining a superior index."

How do these nominal fees hold a candle to the advertising dollars they rake in? Their dominance in advertising fuels their R&D to keep their algorithms superior. They have to maintain their superiority to fuel to keep the advertising dollars flowing. If suddenly anyone can offer Google results then a lot of that ad money dries up. Then the R&D money dries up.

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

#358

Post by ryanobjc » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

beatgammit wrote: post #171

muro wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Google, you missed the part that makes most money.

Most of those products don't make money by themselves, they exist to keep people in the ecosystem, providing more data for the real moneymaker. The biggest blow to Google wouldn't be to break it up into lots of small companies, you just need to separate the advertising business from everything else and you've effectively neutered the monopoly. Google's genius isn't in hiring the best engineers to providing a ton of s…

“... provide more data for the real moneymaker.”

This is a supposition - while perhaps it seems to makes sense, seems true, “must be true”, it doesn’t mean it is true!

Unless you worked on search quality at google you really aren’t in a position to know if, say, google cloud, or android provides useful signals to search (outside of the signals they’d collect anyways if they were different companies).

One thing people are obscuring is just how crazily effective AdWords are. They work for the advertisers, and they earn google like 70+% of the revenue. Confirmed via sec filings which does break that out. Go play with creating an AdWords campaign and try to infer just how much data google really needs to deliver those ads - it’s less than you’d think.

In short: this overall move is more wishful thinking than solidly reasoned. Surveying the field of streaming video, given the amount of studio driven consolidation, is there really a tons of competitors being held down and will spring up? I am skeptical.

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

#359

Post by wongarsu » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

Forcing them to give anyone access to their index at a fair price wouldn't be unprecedented. In Europe that's a common method to deal with infrastructure: anyone can lay a phone line, but you have to sell access to competitors at a fair price.

Alternatively we could just publicly fund a crawler. A project like Common Crawl, just bigger and better, with some simple indexes prebuilt.

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

#360

Post by Janeman544 » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

Wait, Google has built it's index using its own resources but for some reason they should make it public ? Why?

I instead propose something that actually makes sense

1. Audit Pentagon and make the report public 2. Audit the fed and make the report public 3. Audit Whitehouse and make all communication public 2 years later.