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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#391

Post by icotyl »

rndgermandude wrote: post #233
icotyl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Europe’s pro-union climate led to more competitive software companies, or better pay and benefits for its software engineers? Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits. How have the unions helped you in this regard? How have they helped your tech companies be more competitive in the global economy?

> Has Europe’s pro-union climate led to more competitive software companies, or better pay and benefits for its software engineers? E.g. we get health insurance even if we quit or switch jobs. The thing about European software companies tho is that they are hardly unionized at all. >Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits. I am not, t…

Certainly, the salaries are a bit of an illusion when you take the insane housing costs of the Bay Area into account.

If breaking up the American tech companies helped disperse jobs outside of Silicon Valley, that would be a good thing.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#392

Post by jefftk »

tcd wrote: post #376
jefftk wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MAC address is not sent to the server, or accessible to web pages client-side, so that wouldn't matter.

It is if you're using Chrome or got any Google related properties installed on your PC.

I don't think this happens. How do you think it's being transferred? A header sent only on requests to Google properties? A special JS API in Chrome that only Google knows to call?

Re: The world needs more search engines

#393

Post by dev_tty01 »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #63
freediver wrote: post #56

It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page. I see two problems with their approach: 1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset. More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and…

The article says: > One could rightfully counter that Google has a good product. They even offer it for free. But Google Ads are not free. If Search is the product, then advertisers are the customers, not users.

The product is us.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#394

Post by BurningFrog »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #109
bko wrote: post #73

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…

> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with…

For this query, Google was better at understanding the question. Knowing the user had nothing to do with it.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#395

Post by jefftk »

Nextgrid wrote: post #390
jefftk wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For spam / bot / fraud detection, yes. For ad targeting, no.

Source? It’s in their best interests to also use it for ad targeting (in a plausibly deniable way so they don’t get in trouble). We’ve seen them using dark patterns to coerce users into opting into more data collection, and another advertising company got caught using phone numbers for ad purposes even if they originally promised to only use them for 2FA, so why should we trust them this time ?

Source: I work on ads at Google, and if we were doing this I'm pretty sure I'd know.

If it was being used for targeting it would be practical to run an external study demonstrating that.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#396

Post by runarberg »

freediver wrote: post #56

It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page. I see two problems with their approach: 1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset. More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and…

You are wrong. When a product makes the world a worse place—say fridges that deplete the ozone layer—the right thing to do is to ban the product.

In the case of petroleum fueled cars, they are significantly contributing to a massive climate emergency and should be banned regardless of the existence of a superior product. In the case of the Google search engine... Well in the case of the Google company, it should be forced to split up because it is a massive monopoly that hinders competitors from entering any of their dominated markets, and they use their domination of one market to increase their dominance of another.

And this is should be done regardless of the existence of superior products. Goggle as a single company is making the world a worse place, and the right thing to do in that scenario is to split it up.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#397

Post by mantap »

3xblah wrote: post #378
bko wrote: post #73

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…

"... so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user." The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance. If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are look…

Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently, but if all of the results in the result page suck then that's not going to help.

Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#398

Post by quickthrower2 »

solso wrote: post #385
bko wrote: post #73

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…

The claim: "Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search." is, and I'm sorry to say, a make-believe Google's quality is better than anyone else, that is a fact. Let's go to the point. [[I work on Cliqz, and in search]] Do you know how much Google pays apple to be the default search engine? According to you, nothing, because people will go to Google because it's the best. We…

This is business. Apple and Google bring something to the table and they meet in the middle. For zero dollars Apple could just let the user choose from a randomised list which is arguable better and more impartial.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#399

Post by dreamcompiler »

jefftk wrote: post #333
sgt101 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using random Mac addresses?

The MAC address is not sent to the server, or accessible to web pages client-side, so that wouldn't matter.

In theory. But it's not impossible for a nefarious browser to send it along as an HTTP header. Or a nefarious AP:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21463266

Re: The world needs more search engines

#400

Post by [deleted] »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #179
pythux wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is factually incorrect: https://beta.cliqz.com

You're right, instead of saying exclusive feature I should have stuck with 'primary'. I can see how those two words have different enough meanings to cause confusion. Though it's important to remember that not everyone on here has English as their first language, and we should generally be considerate of that when reading people's comments.

[deleted]
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