This sounds eerily like what happened with the railroads, and I suspect it would have some unintended and unsavory side effects. At the very least, it would open up opportunities for the Wesley Mouches of the world.
To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
401–410 of 630 posts
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#402Wouldn't help.
A classic antitrust breakup might.
- Google Search - no account required or offered.
- Doubleclick - ads on third party sites, not including Google sites.
- Alphabet Services - mail, docs, etc. - anything that requires a login or pay.
- Alphabet Heavy Industries - cloud, large scale business services, etc.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
This ^ times a 1000. Google simply has the best search product. They invest in it like crazy. I’ve tried bing multiple times. It’s slow, it spams msn ads in your face on the homepage. Microsoft just doesn’t get the value of a clean UX. DuckDuckGo results are pretty irrelevant the last time I tried them. There is nothing that comes close to their usability. To make the switchover, it has to be much much better than Go…
I don't necessarily agree. The hard part of search is building the index and differentiating _real_ promotion from the _fake_. There's a lot of SEO manipulation that Google does a good job avoiding.
Webspam is a really big problem, yes. It's very unlikely that you'd be able to catch up or keep up in that regard without Google's resources.
Building the index itself is relatively easy. There are some subtleties that most people don't think about (eg. dupe detection and redirects are surprisingly complicated, and CJK segmentation is a pre-req for tokenizing), but things like tokenizing, building posting lists, and finding backlinks are trivial - a competent programmer could get basic English-only implementations of all three running in a day.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have an example of Vox being dishonest?
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/vox/
>Overall, we rate Vox Left Biased due to wording and story selection that favors the left and High for factual reporting based on only one failed fact check and appropriately issuing a correction to a second. (5/15/2016) Updated (M. Huitsing 5/30/2019)
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#405Okay, 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…
I'd wager any startup that tries to crawl a few sites like Amazon, Yelp, Linkedin, etc will be blocked. Google, however gets a pass because they're Google. So yes, I believe their huge index, and ability to crawl any site at will is a huge, huge advantage for them.
Amazon lets anyone crawl them, Yelp has a whitelist and no you can't get on it, Linkedin has a whitelist and no you can't get on it, Facebook has a whitelist and no you can't get on it.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those people had a gigantic Russia scandal though, Trump did, so you must still account for this unexplained aberration. If anything, the Trump/Russia scandal had more coverage than the Hillary e-mail scandal, so it's an even more difficult aberration to explain. Also, if I type "hillary e" I get "Hillary Emails PDF" as an autocomplete suggestion. If I type "clinton e" I get several email suggestions "clinton…
I can believe Google is attempting to de-emphasize scandals on both sides. As an aside, I do get "russia investigation" as autosuggestion for trump. I think the bigger problem is that these adjustment appear to be done manually. We know that's what they're doing to avoid racist autocomplete phrases (and reasonably so, I think most people would agree). Having such judgments made on specific political topics/events/sca…
My only point is that autocomplete results for arbitrary one-off queries isn't instructive, especially because many people see different autocomplete suggestions. As I've already pointed out, its possible to find strange results for anything if you look hard enough.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#407Okay, 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…
You're not alone. From my perspective, the value of google search results has been dropping for years. And the quality of their search results seems to be dropping in a way I suspect is profitable for google. Most of the results I get back from google these days are trying to sell me something I have no interest in buying.
For example, suppose I do a google image search for "pear", because I want images of pears obviously. The first result is indeed a pear, good job google! Except the first search result just happens to come from Amazon, and also happens to be a pretty shitty thumbnail quality photograph (355x336). It's a pear alright, but why is this particular image of a pear first? Google didn't try to give me the best image of a pear, they tried to give me the pear image they thought most likely to induce a financial transaction. Or alternatively, google let itself get cheaply manipulated by Amazon's SEO. Neither is a good look.
A much better pear image, 3758x3336 from wikipedia, is further down the search results. So it's not like google was unable to find good pictures of pears. And a non-image search for "pear" returns the wikipedia page first, so it's not like google failed to noticed the relevancy of the wikipedia article about pears. Yet the shitty amazon thumbnail of a pear shows up higher in the image search results than a high resolution photograph of a pear from wikipedia.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#408Okay, 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…
> Bing had the money and persistence to make that investment, but how many others will? I hypothesized once with an ex Microsoft HIGH up that it probably took 10B to launch bing. He said I was almost exactly on the nose. Also this is a ridiculous thing to ask for. How much money do you think Google pays for the bandwidth to crawl the web? How much do you think it costs to run the machines that create indexes out of t…
> Google should give away the fruits of that labor for free, plus invest in a reasonable API to download that index?
If you're not going to read the article why should anyone read your comment?
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially with voice searches. People are searching entire sentences rather than specific keywords which are much more likely to be unique.
Do people do this? Or do you mean queries forwarded by home assistants trying to parse inputs?
What does it matter whether it came from an assistant or not?
Natural language is likely the preferred search input method for kids under a certain age, who cannot yet type fluently. My kids formulate very long, complex queries verbally. The other day my son asked Alexa why the machine gun is such a deadly weapon. She replied with a snippet from Wikipedia that was surprisingly relevant.
Re: To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
#410This is dumb. You mean if I work two decades to develop tech that nobody else can copy, I have to open-source it because my competitors are dumbasses? This is not how it's suppose to work.
Not saying I agree or disagree with you, but the idea itself isn't anything radical. The US has had anti-trust since the late 1800s.