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

#411

Post by drstewart » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

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…

Why is it people care so much about Google being in many different markets but I never see anyone calling for Samsung or Berkshire Hathaway to be broken up?

Just goes to show how easy populism is to push. Google and Facebook are in the news a lot and used by the average consumer, making them the perfect scapegoats.

Meanwhile, the average consumer just sees Samsung as the TV people (actual industries: apparel, automotive, chemicals, consumer electronics, electronic components, medical equipment, semiconductors, solid state drives, DRAM, ships, telecommunications equipment, home appliances) or Berkshire Hathaway as that old rich guy that drives a cheap car (actual industries (property & casualty insurance, Utilities, Restaurants, Food processing, Aerospace, Toys, Media, Automotive, Sporting goods, Consumer products, Internet, Real estate), so not a peep is made about them or every other horizontally distributed company in the world.

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

#412

Post by losvedir » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

packet_nerd wrote: post #226

tryptophan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Someone linked to an interesting site talking about how to make homemade hot sauce here on HNs. I partly read it and thought it was a great clean site and something I wanted to try. Later going back to find it again I literally spent hours searching, even though I'm pretty sure I remembered some of the exact phrases. For some reason recipe related search results are really really terrible on both Google and Bing.

Yeah, this is why I still use and like myactivity.google.com, as creepy as it is. It's helped me re-find so many interesting half-remembered sites and videos and songs I'd previously come across.

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

#413

Post by izacus » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

drstewart wrote: post #411

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…

Why is it people care so much about Google being in many different markets but I never see anyone calling for Samsung or Berkshire Hathaway to be broken up? Just goes to show how easy populism is to push. Google and Facebook are in the news a lot and used by the average consumer, making them the perfect scapegoats. Meanwhile, the average consumer just sees Samsung as the TV people (actual industries: apparel, automot…

> Meanwhile, the average consumer just sees Samsung as the TV people (actual industries: apparel, automotive, chemicals, consumer electronics, electronic components, medical equipment, semiconductors, solid state drives, DRAM, ships, telecommunications equipment, home appliances)

Samsung was also building military jets and artillery pieces. Imagine the media response if Facebook went into weapons production :)

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

#414

Post by w0mbat » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

Ex-Googler here. This proposal makes no sense to me.

Anybody can write a web-crawler and get a searchable indexed snapshot of the web. What Google is good at, is ranking your search results based on relevance and quality so the best results are at the top and you never see the terrible results.

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

#415

Post by ohiovr » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

Google search is by far the company's most profitable service or product. Compare the investment of putting a dollar into search over a year vrs putting a dollar into android or youtube. You can legally force a company to work against itself but we may have to say goodbye to all the side projects.

also this didn't set well with me

"Access. There might have to be limits on who can access the API. We might not want every high school hacker to be able to build his or her own search platform. On the other hand, imagine thousands of Mark Zuckerbergs battling each other to find better ways of organizing the world’s information."

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

#416

Post by root_axis » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

bodono wrote: post #369

root_axis wrote: post #364

Earlier 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…

Actually both Obama and Clinton had major stories relating to Russia including the failed 'reset', the annexation of Crimea during the Obama administration, obama's "red line" of using chemical weapons in syria which was circumvented by russia, and Obama telling Mitt Romney that Russia was not a threat in the 2012 presidential debates. So yes, they have huge stories relating to russia. And your autocomplete results j…

Those stories barely saw a fraction of media coverage compared to Trump/Russia. The Obama/redline thing was primarily reported as a story about Syria, not Russia. If you type "obama red line" you get plenty of Syria suggestions which makes sense.

This is the problem with search query anecdotes, it ultimately produces a subjective and pointless debate about how one should interpret search suggestions for arbitrarily selected one-off queries. There is no methodology here, and we don't even know how widespread any particular suggestion results are. Any person with an agenda will be able to cherry-pick search queries that confirm their narrative.

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

#417

Post by jschwartzi » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #306

buildzr wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that actually work? I must be old school, I always delete such IDs before searching, but then again I used Google back when it actually did what you told it instead of misinterpreting everything for you.

It doesn't seem to have any particular effect on the results that come up. I always used to delete them, and still do sometimes but Google seems to pretty much ignore them in practice.

Which is a wonderful behavior except for all the times that the error numbers are not actually GUIDs but rather identify general errors.

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

#418

Post by torbjorn » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:21 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…

Yeah I must echo your sentiments wrt their Google Now product, it is great. Not only does it provides relevant content but some of it is very new and or obscure which I really appreciate. I have linked people to videos I pulled off my Google Now feed and they are amazed that I know about a video on our very specific shared interest that is less than a couple hours old and has only a few hundred views.

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

#419

Post by metabagel » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

bodono wrote: post #236

root_axis wrote: post #209

Earlier 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…

Try news.google.com. It works there.

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

#420

Post by dpacmittal » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

ga-vu wrote: post #371

This 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.

I think the bigger issue is how it affects people and the power this tech gives to control various things about socio-political landscape which a single corporation shouldn't be trusted with.