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

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

#441

Post by jhunter1016 »

jorvi wrote: post #152
dalbasal wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assess Google (& FB's) "crown jewel" as, ultimately, their market share, which is related to your points... and causation runs both ways. The user data helps/ed Google create the superior UX, as you say. The reach is what makes Google & FB valuable to advertisers. A search engine with 0.1% of Google's user volume cannot charge advertisers 0.1% of Google's as revenue. Returns to scale/reach/market-share are ve…

'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…

I'm not sure how much an impact breaking Google up would have, and I say this as someone who has built a product that competes with Google's G-Suite. I want there to be a more level playing field, sure. But each of these siloed businesses would still be a monopoly in its own right.

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

#442

Post by tynorf »

vinayms wrote: post #425

Can someone explain why its fair or acceptable to force Google to make its index public, the one it built with its own time and money, instead of having some open source initiative building another index from scratch?

It's posted a few other places in this thread, but it already exists: https://commoncrawl.org/

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

#443

Post by exolymph »

bduerst wrote: post #394
ar-jan wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, and further observations show that it's not unique to Hillary Clinton. This means you can discount the claim since it uses cherry picked data.

But we still haven't answered the actual question: Why doesn't "email" come up in autocomplete for Hillary Clinton, when it clearly should?

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

#444

Post by goldenshale »

It might be true that Google is in such a dominant position that the greater society needs to think about regulation, transparency, etc., but I think we need to develop better and more clearly differentiated terminology that clearly differentiates this form of dominance from an anti-competitive monopoly. This is not a monopoly in the standard sense, and since anyone can crawl the web and build their own index Google isn't hindering anyone from competing.

Through hard work and good strategy they have achieved a dominant position, and I think that as a society we should both honor that and recognize that they have been pretty good players in the market. At the same time, if Google were instead run by the Koch brothers we could be in dire straights, and so we should also realize that we can't safely leave such power in the hands of private citizens without demanding accountability, transparency, openness to scrutiny, open dialogue, etc.

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

#445

Post by AnimalMuppet »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #215
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…

What Google has is "I'll google that".

In particular, they have the google.com domain. That is literally their most valuable asset.

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

#446

Post by core-questions »

goldenshale wrote: post #444

It might be true that Google is in such a dominant position that the greater society needs to think about regulation, transparency, etc., but I think we need to develop better and more clearly differentiated terminology that clearly differentiates this form of dominance from an anti-competitive monopoly. This is not a monopoly in the standard sense, and since anyone can crawl the web and build their own index Google…

> This is not a monopoly in the standard sense, and since anyone can crawl the web and build their own index Google isn't hindering anyone from competing.

It's close. It's as close to a monopoly as MS was with IE built into Windows 98 - while you can find and use alternatives, it's on you to do this, and Google is the default all over the place.

Remember, too, how much power this gives Google - the top five search results for a keyword are intensely powerful, for everything from directing commerce to a particular site, to controlling news narratives, and more. Companies pay millions for SEO "professionals" and software like Moz / Stat to ensure they're in the top rankings. The latter in turn need to defeat google's anti-bot stuff to get search results, so they're in their own arms race...

The whole ecosystem is dirty and gross and gives too much power to too few people with too much money. It'd be fine if the average consumer was conscious of this and could reasonably make the choice to use a different engine, but this is highly controlled as well - think of the Google donations to Mozilla that they may not be able to live without.

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

#447

Post by lostctown »

latexr wrote: post #426
com2kid wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Also people forget that the creepy stuff Google does is super useful . For the same reasons you’re exalting them, I have non-technical friends who asked me how Google knows so much about them (and suggestions on how to avoid it) because they found it too creepy. I don’t think people forget Google’s results are useful; some just think they’re more creepy than valuable. You seem to have picked your side in that (im)b…

I wish interfaces were more straight up about their intentions and made it easier to implement account level partitions. For work I love Google's magic tracking effects, but at 1 am, hell no.

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

#448

Post by rasz »

losvedir wrote: post #412
packet_nerd wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you rely on google spying instead of your own browser history?

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

#449

Post by foota »

zubspace wrote: post #65

From the article: "But what about those nasty filter bubbles that trap people in narrow worlds of information? Making Google’s index public doesn’t solve that problem, but it shrinks it to nonthreatening proportions. At the moment, it’s entirely up to Google to determine which bubble you’re in, which search suggestions you receive, and which search results appear at the top of the list; that’s the stuff of worldwide…

> I don't want Google results! I want different web crawlers ordering the results according to my taste

Okay, great, we'll see how you browse and use that to determine...

> without tracking each and every page impression of me. Give me that and I'll switch in a heartbeat.

Uh? How exactly do you want them to do that?

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

#450

Post by thinkalone »

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.

Could you not find it again via the HN site search? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hot%20sauce%22%20recipe&sor...
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