Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 630 posts

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

#471

Post by gigatexal »

epicide wrote: post #150
gigatexal wrote: post #96

I'm of two minds here: Google's whole reason for ascending to where they are is the PageRank algorithm which is why Google was created in order to monetize. I see this in similar veins to Apple and iOS: would we support calls for Apple to be forced to allow iOS to be installed on non-Apple hardware? If not, then why would we insist on Google giving up it's reason for being, it's reason a lot of us use it to find rele…

Not a lawyer, but this seems to be conflating patents with copyrights? i.e. iOS (especially new versions) would fall under copyright protection [0]. PageRank is a patented technique for search. The patent apparently ran out about 6 weeks ago [0]. While both copyright and patents are intended to protect creators for a certain period of time, copyright protects a specific work and patents protect an idea. Patents shoul…

Makes sense actually. Yeah I think I am conflating them.

The patent is expired but could you argue the index Google is accumulating and aggregating could be copyrighted work in the same way that iOS is? It has taken considerable effort, expense, and expertise to cultivate a useful index.

Full disclosure I’ve no idea what I’m talking about just thinking I can’t see what basis people have to force Google to open up their key money maker just because. Other people/companies can create their own indexes with the now expired patent, no?

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

#472

Post by root_axis »

exolymph wrote: post #443
bduerst wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The question doesn't need answering any more than any other arbitrarily selected individual query needs an answer. Why does "trump helsinki" have zero suggestions? Why does "bill oreilly sex" have zero suggestions? Why does "alex jones sandyhook" have zero suggestions? I used right-wing examples because I presume any celebrity or left-wing examples will be considered evidence in favor of your position, but there are plenty of examples all over the place.

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

#473

Post by reroute1 »

latexr wrote: post #469
reroute1 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually possible to operate without relying on Google or any other big tech firm. Who is forcing you into these privacy dilemmas? All of their services are a choice you are making. You don't need to accept any of it if you don't want to.

> You don't need to accept any of it if you don't want to. Tell that to the people who had their privacy violated by Street View[1]. And the people who specifically disabled location services on their Android devices but were still tracked[2]. Or all the people who have no idea what Google Analytics is and never consented to it, but are profiled by it everyday. > All of their services are a choice you are making. I d…

Street view is debatably invasive. I understand this might seem hand wavy to someone really concerned about privacy issues, but

1.generally speaking I would think VERY few people care about an image of their property being on street views. 2. It's not really illegal to take pictures so even from a legal standpoint it seems like a gray area. 3. I understand there can be individual reasons for not wanting this, but it seems to be a very large net positive. And I would apply that statement to most other tracking and data policies they have.

If they are lying about how their services track people, that is definitely grounds for concern. The transparency can definitely be improved, but still these are people with Android phones and people using Google Analytics. No one is forced to use these things they are free to use any other service or create their own.

And my attitude is out of pragmatism and how I think privacy issues should be handled. I don't have any problem with the way Google uses my data so I don't care to fix a non problem. And I don't see it as their responsibility to change a way of business when anyone is free to use any other service or create their own, since I don't find it offensive.

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

#474

Post by latexr »

reroute1 wrote: post #473
latexr wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need to accept any of it if you don't want to. Tell that to the people who had their privacy violated by Street View[1]. And the people who specifically disabled location services on their Android devices but were still tracked[2]. Or all the people who have no idea what Google Analytics is and never consented to it, but are profiled by it everyday. > All of their services are a choice you are making. I d…

Street view is debatably invasive. I understand this might seem hand wavy to someone really concerned about privacy issues, but 1.generally speaking I would think VERY few people care about an image of their property being on street views. 2. It's not really illegal to take pictures so even from a legal standpoint it seems like a gray area. 3. I understand there can be individual reasons for not wanting this, but it…

The first sentence of the linked New York Times story:

> Google on Tuesday acknowledged to state officials that it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project when it casually scooped up passwords, e-mail and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users.

That answers your first three paragraphs. There’s no “if” to their lying and privacy invasions. They’ve been caught and admitted their actions time and again.

> No one is forced to use these things they are free to use any other service or create their own.

It is here I will respectfully give up on continuing the conversation with you. You’re either ignoring my main point or truly don’t care for the majority of users. Most people don’t understand the ramifications of these choices and for good reason; they are hard to understand. By suggesting non-technical users create their own services and devices, I’m now wondering it you’re trolling me.

> And my attitude is out of pragmatism (…) I don't have any problem with the way Google uses my data

Which is valid, but irrelevant. I’ve already mentioned in the top post different people make different choices. I presented another side and used facts to justify it. If you’re going to answer with mere opinion, you’re not adding to the points made by the original poster.

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

#475

Post by Eridrus »

nostrademons wrote: post #309

Ex-Google-Search engineer here, having also done some projects since leaving that involve data-mining publicly-available web documents. This proposal won't do very much. Indexing is the (relatively) easy part of building a search engine. CommonCrawl already indexes the top 3B+ pages on the web and makes it freely available on AWS. It costs about $50 to grep over it, $800 or so to run a moderately complex Hadoop job.…

Sure, it costs $50 to grep it, but how much does it cost to host an in-memory index with all the data?

This is not a proposal to just share the crawl data, but the actual searchable index, presumably at arms length cost both internally & externally.

The same ideas could be extended to the Knowledge Graph, etc.

IMO the goal here should not be to kill Google, but to keep Google on their toes by removing barriers to competition.

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

#476

Post by crowbahr »

Razengan wrote: post #430
nojvek wrote: post #361

Earlier 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…

> Google simply has the best search product. The best available doesn't necessarily mean the best possible. And Google is far from it, and it's getting worse, not better.

I've definitely noticed a decline in quality from Google results over the past few years in particular. I don't know if that's because SEO has gotten control of the results of if Google's algo is shoving lower quality up higher for revenue but it's become difficult.

Using a bit of Google-fu I'm usually able to find what I need quickly but it's still more of a hassle than it used to be.

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

#477

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #309

Ex-Google-Search engineer here, having also done some projects since leaving that involve data-mining publicly-available web documents. This proposal won't do very much. Indexing is the (relatively) easy part of building a search engine. CommonCrawl already indexes the top 3B+ pages on the web and makes it freely available on AWS. It costs about $50 to grep over it, $800 or so to run a moderately complex Hadoop job.…

[deleted]

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

#478

Post by gscott »

eaenki wrote: post #368
toast0 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has infinite money, pays users with rewards directly, and has barely gotten any marketshare with Bing. In order to compete, you would need good results and good performance for your organic results and your ad program in addition to a huge budget for traffic aquisition and patience and ability to execute on strategy consistently over multiple years. Also, keep in mind that people will judge based on perceiv…

As you can clearly see for yourself, Microsoft is not as interested in acquiring market share for Bing. Not as much as to outbid Google's contracts with Firefox and Apple to be the default. Bing is clearly a second thought for Microsoft even tho it's big. That's probably because they wouldn't get the same bang for their buck anyway. They have far less advertisers on board. Anyway, according to Microsoft, they own 33%…

Microsoft is solving their biggest problem by switching IE to Chromium. Right now everyone uses IE to download Firefox or Chrome. But now that IE will be Chrome they are hoping that enough people will not switch their browser and will start using the defaults (bing, outlook, etc). It's genius. In the past IE had the dominate browser it is not impossible that they can claw back some of that market share.

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

#479

Post by Cybiote »

nojvek wrote: post #361
nostrademons wrote: post #309

Ex-Google-Search engineer here, having also done some projects since leaving that involve data-mining publicly-available web documents. This proposal won't do very much. Indexing is the (relatively) easy part of building a search engine. CommonCrawl already indexes the top 3B+ pages on the web and makes it freely available on AWS. It costs about $50 to grep over it, $800 or so to run a moderately complex Hadoop job.…

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…

One thing to keep in mind when comparing DuckDuckGo to Google is that people do not use Google with an alternative backup in mind. When you DDG something and it fails, you can always switch to google.

But what about when Google fails? Unlike DDG, there is no culture of switching between search engines when googling. Typically, you'll just rewrite the query for google. And as rewriting the query is an entrenched part of googling, you are less likely to notice this as a failure. It is this training that's the core advantage nostrademons points out.

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

#480

Post by mvgoogler »

iamaelephant wrote: post #408
inlined wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The hacker news guidelines specifically advise against this kind of comment.

'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'

'Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Post reply on HN