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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#481

Post by lolinder »

chinesempire wrote: post #309
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…

You're helping google by tagging its searches, so many people ask for this kind of things that they can prioritise results that gets the most clicks (people rank searches for google everytime they click). By contrast, the new privacy friendly search engine from the article, with a lot less money and users, can answer a simple question like "news guy actor in spiderman" with Cliqz: - And the new actor playing Spider-M…

That may have been what search engines were for, but Google changed that. Very few people have the patience any more to try multiple queries to get an answer. When DDG fails, as it inevitably does, I don't spend time refining my query: I repeat the search on Google and get my answer.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#482

Post by aliakhtar »

buboard wrote: post #211
pcmaffey wrote: post #41

I want to see niche search engines: - a search engine for blogs - a search engine for dev questions - a search engine for shopping - a search engine for diy etc. Im really tired of sites trying to centralize and own this content. The key to decentralizing and empowering individuals to own their content is enabling distribution and discovery. New search engines are essential to the web we want.

google will neatly incorporate their results in their index and then people will go back to searching in google. I mean it happens with all major sites (stackoverflow, shopping results, diy/pinterest). Only twitter and facebook , who completely block their content from google get away. Perhaps we should take a lesson or two from them.

Tweets do show up in search though

Re: The world needs more search engines

#483

Post by 3xblah »

ummonk wrote: post #477
3xblah wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For such a simple question, why wouldn't you just use Wikipedia? In any event, neither a blog nor Wikipedia would likely be a "primary source". Maybe something like a driver license would be a primary source. It could be that you have a "philosphical objection" to "copy-pasted crap and artifically inflated content". I wonder if Google could have a role in encouraging the continued existence of this stuff. The effecti…

I can’t just enter my question in to Wikipedia and get an answer back, as I can with google as the default search bar. Why would I use Wikipedia when it is more work than googling?

Assuming you entered the name of an actor that has a corresponding Wikipedia entry you would be redirected to the actor's Wikipedia page that, in most cases, shows the actor's date of birth and calculates the age for you.

Even when I entered the actor's name plus the term "age" and was redirected to the Wikipedia search results, I could still see the actor's page as the third result and his date of birth in the summary text.

As for why anyone would want to search some things using Wikipedia versus Google, I can think of a few reasons. I cannot speak for other users however.

I have a script I wrote to search Wikipedia from the command line. For those who care, one can strip out "X-Client-IP" from the returned page html before opening the page in a browser.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#484

Post by yabadabadoes »

Laakeri wrote: post #440
mrweasel wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When DDG doesn't yield the results I'm looking for, I will frequently try Google, but more and more I find that if DuckDuckGo can't find the results that I want, then neither can Google. What Google can do however, is annoy me with results that it knows to be wrong, because it is excluded the most specific part of my query. Google will remove the bit that absolutely had to be in the query, to get more hits on the maj…

For the "most of us" point, keep in mind that Google has a superior international infrastructure. At least in Finland, DuckDuckGo's loading time for search results is about 2 seconds compared to Google's <0.5s. This makes using ddg surprisingly annoying.

Google? No, Yandex.. obviously not blocked in Russia, also not blocked in China.

I don't really notice any infrastructure problems for ddg in Europe though, so Finland may be atypical?

Re: The world needs more search engines

#485

Post by gmueckl »

toast0 wrote: post #374
bagacrap wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it would be possible to split off AdWords from Search. Search would either partner with AdWords or roll its own ads and then we'd be back to square one. When Bell Telephone was split it was cut along geographic lines. That would also not work on a tech company for obvious reasons --- software knows no borders. I don't know of a sensible way to break up tech giants because the efficiencies of scale creat…

So, as part of the deal, you prohibit the companies from engaging in the businesses that you broke up. So search, inc can't expand to ads, and adwords can't expand to internet search. Search, inc is still going to want ads, presumably, so they'll contract with someone. Setup rules for the contract. Maybe require at least N ad providers with each getting a minimum of Y% of pageviews, and contract terms have to be FRAN…

Google Search is aleady geofenced. Wven if you switch search language, it will still apply filters depending on the geolocation of the request IP. So splitting Google along geographic boundaries wouldn't change much on the technical side of things at all.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#486

Post by ljm »

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…

Same here, more or less. DDG is 'good enough' in a lot of instances but I think it's more that Google has taught some 'bad' searching habits. When I type a random Google search I'm basically expecting it to read my mind (and essentially it does through all of the tracking and analytics); DDG has none of that so the method of searching has to be more specific.

That said, it does't prevent the situation where searching for certain gifs or images gives you a page full of softcore porn, even with the moderate safe search enabled.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#487

Post by riku_iki »

buboard wrote: post #288
teawrecks wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're ok with only searching reddit...

what else is there to search, honestly? 1000 headphone affiliate sites? "honest" reviews sponsored by sennheiser? Reddit at least provides generally-ungamed reactions and high density of opinions. Adding "reddit" is the default for any search that matters for me nowadays. I was just searching "game payment gateway" , reddit had the most informative comments.

actually there are tons of niche sites, which have more active discussions than reddit, specifically for headphones one is head-fi.org.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#488

Post by K0SM0S »

zarkov99 wrote: post #355
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Google has a superior product riding on top of a corrupting business model that cannot help but mis align Google's interests with those of the users they are claiming to serve. Google should unbundle the current business model from the technology and also offer clean, unbiased, private search service that is paid by the user on a subscription basis. I would jump on the chance to pay say $10 a month for Google qu…

Ballpark estimate, how much would you pay for the entirety of your digital life being private? All of it, bar none?

Re: The world needs more search engines

#489

Post by gmueckl »

bagacrap wrote: post #264
Tenoke wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product. One of the reasons for breaking up monopolies is that they make it harder for newcomers to build something better.

I don't think that if Google vanished tomorrow, a new crop of superior search engines would suddenly pop out of the ether to replace it. Is Google somehow suppressing the creation of a good search engine? No, on the contrary it has created the best web search engine we've ever seen. I would personally be sad if you took it away from me, and I suspect that 99% or more of its users would be in the same boat (don't judg…

Google's search engine is a unique portal into the WWW in that it heavily controls what parts of the web people get to see. Opinions can be shaped, facts can be suppressed, lifes can be ruined by the decisions that go into search result prioritizing.

With the world being what it is today, Google Search is in an extremely powerful position. We depend a lot on information that we find on the web. And these free form search queries are the best UI we have at the moment to retrieve it.

It is a good thing that Google Search is good and is getting better, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they wield a lot of power that needs to be checked somehow.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#490

Post by gmueckl »

vivekd wrote: post #461
runarberg wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

That's such a vague standard - every single big company has people claiming they make the world a worse place, are we going to break up nestle, every oil company, every agribusiness and pharmaceutical and car company along with google? That could make the world a much worse place

Would it? Big food producers like Nestle buy ingredients globally, ship them in masses between comtinents to produce highly engineered products. Would a company that is smaller do all of the same things? Would less energy be wasted on production in those factorie? Would the products have fewer additives, etc...?

Would smaller farms with smaller fields and a larger variety of crops be better for the environment? Would those farmers grow more organic food?

I don't think that this is black and white. But smaller companies would likely be a whiter shade of gray in some cases.

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