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The world needs more search engines

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Re: The world needs more search engines

#491

Post by dikei »

1024core wrote: post #198
pythux wrote: post #3

Absolutely love this quote from the article: > Paraphrasing Monty Python: “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall. I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search busine…

> We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole. There are plenty of alternatives. But people don't use them as much because they are worse . Consider Bing ( http://www.bing.com/ ). It is backed by a company even bigger than Google. MSFT's market cap is 1.155T; Google's is 899B. MSFT is 30% bigger than Google. Why h…

Google receive over 100 Billion USD per year from ads revenue. If spending a few billion dollars can get you a new Google, then every one would have done it a long time ago.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#492

Post by Const-me »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #358
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with…

This comment and everything downstream from it are a distraction from their point: Run their query from your machine or from Tor and you'll see the same results in Google and lack of results in DDG. Another example is a query for "elm dict". DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.

> DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.

You know you're looking for a data structure, right? Add structure to your query, and DDG will do fine. Easy fix.

The opposite case, when google thinks he knows what you're asking but it's wrong, is impossible to fix.

I don't want them to be smart, I want them to be predictable and search what I say, not trying to reinterpret the query.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#493

Post by rotrux »

The world needs more ways to navigate the internet is what it needs. An intuitive tool that helps me stay on track and/or helps me remember what the hell I did would be preferable.

The mystery-box-that-reads-my-mind-then-poops-out-links model feels increasingly clumsy as the years go by.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#494

Post by jacobsenscott »

mrweasel wrote: post #411
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…

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…

In my experience DDG's results are mostly 10+ year old "yahoo answers" posts, while google searches tend to be up to date and relevant.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#495

Post by thomasedwards »

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.

I have the same problem in Japan. Certain times of the day DDG seems like it’ll never load and I normally switch to Google after about 4 or 5 seconds.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#496

Post by zarkov99 »

K0SM0S wrote: post #488
zarkov99 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I would probably pay at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me, for privacy and freedom from ads or any other manipulation I did not explicitly permit. Note I consider the latter at least as important as privacy.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#497

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

helpPeople wrote: post #65
freediver wrote: post #56

It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page. I see two problems with their approach: 1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset. More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and…

The search results have gotten noticably worse in the last year. When a Wikipedia/encyclopedia article is what I'm looking for, why is Google showing articles? Wikipedia used to be the top result.

Google does seem to have their 'recency bias' setting set to 11. If any of your search terms have been in the news in the last 2 weeks, those articles are all you are going to get.

Re: The world needs more search engines

#499

Post by summerlight »

scarface74 wrote: post #468
summerlight wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how I defined a monopoly, but a well established practice done by DoJ of the US. Defining a relevant market is not that clear and simple as you described, but it's more of an economical, data-driven process. Look up for hypothetical monopolist test. I just explained one possible scenario how this could be defined as a relevant market and you're now throwing a bunch of random assumptions on my comment. I w…

So if it “well defined” by the DOJ, you should be able to find a specific example where a minority vertically integrated platform vendor was declared a “monopoly” and specific remediation steps were enforced. Not a Wikipedia article. If that were the case, every single console maker since the mid 80s would be declared a monopoly. Why hasn’t that happened?

> you should be able to find a specific example where a minority vertically integrated platform vendor was declared a “monopoly” and specific remediation steps were enforced.

I already told you that the market defining process is a very case-specific one and big techs now are unprecedented. Why are you trying to find applicable prior arts on such cases? You asked how Apple can be monopoly on a market and I gave you one possibility which may or may not materialize due to its uncertain and complex nature. It's pretty hard to understand why you're being so defensive on this issue?

> If that were the case, every single console maker since the mid 80s would be declared a monopoly. Why hasn’t that happened?

There has been multiple antitrust lawsuits and investigations on Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft for their gaming consoles while their exercise of monopolistic power was nowhere comparable to Apple's nowadays. Why don't you google just 2~3 words before making such a false claim?

Re: The world needs more search engines

#500

Post by ryguy1 »

gmueckl wrote: post #490
vivekd wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In some cases highly engineered products are not ideal for human health.

But highly engineered products are often ideal for:

1. Having a longer shelf life. (Ideal for countries without the same standards for food preservation) 2. Having yields large enough to feed populations. 3. Increased ability for transport.

I agree that there are gray areas, but it's these qualities that help feed a world.

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