In South Korea, Google's market share is below 5%, and Naver gets more than 80% of search queries. I think this is the reason why Google's search results for Korean contents are not as good as contents in other languages.
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Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is more open, a Chromebook or a Windows laptop or a Macbook? I would think a Windows laptop or a Macbook because the users and developers can install or develop any application, yet we have everyone singing the praises of heavily DRM'ed and locked up Chromebooks and iPads. Sometimes I feel it's more about Microsoft hate than about a free computing environment. At least RMS is consistent and is less prone to comp…
I think he was talking about iPhones and iPads that helped to create a marked for locked down hardware systems where nor developers of the software and users of the software have no say.
>where nor developers of the software and users of the software have no say.
The Chromebook is actually worse, since the iDevices at least give you access to run native applications even if they have to be approved by Apple. On a Chromebook, native applications can only be made by Google.
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Notice that this is a feature you have to turn on (try it!) This isn't true , according to this post in google product forums(and others like it who complain about unwanted sharing and how stop it) : https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/hOk8r9... And personally i've tried it , and that's false - the default is history sharing. I don't want to be rude, but are you some kind of a troll, or just enjo…
The answer given there is simply not correct. Click: settings, advanced sync settings, uncheck "history". I am quite confident that the default behaviour when you install chrome is that you are not signed in. It definitely doesn't share any history when you're not signed in. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have a login box otherwise ;) I also feel that the message you get when you decide whether or not to sign in…
Fresh install of Chrome. https://i.imgur.com/4ZyuSNN.png Notice how little "No thanks" and "Choose what to sync are". Nice anti-pattern.
And if you simply sign in and don't choose anything, this is what you get https://i.imgur.com/XQSxwu5.png
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it necessarily an "either/or" situation here? This seems to me like an example of a "both/and".
That's fair. I just wonder which half was the selling point that made the change happen.
It's honestly hard to say. Privacy is a selling point, especially nowadays.
My guess is that the proposal probably included the cliche "win/win situation," had already been sitting in someone's back pocket, and the raising of it was either sparked by some privacy-related news story -or- a market event of some kind. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.
I think there are a handful of techs that lend themselves to natural monopoly--basically anything where the expense of building sufficient infrastructure for a minimally-competitive product requires previous success in the market. This is true whether the infrastructure is copper lines or a body of previous searches.
That means you're either one of the first ones there with low cost of entry and building on your own successes (Google); or you're shifting to the market from success in an unrelated area (Bing); or you're essentially locked out unless you can somehow acquire access to that infrastructure.
My guess is search will eventually turn into an antitrust-regulated industry. Really depends on whether up and comers like DuckDuckGo can really stay relevant based on ideology and whether old players like Yahoo can really re-enter the market successfully.
But the most likely scenario really appears to be a duopoly between Google and Bing at best, and more likely simply a monopoly for Google.
The analogous solution to telecom would be forced access to search queries for alternative providers (a la CLEC/ILEC) but privacy concerns will make the situation interesting to say the least.
Possible it may eventually turn out that mainstream search engines simply have no specific privacy protection, at least for aggregate data. Since that's in both the corporations' (market leaders aside) and government's best interest, seems plausible. That'd be a lot of power behind it.
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure they can, but it's a huge market almost on par with the US and it opens them up elsewhere in the world to competition emanating from the void they leave in the EU, i.e alternate OSes and search engines.
I get this completely, although let's say Microsoft just ignored their requests for compliance. Would the EU seriously dare to ban Windows? I feel like they'd get outrage from their own locals and topple their own economy if they banned Windows, so they probably wouldn't. Therefore, does Microsoft need to care? Could they just sit around in Redmond and keep developing as long as the US doesn't care? As for websites,…
They would fine Microsoft. If Microsoft didn't pay they would have their assets seized. Or their credit rating damaged. Their credit rating drop could then put them as junk status and thus mutual funds would have to divest from Microsoft. Microsoft share price would be negatively affected.
NB: I am not a lawyer or economist.
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#56Other than the index data, there's something even bigger.
Google's biggest PR success is convincing everyone that the quality of web rankings depends almost purely on algorithms. It does not. What allows Google to hold their monopoly is the $100s of millions (or more) they continuously pay to amass more manually created training data:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/27/google_raters_manual
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/11/27/is-google...
A new search engine could appear today with algorithms 10x better than Google, but without access to this scale of training data, their rankings wouldn't even be close to Google's quality.
Google maintains their position by paying cash for this monopoly on training data made by tens of thousands of $9/hour workers, not through superior algorithms!
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#57Training data is nice, but I think its important not to underestimate capacity for crawling.
IMO one of Googles strengths is that they crawl large quantities of new content. Smaller operations like DDG can't crawl at that scale.
If I want discussion new bugs, search the articles at my favorite newspage (where the inhouse search is unusable), or just want the newest blogpost on some subject - Google is hard to beat.
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#58Sigh, this is incorrect.
edit: incorrect is perhaps too strong, it is incomplete.
While it is true that click tracking can be used as a relevance signal, the people who were really pissed off when the data stream got dumped were advertisers who wanted to buy AdWords. That was a very simple system, pay someone for clickstream data, extract trending queries, front those with AdWord buys to get your page on the top of Google's results, and profit.
Having built a search engine and run it for 5 years, we got to see what people felt was relevant and what wasn't in a very loose way with click stream data. Basically you have a query and 10 blue links you can split the results in quartiles and figure out if the thing they clicked on was top half, bottom half, top quarter/second quarter etc. And do A/B testing to see how that played out. But what we found was that the best indication of what a page was about, was the text that linked to it. If you have an in-link to a page which was "great radio site"[1] then "great radio site" would be a query that should return that page which might be titled something like "bob's electromagnetic spectrum imaginarium" or something equally unlikely to come up in a query string.
So the bottom line is that there are lots of ways to try to determine relevance, click stream data is a part of that but by no means the biggest factor.
[1] neutered html for obvious reasons.
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer given there is simply not correct. Click: settings, advanced sync settings, uncheck "history". I am quite confident that the default behaviour when you install chrome is that you are not signed in. It definitely doesn't share any history when you're not signed in. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have a login box otherwise ;) I also feel that the message you get when you decide whether or not to sign in…
Fresh install of Chrome. https://i.imgur.com/4ZyuSNN.png Notice how little "No thanks" and "Choose what to sync are". Nice anti-pattern. And if you simply sign in and don't choose anything, this is what you get https://i.imgur.com/XQSxwu5.png
That all seems clear and reasonable to me. I double checked the size of 'No thanks' and 'Choose what to sync' in the chrome dev tools: they are 13px, which is exactly the same size as 'Sign in' and 'Need help'. Signing in without making a specific selection gives you what the third line on the screen said it would do.
What, if anything, is wrong with this?
Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he was talking about iPhones and iPads that helped to create a marked for locked down hardware systems where nor developers of the software and users of the software have no say.
>where nor developers of the software and users of the software have no say. The Chromebook is actually worse, since the iDevices at least give you access to run native applications even if they have to be approved by Apple. On a Chromebook, native applications can only be made by Google.
Fair enough, but Apple (Jobs) started this madness.