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

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, because the quality has 100% tanked over the last few years. I agree that there may be some selection bias between us, but it's at least got some of my normie non-technical friends commenting about it, so it's not completely without merit. I have a couple of theories, one of them is also a warning.

First, I think search results at Google have gotten worse because people are not actually good at finding the best example of what they're looking for. People go with whatever query result exceeds some minimum threshold. This means when Google looks at what people "land on" (e.g. something like the last link of 5 they clicked from the search page, and then which they spend the most time on according to that page's Google Analytics or whatever), they aren't optimizing for what's best, they're optimizing for what is the minimum acceptable result. And so what's happening is years and years of cumulative "Well, I suppose that's good enough" culminating in a perceptible drop in search result quality overall.

Second, Google has clearly been giving greater weight to results that are more recent. You'd think this would improve the quality of the results which "survive the test of time" but again, Google isn't optimizing for "best" results, they're optimizing for "the result which sucks the least among the top 3-5 actual non-ad results people might manage to look at before they are satisfied". So this has the effect of crowding out older results which are actually better, but which don't get shown as much because newer results have temporal weight.

My warning is this, too, which you've surely noticed: Google search has created a "consciousness" of the internet, and in the 90s it used to be that digitizing something was kind of like "it'll be here forever" and for some reason people still today think putting something online gives it some kind of temporal longevity, which it absolutely does not have. I did a big research project at the end of the last decade, and I was looking for links specifically from the turn of the century. And even in 2009, they were incredibly hard to find, and suffered immensely from bitrot, with links not working, and leaning heavily on archive.org. Google has been and is amplifying this tremendously, by twiddling the knob to give more recent results a positive weight in search. Google makes a shitload of money from mass media content companies (e.g. Buzzfeed) and whatever other sources meet the minimum-acceptable-threshold for some query, versus linking to some old university or personal blog site which has no ads whatsoever. So the span of accessible knowledge has greatly shrunk over the last few years. Not only has the playing field of mass media and social media companies shrunk, but the older stuff isn't even accessible anymore. So we're being forced once more into a "television" kind of attention span, by Google, because of ads.

> Just because user X can't create a new product does not mean that we should place sanctions on company Y. (…) in this post you just illogically connect a bunch of dots.

That is an insane extrapolation, and the reason I don’t want to continue the conversation with you: you’re answering points I’m not making. I haven’t even hinted at sanctions; I have no idea where you’re getting that from.

> But a fact is still no one is forcing you to use these products

And I don’t use them. I hoped that by continuing to mention non-technical users you’d get it, but this was never about me. You keep bringing up that argument, but read what you replied to in the first post — I recounted the experience of non-technical people I know, not my experience. Stop telling me I have a choice; the point is not us, it’s non-technical users who don’t have the knowledge to make informed choices!

> That sounds like a rationality of a completely one-sided biased individual in itself, respectfully.

Believe what you want. I just don’t want to keep wasting my night arguing with someone that started a discussion but refuses to address the points originally made. Why reply, then?

Maybe I’m not explaining myself well enough, or in the correct way for you to understand, or maybe you’re the one not grasping what I mean. It doesn’t really matter where the problem lies, just that it’s clearly not working.

Maybe if we ever meet in person we can resume this conversation, but tonight it’s not being productive, so I genuinely wish you a good week and sign out here.

Why does everyone assume Google is automated? A single website containing a small amount of knowledge or even a leaked archive of Diebold emails will show lower on Google search results than a web forum or some listicle.

The real web crawlers are people who surf the web, Google likely takes information from analytics and outbound link tracking to determine the most popular (not the most informational) website.

I don't see how 2.a would stand in a courtroom.

What is 'good faith' and 'otherwise objectionable' in this context? Is removing all content from a religious group afforded in this definition, as long as the provider considers it objectionable?

'whether or not such material is constitutionally protected' has almost no meaning because almost all speech is protected.

Another interesting point is, while it's allowable by the law to restrict content you deem objectionable, is it allowable to promote content you prefer over other content? Or de-promote the content but not remove it?

Is it acceptable to remove religious content with no explanation as to why? Is it acceptable to ban or demonetize a religious group without explanation?

I think that the "fallback to Google" might actually tend to diminish consumer confidence in DDG. Every time you use it, you basically say to yourself "$newRiskyStrategy fails sometimes, we still need $oldReliableStrategy".

Instead, what might help DDG is a plugin that detects when you go past the first or second page of Google search results, and suggests that you might get better results on DDG. It's a little intrusive, but the mental nudge becomes "$oldReliableStrategy has flaws, try $newRiskyStrategy". You get a positive emotional interaction with DDG rather than "forcing" yourself to use it all of the time and "failing back" to Google.