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

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

#541

Post by jibbed123 »

kyrra wrote: post #107
tyingq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO spam, and poor quality content I would guess. Google has bolted on a ton of ML over the last ten years to fight it.

It's not just ML, but the people that provide the labeling for the ML. Google pays some large number of people to do search and grade the various results they get to see if the answers are good, which then helps feed back ML. Heck, according to this article[0], google has been paying people to evaluate their search results since 2004. [0] https://searchengineland.com/interview-google-search-quality...

It doesn't feed back into the ML directly, according to Google. Instead they use it to evaluate changes to search algorithms. If they get an increase in thumbs up back from the Quality Raters then their changes were positive. If not, they figure out why.

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

#542

Post by godelski »

appleshore wrote: post #493
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.…

If there were viable alternatives, people would shift over time. If I type in “ Pentagon” on Google, the first link is LinkedIn. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even list it at all. There’s countless examples where DuckDuckGo just can’t find basic information. DDG is just unreliable beyond it’s silly name.

I'm always confused by this. I have ddg as the default on my home computer and Google is the default on my work. So I'm constantly using both. There aren't really any apparent differences to me in results. I'm not sure what everyone else is searching, but I search everything from how to spell a word that I should definitely know all the way to niche topics in physics.

Maybe it's because I don't have tracking enabled in Google (I'm not logged into my account when at work) and opt out of tracking where I can. Maybe this is the difference between the lack of difference I see and the huge difference so many others see. But I still don't see it as an issue because I generally find what I'm looking for with one search. Might be the third item, but that's not an issue to me.

I hear this so often that I assume something has to be different. I'm curious if others have ideas as to what it might be, or if I correctly identified them.

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

#543

Post by joshuamorton »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #540
joshuamorton wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free scrolling was pretty revolutionary. As was, like, an app that could reroute live instead of relying on pre-printed paper instructions. Gmaps had both before MapQuest.

You are right that traffic was revolutionary and that's why google maps became the defacto standard. However, in context with the original post, this is exactly why it's unfair. Google has an android that gives them user location data which they then use as a competitive advantage in another space to eliminate all competition. If Android were 1 business and GoogleMaps another, then people like MapQuest could also neg…

I'm not talking about using traffic data. Simply rerouting if you, for example, miss a turn, which instructions on paper can't do.

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

#544

Post by plankers »

Cybiote wrote: post #479
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…

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…

This right here is why I don't understand people who complain about DDG's search results. If you simply make the commitment to not use Google, for whatever reason that may be, then using DDG becomes exactly the same process of rewriting search queries until you get the thing you're looking for.

I've been using DDG exclusively since I was a contractor at Google years ago and have never had a problem finding things with it...

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

#545

Post by brunoff »

tracker1 wrote: post #523
Razengan wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 find the single hardest thing to search for these days is anything more than a few months old on YouTube... They hate older videos, it feels like. Beyond that, I keep seeing suggestions on new content from years ago... it's just weird. I know it's not google proper, but I'd guess a significant number of their searches are specific to youtube.

I believe they try to put newer content first in order to make a more fair distribution of views. If you order results by popularity on yt, you will see that it uses just an "order by view count desc" (no relationship with like/dislike ratio), which is bad because it keeps popular some not so good quality videos published on first yt years.

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

#546

Post by bamboozled »

jazoom wrote: post #500
appleshore wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were viable alternatives, people would shift over time. If I type in “ Pentagon” on Google, the first link is LinkedIn. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even list it at all. There’s countless examples where DuckDuckGo just can’t find basic information. DDG is just unreliable beyond it’s silly name.

I try to use and like DDG, but the results just aren't as good. For example, it seems to be completely unaware of Docker Hub. Like, pages from that entire subdomain never show up. I can search "Docker hub" and it doesn't even show up.

I agree, unfortunately the search is really really sub-par and like others said, frequently doesn’t find basic things no matter how specific the keywords I use are.

I feel it might have even been better at one stage ?

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

#547

Post by bamboozled »

striking wrote: post #522
appleshore wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were viable alternatives, people would shift over time. If I type in “ Pentagon” on Google, the first link is LinkedIn. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even list it at all. There’s countless examples where DuckDuckGo just can’t find basic information. DDG is just unreliable beyond it’s silly name.

I find DDG has pretty acceptable or even good results most of the time. The real power is in the "bangs", though; you can use the `!` to immediately jump to the first search result without seeing a search page, or use `!g` to switch to Google for this particular query, among others. It enables a sort of power-user usage that one wouldn't get with Google.

I don’t really get the logic, just use a good search engine in the first place ?

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

#548

Post by zepearl »

> Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company’s monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its “index”—the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content—into a kind of public commons.

Partially bull__it - even forgetting about the $ that anybody would have to pay to Google for I/O traffic to scan its index (on which Google would put its % of fair earnings for at least the I/O generated plus maybe the "discovery" service for new URLs) that way any competing search engine would only have access to what Google decides that is worth indexing => OK from the point of view of the competing market (more search engines can rely on the same source data and potentially extrapolate different results) but in many cases NOK for the end-users as in all search engines that would use such service only the data that Google would decide that is worth to be indexed could be used (therefore a "closed bubble" set by Google).

If I were Google this proposal would probably be OK (more $ earned to cover the fixed costs of indexing by selling I/O to outsiders and at the same time it would lower the pressure/attention from regulators).

On the other hand non-indexed informations like all what comes from the Android OS (e.g. position of users, apps used by whom&when&etc), usage and actions on web-pages tracked by g-analytics, DNS access (e.g. 8.8.8.8), and etc... would be excluded - these are nowadays probably the most lucrative sources of infos of "what's happening now" + "what are people doing now where" which in turn generate the best answers to what "most" users want to know, which is mostly about "now" and their regional area.

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

#549

Post by JaRail »

swebs wrote: post #239
UncleMeat wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a pretty strong indication that his claims are BS. Sputnik is a literal propaganda arm.

It's certainly grounds for more scrutiny, but not outright dismissal before even looking at it.

I usually find expert consensus to be pretty good grounds.

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

#550

Post by S4M »

bamboozled wrote: post #547
striking wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find DDG has pretty acceptable or even good results most of the time. The real power is in the "bangs", though; you can use the `!` to immediately jump to the first search result without seeing a search page, or use `!g` to switch to Google for this particular query, among others. It enables a sort of power-user usage that one wouldn't get with Google.

I don’t really get the logic, just use a good search engine in the first place ?

The !bang feature I use the most is !w for wikipedia, however I don't use wikipedia enough to justify making it my default search engine on the nav bar.
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