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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

#571

Post by devit »

beachy wrote: post #566
devit wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO a simpler and probably the only viable way to force competition is to legally force Google to not respond to any query on certain periodic time periods. For instance, if you were to forbid Google from operating on every odd-numbered day, then 50% of the search engine market and revenues would immediately be distributed among competitors and furthermore users would be forced to test multiple engines and they coul…

Any search engine that was unavailable for 50% of the time would soon have 0% of the market, not 50%.

This can be solved, in the odd-days example, by making either the second most popular or all other search engines operate only on the even days (as well as making the restriction apply to the most popular engine instead of Google in particular).

This has other drawbacks of course.

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

#573

Post by ben509 »

tills13 wrote: post #563
jammygit wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a lot more seo spam than I used to, but the results are still quite good. I think we should give google some credit for that at least. Like, a lot more seo spam though.

People have gotten really good (i.e. it's their full-time job) at "gaming" Google. That's not to say Google is fallible - every search engine is game-able depending on its algorithm - it's just that these people are _very_ clever.

They don't even need to clever as much as persistent, because of the selection effects.

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

#574

Post by eloff »

slashdev wrote: post #373
ForHackernews wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just not easy to make a better Google It depends which sense of "better" you mean. It's nearly trivial to make an ethically superior search engine by just not building the spyware bits of Google. It's difficult to make a search engine that's "better" along the dimensions of speed, profitability, etc.

That exists, it's called duck duck go, and even less people care about it than Bing. For the most part, people don't actually care about Google collecting their entire search history and combining it with their other data on you. We may live to regret that in a hypothetical future where the government turns more authoritarian and requisitions that data for evil.

I made three statements. They're all true as far as I can see. Would the downvoters care to speak up?

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

#575

Post by pedalpete »

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 wonder if this is due to google possibly ignoring the robot.txt and Bing (which powers DDG) accepting Linkedin's request? https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt

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

#576

Post by ben509 »

godelski wrote: post #542
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'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…

I use DDG as my default everywhere, and when I don't find something, I'll !g it as a bit of a last resort.

I'd estimate I'm doing that maybe 5% of the time. It seems to be even odds that I find a satisfying match, though, obviously those are all the hard queries.

The hardest queries are trying to dig up details about stories in the news.

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

#577

Post by ben509 »

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.

For that specifically, use !dhub or !dockerhub to search the site directly. Really, the magic of DDG is bang queries.

(Search for bang queries with, not surprisingly, "!bang".)

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

#578

Post by qtplatypus »

There are problems with this article.

First googles competitive edge was never from its index. It was from its ability to give good matches to questions.

Second google being forced to share information like this might be considered a government taking of google property. Which would require a massive amount of compensation.

Third this has a condition that google isn’t allowed to remove anything from its index. However this flies in the face of the right to be forgotten, copyright law, child exploitation material law etc.

Fourth it says google must allow people to add to the index. Which is just inviting the index to be spammed with garbage.

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

#579

Post by ben509 »

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 ?

It's for when the good search engine is the site's own page.

If I'm working on python and numpy and I want to look up `argsort`, I know I want to search the numpy page, so !numpy argsort takes me right there.

Any kind of web dev is !mdn whatever and I don't have to scroll through a dozen BS tutorials, I just get the specs.

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

#580

Post by vadym909 »

syshum wrote: post #529
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…

Microsoft thinks what they have is Clean UX.....

Microsoft just needs to get their head out of their ass! With the amount of money they have spent- and what they have to show for it- they should should just can the entire Bing team (or whatever they call their search engine team today). Not only have they not sucked- if they just folded - they'd let the monopoly argument against Google ride somewhat.
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