Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 630 posts

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

#591

Post by UncleMeat »

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.

Sputnik has twisted my actual research from grad school into garbage propaganda. I've seen first hand how "accurate" their reporting is. I'm likely to believe that something adjacent to their claims is true but I believe that slapping their name on something makes it less likely to be true.

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

#592

Post by joantorres »

nostrademons wrote: post #400
mrtksn wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is possible to make way, way better search engine because Google Search is no longer as good as it used to, at least for me. I can no longer find anything remotely good quality, I discover new and quality stuff from social media like Twitter and HN. The search results seem to be too general and too mainstream. Nothing new to discover, just a shortcut to the few websites like Reddit, StackOverflow for more…

The reason for that is because Google's building for a mainstream audience, because the mainstream (by definition) is much bigger than any niche. They increase aggregate happiness (though not your specific happiness) a lot more by doing so. It's probably possible to build a search engine for a specific vertical that's better than Google. However, you face a few really big problems that make this not worthwhile: 1) Sp…

Why do you say there is no business model in a search niche? StackOverflow and pleny of listing sites (Tripadvisor, Yelp, Zillow, Capterra to name a few) have been successfully built in this exact premise and the user experience of searching for restaurants, real state or software on these sites is usually much better than searching directly on Google due to the availability of custom filters and the amount of domain-specific metadata that the global search engines cannot read. While it's true that most of these sites heavily rely on SEO to drive inbound traffic from the big G, there is no doubt that they are perfectly viable businesses.

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

#593

Post by Xelbair »

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.…

>The real reason Google's still on top is that consumer habits are hard to change, and once people have 20 years of practice solving a problem one way, most of them are not going to switch unless the alternative isn't just better, it's way, way better.

I agree about consumer's habits, but not about quality - i mean google of today is worse search engine than google of 5 years ago.

Now google tries to guess, badly, what you meant, instead of giving you what you asked for. The pleasure of dealing with IT systems is that they give you what you ask them for, not what you meant - it introduces extra error, and worse - one that cannot be fixed by user.

I can rephrase my querry, and google will still interpret it - leading to same batch of useless results.

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

#594

Post by sobani »

reroute1 wrote: post #455
latexr wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also people forget that the creepy stuff Google does is super useful . For the same reasons you’re exalting them, I have non-technical friends who asked me how Google knows so much about them (and suggestions on how to avoid it) because they found it too creepy. I don’t think people forget Google’s results are useful; some just think they’re more creepy than valuable. You seem to have picked your side in that (im)b…

It is actually possible to operate without relying on Google or any other big tech firm. Who is forcing you into these privacy dilemmas? All of their services are a choice you are making. You don't need to accept any of it if you don't want to.

> It is possible to operate without relying on any big tech firm.

Some writer from Gizmodo tried that last February. Let's just say that you are technically correct that you don't need any of the big tech firms.

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...

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

#595

Post by richliss »

Unfortunately, people like him and consultants who will be interested in doing business with Google will be the ones that politicians listen to.

I'd personally do this to solve the problem:

1. Separate Google from Alphabet and separate Google Search from everything else they do.

2. Nationalise the Google brand and search engine along with Bing. Everyone else can stay as-is for now.

3. Allow applications for companies to become a search result endpoints. Ownership would need to be completely transparent. Prevent incumbents from being involved - Amazon, FB, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung etc.

4. All Google and Bing result listings would then be evenly distributed across the search result endpoint providers.

5. The propositions for each of these companies can now be customised knowing that they will get a maximum number of likely searches per year.

6. Prevent any mergers or foreign ownership of these new companies.

Sure the search would develop at a slower pace but its power would devolve into utility again rather than as a way to control what people see.

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

#596

Post by ailideex »

echelon wrote: post #284
epicide wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The search business would also be free to auction ad space to other providers. Doesn't that make them an ad business?

It makes them like the New York Times, which sells ad real estate. It's a much different business.

Is that not what google's ad business does already? Not sure where the difference is actually. Basically the request seems to be:

Pre Split:

  - Company A
    - provides: search
    - sells: ad space
Post Split:

  - Company A
    - provides: search
    - sells: ad space
  - Company B
    - (re-)sells: ad space
Seems like this solves nothing and can be repeated ad infinitum. There are many companies which already does what Company B does - what exactly will this fix?

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

#597

Post by repolfx »

joantorres wrote: post #592
nostrademons wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for that is because Google's building for a mainstream audience, because the mainstream (by definition) is much bigger than any niche. They increase aggregate happiness (though not your specific happiness) a lot more by doing so. It's probably possible to build a search engine for a specific vertical that's better than Google. However, you face a few really big problems that make this not worthwhile: 1) Sp…

Why do you say there is no business model in a search niche? StackOverflow and pleny of listing sites (Tripadvisor, Yelp, Zillow, Capterra to name a few) have been successfully built in this exact premise and the user experience of searching for restaurants, real state or software on these sites is usually much better than searching directly on Google due to the availability of custom filters and the amount of domain…

StackOverflow and those other sites aren't search engines. They may have search engines in them but not many people use them (the only time I reach StackOverflow, booking.com etc is via search engine referral). They're user content hosting and curation sites.

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

#598

Post by repolfx »

gefh wrote: post #588
marcescence wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> specifically designed to make Google's job harder "Better search" doesn't necessarily mean "more personalized search."

Unless you're a very average person, I'd argue it does.

Google have metrics on how much better it makes search - at least when I was there it makes quality a lot better, but not, say, double the quality. I think in the early days of the company they thought personalisation would be a much bigger win than it was - it was big enough that it didn't make sense to turn it off or anything like that, and you can see it in action when people say their results are customised to the programming language they are most recently using. But most of the time it's not doing all that much - and the biggest component of it was basic stuff like location and language.

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

#599

Post by karolg »

mrtksn wrote: post #388
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.…

I think it is possible to make way, way better search engine because Google Search is no longer as good as it used to, at least for me. I can no longer find anything remotely good quality, I discover new and quality stuff from social media like Twitter and HN. The search results seem to be too general and too mainstream. Nothing new to discover, just a shortcut to the few websites like Reddit, StackOverflow for more…

> Getting specific is harder on Google because it just omits or misinterprets my search query keywords quite often.

I have this problem too. Google often thinks that I made a typo and presents me results for things I didn't searched for or care about and I have no way to force it to search for things I really want.

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

#600

Post by iainmerrick »

ailideex wrote: post #596
echelon wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes them like the New York Times, which sells ad real estate. It's a much different business.

Is that not what google's ad business does already? Not sure where the difference is actually. Basically the request seems to be: Pre Split: - Company A - provides: search - sells: ad space Post Split: - Company A - provides: search - sells: ad space - Company B - (re-)sells: ad space Seems like this solves nothing and can be repeated ad infinitum. There are many companies which already does what Company B does - wha…

Here’s a question that may clarify: who runs the ad auction?

If post-split that’s company B, I’d argue that is a genuinely new structure with some different properties.

Company A would still have an ads team to manage the integration, but they would explicitly outsource ad selection to (potentially) multiple partner companies.

Post reply on HN