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Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

andreasgal.com

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Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#71

Post by M2Ys4U »

dheera wrote: post #45
jfuhrman wrote: post #38

>In Germany, for example, where Google has over 95% market share, competing search engines don’t have access to adequate past search data to deliver search results that are as relevant as Google’s. And, because their search results aren’t as relevant as Google’s, it’s difficult for them to attract new users. You could call it a vicious circle. This is interesting because of the browser choice enforced by the EU on Wi…

Ethics and morality aside, I'm curious what allows the EU to "enforce" laws on a US company. Let's say Google and Microsoft don't register entities in the EU. Can they do anything? Can Microsoft and other US-based technology companies theoretically just keep doing their own thing, tell the EU government "to hell with it, we're abiding by US laws, you have a choice to stop importing Windows and invent your own OS if y…

The EU is the world's largest economy, do you really want to shut your entire business out of that market?

What then happens if a competitor is established to take your former position in the European market - chances are they're not just going to stay in the EU. They're going to eat your lunch elsewhere too.

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#72

Post by dheera »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #71
dheera wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics and morality aside, I'm curious what allows the EU to "enforce" laws on a US company. Let's say Google and Microsoft don't register entities in the EU. Can they do anything? Can Microsoft and other US-based technology companies theoretically just keep doing their own thing, tell the EU government "to hell with it, we're abiding by US laws, you have a choice to stop importing Windows and invent your own OS if y…

The EU is the world's largest economy, do you really want to shut your entire business out of that market? What then happens if a competitor is established to take your former position in the European market - chances are they're not just going to stay in the EU. They're going to eat your lunch elsewhere too.

How would the EU shut you out? Would the EU actually dare to begin censorship?

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#73

Post by xxxyy »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #71
dheera wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics and morality aside, I'm curious what allows the EU to "enforce" laws on a US company. Let's say Google and Microsoft don't register entities in the EU. Can they do anything? Can Microsoft and other US-based technology companies theoretically just keep doing their own thing, tell the EU government "to hell with it, we're abiding by US laws, you have a choice to stop importing Windows and invent your own OS if y…

The EU is the world's largest economy, do you really want to shut your entire business out of that market? What then happens if a competitor is established to take your former position in the European market - chances are they're not just going to stay in the EU. They're going to eat your lunch elsewhere too.

Similar argument can be applied to China. This is precisely why Zuckerberg is learning Mandarin and networking there.

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#74

Post by xxxyy »

dheera wrote: post #72
M2Ys4U wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is the world's largest economy, do you really want to shut your entire business out of that market? What then happens if a competitor is established to take your former position in the European market - chances are they're not just going to stay in the EU. They're going to eat your lunch elsewhere too.

How would the EU shut you out? Would the EU actually dare to begin censorship?

No, of course not by censorship. Through: fines for monopolist practices (happened to Microsoft), general smear campaign (happens to Amazon in Germany over working conditions), poking with a stick (the "right to be forgotten"), or just plain old taxes (the new "internet tax" is a current topic in the EU). There is always a way if you are determined enough. Politics.

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#75

Post by M2Ys4U »

dheera wrote: post #72
M2Ys4U wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is the world's largest economy, do you really want to shut your entire business out of that market? What then happens if a competitor is established to take your former position in the European market - chances are they're not just going to stay in the EU. They're going to eat your lunch elsewhere too.

How would the EU shut you out? Would the EU actually dare to begin censorship?

It's not about censorship. It's about doing business.

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#76

Post by Animats »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #58

Sigh, 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 G…

The value of looking at queries is that it allows learning what questions users ask. The front end of the search process is to infer from the query what the user really should be given. That's a machine learning problem. The head of Google search remarked recently that "as the search engine gets smarter, the queries get dumber".

This is reflected in Google's search results. A Google query which can possibly be interpreted as related to a popular culture item usually will be. Google has become more aggressive about this over the years. Their "Did you mean" result tag once offered an alternative for a second search. Now, they return results for the more popular interpretation first.

The back side of search, page quality and ranking, is weaker than many think. Links are less useful than they used to be. Most links to business sites are now from "social" sites or forums, which are easily spammed. Using social signals was a disaster back in 2012, when, for a few months, Google went all-in on social signals. Google tried to recognize sites that "look like spam", but everybody knows that now and spam sites look better than ever. (The same thing happened with spam emails a decade ago.) Google doesn't recognize provenance, so they can be fooled by scraper sites. Google doesn't recognize the business behind the web page, so they can be fooled by marginal businesses. There are even SEO companies using machine learning to reverse engineer Google's algorithms, to find out how far they can go with keyword stuffing before a penalty kicks in.

Google does far more manual adjustment than they did two years ago. There's an army of people doing manual ranking, and a smaller unit handing appeals from manual penalties. There was a time when Google boasted they did no manual adjustments to ranking. The automation is starting to fail.

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#77

Post by [deleted] »

xxxyy wrote: post #74
dheera wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the EU shut you out? Would the EU actually dare to begin censorship?

No, of course not by censorship. Through: fines for monopolist practices (happened to Microsoft), general smear campaign (happens to Amazon in Germany over working conditions), poking with a stick (the "right to be forgotten"), or just plain old taxes (the new "internet tax" is a current topic in the EU). There is always a way if you are determined enough. Politics.

[deleted]

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#78

Post by pain »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #60
ntakasaki wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Basic needs mad to map?

If madmess means objectification relation issues, are object-relational pattern mapping recognition issues, then we need to address roots causes of offense being made (said infosec minus madus emosec) from the office of authority over self copy.

Systems thinking rarely accounts for system feeling (https://fb.com/groups/roboswears/permalink/574282622692010). Social contract terms can evolve past pleasure-trauma-based war compeatition business forms of safety, to register mental health as material health, user rights as business rights.

Data-legal-rational-emotional-empathic business terms are missing.

Our software and our hardware is taking turns at manipulating real physical and emotional problems by forgetting how many hands it takes to move a machine, and putting a dress over working parts, to light a figurine of determination that barely speaks without hurting.

Even Steve Jobs had to beat odds that respect objectification before emotional development, coming from acid trips wiring depth to doing ACID tests just to pass text notes, we live with tools that we want to share to help, but business terms are designed to define us as without legal-rational-medical parity to corporal hierachies of need.

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#79

Post by ChuckMcM »

xxxyy wrote: post #70
ChuckMcM wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually if you do double blind tests you will find that Bing and Google are indistinguishable. We did this at Blekko earlier with our "3 card monte" gambit where you did a query, got back blekko, bing and google results, and got to pick the one with the "best" results for your query. Blekko usually won if it was query we had a slashtag for or if it was a "highly contested" query (lots of ad spend like "no fee credit…

I participated in a blind test between Google, Bing and Yahoo in my Information Retrieval class at a university, back in 2013. The results were: 1) Google, 2) Bing, 3) Yahoo - for every standard IR metric we thought of, which included NDCG@{1, 5, 10}, MRR, MAP.

Did the results get published? Were the queries "external" or "user generated"? We found it very informative to compare the results of relevance testers (which were people who were shown a query and a set of results) with users (which were people who actually generated the query and evaluated the results). I had hoped to get a study done to get more data on that.

Re: Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?

#80

Post by sanxiyn »

asuffield wrote: post #59
killwhitey wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You know it is wrong, because it misleads users. UI is not about technical accuracy, it is about what users do.
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