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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

#81

Post by dkyc »

noahl wrote: post #61

Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…

> Yes, Google has a huge index, but most queries aren't in the long tail.

I'm not quite sure about that. 15% of Google searches per day are unique, as in, Google has never seen them before. [1]. That's quite an insane number.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

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

#82

Post by estebarb »

I don't see how this could reduce Google's "Monopoly".

Searching with an API is the same as searching from the browser. how the results are going to be sorted: garbage will be garbage, and should be demoted both in the API and HTML version. And of course, downloading the index is out of question.

I think that a better way to improve competition would be reducing cloud computing costs (bandwidth in particular). But of course, regulators in USA would say that it is communism or something... Sigh.

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

#83

Post by toxik »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #76
noahl wrote: post #61

Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…

> most queries aren't in the long tail But that's where differentiation occurs. Every search engine will get short tail results correct. We go back to Google because it also performs with the weird queries. I agree that algorithmic superiority will probably perpetuate Google's dominance. But making its index public is (a) legally precedented, (b) conceptually simple and (c) a small step in the right direction.

Gotta say my experience is very varying with long-tail type queries, I usually try DuckDuckGo and if that fails I search Google. They find very different things, DDG tends to be less filtered in terms of spam sites and fake news, but it also finds results of dubious copyright nature, for example.

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

#84

Post by changoplatanero »

detritus wrote: post #78
noahl wrote: post #61

Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…

> Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think. This is what makes me wonder why we don't have a LOT of competing search engines. Perhaps i'm vastly under-estimating the technology and difficulty (I could well be - it's not my domain) but it surely it can't be THAT hard to spawn Google-like weighted crawl-based search results? It's a long-since solved problem - heck, pageRank's first iterat…

PageRank was an innovation at the time but modern search engines require training models on lots of query logs to get good performance. Its expensive to make a really good search engine.

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

#87

Post by scarface74 »

mbrumlow wrote: post #22
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what seems like the most obvious way to split up Google, separating their search and ad businesses Given the complexity of (a) Google's search and ad integrations and (b) the adtech landscape as a whole, this would be difficult to do legislatively. That leaves settlement with the DoJ, a costly and time-consuming path. The author's suggestion is not exclusive against a break-up of Google. Its moderation and basis in…

Microsoft said the same thing about internet exploror and it's operating system..

And when it all came down to it, it didn’t matter. Chrome didn’t become dominant on the desktop because of government intervention and Safari didn’t become important because of DOJ either.

Apple and Google competed. Government intervention is rarely the right answer. A bunch of people who are both beholden to lobbyists and ignorant to technology won’t produce the outcome people think it will.

Besides, the last thing anyone should want is more government power. Given the choice between trusting the government - that has the power to take away my liberty and my money - with more power or trusting private corporations, I have much more to fear about government.

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

#88

Post by rpiguy »

taf2 wrote: post #54

So although everyone likes to believe google is a monopoly it’s far from it. You have choices- bing, biadu , yandex, DuckDuckGo... there is also nothing about googles search position that prevents you from building a competitor. What we do have is peter thiel backing an administration that’s anti google, Russia, China that are anti google. Why? it’s a source of truth that challenges their lies. We also have an emerge…

Google is a profit-seeking corporation that needs to expand into China to generate more money and bends the knee as much as it can to make inroads there. Far from being a source of truth they follow all Chinese censorship laws (why, because they would be blocked from operating there and unable to make money off of the Chinese). China likes everything about Google other than the fact that it is not a domestic corporation.

A company does not need to be a monopoly to face Anti-trust measures made in the public interest. In the 90s you could have run Linux on a PC, installed Netscape on a PC, or bought a Mac, but Microsoft was still treated as a monopolist. The same with IBM in the 70s. There were at least five to ten other major suppliers of mainframes, but IBM was so dominant in the market that they were aggressively regulated for anti-trust.

Google is not the victim of misinformation. Everyone is just starting to understand how important they are as the de facto gateway to information (regardless of choice) and mulling over the implications of it dominating add revenue, search, etc.

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

#89

Post by tyingq »

detritus wrote: post #78
noahl wrote: post #61

Okay, this is a relatively serious proposal to require Google to allow API access to its search index, with the premise that it would democratize the search engine ecosystem. There are some issues with the regulations he proposes (you have to allow throttling to prevent DDoS attacks, and you can't let anyone with API access add content to prevent garbage results), but it's roughly feasible. The main problem is, I thi…

> Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think. This is what makes me wonder why we don't have a LOT of competing search engines. Perhaps i'm vastly under-estimating the technology and difficulty (I could well be - it's not my domain) but it surely it can't be THAT hard to spawn Google-like weighted crawl-based search results? It's a long-since solved problem - heck, pageRank's first iterat…

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.

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

#90

Post by eaenki »

The effect of this on Alphabet's revenue would be nil.

The majority of Google's Revenue comes from Google, Youtube, Gmail and Play. They make so much $ because they have the biggest network effect of advertisers-eyeballs in the world along with Facebook. That. Is. Unbreakable. Even more than a social network's network effect, because the friction to switch budgets and people in a company is higher than a guy telling their best friends to download an app.

And then, YT is a network effect. And then, Play/Android is also a network effect. And then there's the branding. But presumably every big company has the latter. Still, what a brand. Everyone knows what Google or Android is. Every. Single. Human.

Finally, because they make all this money, they can pay to be the default on the other half of the devices, Apple's devices, to use Google as default. Last time I checked, $5B a year.

Hence, this article is so bad.

I don't even care about Google, just saying.

edit: did I mention Chrome? They've got chrome too, with the googleverse as default.

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