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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

#91

Post by londons_explore »

api wrote: post #51
ksahin wrote: post #48

"DuckDuckGo, which aggregates information obtained from 400 other non-Google sources, including its own modest crawler.)" I looked into it, and it seems DDG is using Bing and Yahoo search API and lots of other sources. I looked into the pricing of Yahoo's search API / Bing search API,it ranges from $0.80 / 1000 queries to several dollars per thousand queries. It seems to expensive to be economically viable with ads,…

They've negotiated a lower rate?

Running a search engine is pretty expensive. $0.80 per 1000 queries doesn't seem orders of magnitude off the actual running costs.

For comparison, that works out to ~$15 per year for the average users search volume.

If you can't make $15 per user per year on search, you have bigger problems...

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

#92

Post by boringg »

eaenki wrote: post #90

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…

Also - just the amount of people who would game the system afterwards all the search results would be utterly useless.

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

#93

Post by samscully »

ailideex wrote: post #73
iainmerrick wrote: post #7

I don’t see any mention in this article of what seems like the most obvious way to split up Google, separating their search and ad businesses. (Edit to add: although maybe the effect would end up being similar, if API users serve their own ads but without access to Google’s ad infrastructure.) That obviously wouldn’t be a simple job, of course, and maybe there are some interesting reasons why it wouldn’t work well.

> I don’t see any mention in this article of what seems like the most obvious way to split up Google, separating their search and ad businesses. What would be the revenue model for their search then?

The ad business would pay the search business for ad placement. The search business would also be free to auction ad space to other providers.

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

#94

Post by scarface74 »

archy_ wrote: post #63
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google’s search is fantastic The author's proposal, making Google's index publicly accessible, would leave Google search intact. Google's algorithm would presumably remain proprietary. For people who like Google today, nothing would change. For people for whom Google falls short, there would be new options. Looks like a clear win-win for consumers.

>Google's algorithm would presumably remain proprietary. This is not a good thing. Basic keyword searching on an index isn't viable to compete, then you go back to when keyword spammers were at the top. Google should be forced to distribute all their search technologies to the public with the threat of the Alphabet corporation being dissolved if they do not comply. That is the only way to get us out of this mess and…

If you started a business would you be okay with giving up all of the IP you invested in creating?

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

#95

Post by JumpCrisscross »

toxik wrote: post #83
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've had the same experience with DDG, which I use as my primary search engine. If I'm looking for a specific e.g. scientific paper or a recent news article, it doesn't have it. I run the search through Google. That's purely an indexing problem.

On the other hand, if I have a health-related search, I run it through Google. DDG has the proper content. It's just that it priorities the blog spam. That's an algorithm problem.

Relieving the former, as the author's proposal would do, makes DDG more competitive. As a second-order effect, it would also let DDG priorities resources towards the second problem, making them more competitive still.

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

#96

Post by gigatexal »

I'm of two minds here: Google's whole reason for ascending to where they are is the PageRank algorithm which is why Google was created in order to monetize. I see this in similar veins to Apple and iOS: would we support calls for Apple to be forced to allow iOS to be installed on non-Apple hardware? If not, then why would we insist on Google giving up it's reason for being, it's reason a lot of us use it to find relevant information?

Then again, the concentration of power in a handful of operators likely threatens the open internet.

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

#97

Post by astonex »

A list of websites and their content is really not useful at all. Anyone can get this themselves with some really simple programming.

The actual hard part is when it comes to ranking and sorting the data in any useful way, and doing it within like 100ms. Plus various other issues like spam protection etc. This is where Google excels (at least in my opinion).

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

#98

Post by ailideex »

__s wrote: post #72
ailideex wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we do have is peter thiel backing an administration that’s anti google, Russia, China that are anti google. Can you provide some context? Article does not mention Thiel, Russia or China.

Foreign propaganda usually doesn't label itself as such. Nor does this article have to be from such a source. Merely inspired by the noise being made

Are you suggesting that we should discard criticism of google because Russia and China is anti google? China does not like Trump either, so should we not criticize trump because of China?

And I don't even get why you say China and Russia is anti Google. They are anti-information more than anti-google. If google allows them to control what information people get they will have no problem with Google. They are further anti-west and are concerned that Google will play ball with western governments to give them access to Chinese and Russian data. Maybe I am missing what you mean by them being anti Google.

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

#99

Post by JD557 »

toxik wrote: post #83
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

From my experience, for long-tail queries, DDG also a lot more NSFW results than Google.

Bing does have the reputation of being better for NSFW searches than Google, so I guess that it's normal to have more NSFW false positives as well.

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

#100

Post by eaenki »

boringg wrote: post #92
eaenki wrote: post #90

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…

Also - just the amount of people who would game the system afterwards all the search results would be utterly useless.

Ye and anyway you could return x10 worse results than Google's current results and still become the new dominant search engine if you've got infinite $B a year to outbid Google to be the default on browsers and operating systems and a big salesforce to onboard the advertisers. Man this is the exact playbook they used to become the search engine in the first place. They literally were Yahoo's search bar at some point two decades ago.
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