7 ms·

Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? That's a great question - why not? For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, and by m

by lemming 11y ago

Why not ask Google to make their search engine code public? That's a great question - why not? For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, and by meddling with search results (which they already do to try to personalise my results) they could make or break companies or politicians by presenting one-sided or even false material. That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it?

sloanesturz 11y ago
Maybe because thousands of people have spent millions of hours making the best search engine in the world and they should be rewarded for their work by making money off of it instead of giving it away for free?
- damoe 11y ago
  They have been rewarded for their work. Perhaps there should be limits on these rewards?
  - ra1n85 11y ago
    As determined by who?
    - SapphireSun 11y ago
      Well clearly if the rewards included all the money on the planet, that would be egregious. It seems fairly likely that there would be limits that are lower than that (all the money in a country) and possibly below that....
  - verinus 11y ago
    this is a seriuous problem with all digital products and comes down to fixed vs. variable costs: - development costs are fixed costs- they are independet of the number of products sold. - production costs are variable costs- they have to be paid for every unit sold. as digital copies in most cases have no or negligible variable costs (support may be regarded as variable) the earnings for certain products can be way out of any sensible relation- but who should say: enough is enough? als long as there is no sensible answer to this question there can only be one: let the market decide...
    - TuringTest 11y ago
      > let the market decide... Are you talking about a market with or without a regulated strong copyright law?
  - vfdfv 11y ago
    This is a great question. What would the world look like if no individual could earn more than a million dollars a year, or if companies were taxed at exceedingly high rates once they reached a valuation of 100 millions dollars? I realize it would be tricky to implement, but considering the societal benefit of more even wealth distribution the idea itself is worth exploring.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Linux is also made of millions of man-hours of work and yet it is free and Free and it has become a great gift to Humanity as a whole.
- zurn 11y ago
  Publishing source code doesn't preclude making money off it. There are many natural experiments in this category, where source code of proprietary products was leaked with little ill effects. It's happened eg to Windows, many games, VMware... This pretty closely models the scenario of making source code public but not giving anyone license to use it for purposes other than study.
- Tinyyy 11y ago
  I think patents exists for this very reason.
  - davexunit 11y ago
    But software patents are clearly a scam, too.
abecedarius 11y ago
Bruce Schneier made a similar proposal in Data and Goliath, his latest book. I forget exactly how similar, and of course the details matter; but the purpose behind it was much as you say.
danso 11y ago
Why do you need to see Google's source code when you already know that Google is personalizing the search results for you? Hypothetically, what kind of parameters discernible in Google's search code would make the difference between "OK meddling" versus "Evil meddling"? The bigger question is: why do you think that there is some kind of pure, objective ranking of websites that Google is now tampering with? Do you think that someone whose IP is located in Utah should get the same result for "good hamburgers late night" as someone in New York? If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things that we don't need a review of source code to debate. But your suspicions toward them seems to be based off of a worldview in which there is One True Web for everyone, which seems as problematic as the mindset that surely Google can do no evil. Given that Google uses personal data to shape the web its users see...isn't it even more relevant to see the data they collect? AFAIK, Google still allows us to download virtually every bit of data we've explicitly generated on its services, including all the emails and search requests we've conducted.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things I don't find this one so complicated; they're better sent to en.wikipedia.org, because that page, like their query, is written in english.
  - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
    Additionally, it could depend on whether they are using google.com or google.vn.
  - danso 11y ago
    Sorry if this is already evident to you...but the differences between Wikipedia sites is not just about the language. vi.wikipedia.org is independently edited and maintained from en.wikipedia.org. The Vietnamese wikipedia page [1] is not as lengthy as the English one. And I'm not as good as reading Vietnamese as I should be, but the Vietnamese page doesn't seem to have the same content for "Media and censorship" that the English one does...among other differences. So I don't think it's as simple as "Send them to whatever language they used" (though I guess this is one case where seeing Google's source code would be enlightening, so...touché?) [1] https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam
easytiger 11y ago
> For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, That's their problem.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it? That's a double-edged sword here. The current problem with search, and one of the reasons the exact algorithms stay undisclosed, is not Google. It's your average Joe the small business owner, who sees no problem with poisoning the Internet with spam and fake websites, just to gain a competitive edge. There's even a whole industry (SEO/SEM) serving such Joes, that specializes in extreme "meddling with search results". As long as Google maintains some control over it, it can tweak and twist their algorithms to counteract the manipulation, or even explicitly penalize biggest offenders. Take that control away and the Internet will go to shit. Search is a common resource, and it needs to be managed. I'm far more willing to trust Google than a mob of hundreds of millions "entrepreneurs" trying to one-up one another at the cost of everyone else.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  This sounds similar to security through obscurity.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yes, but you don't have much other choice. Security through obscurity can and often is practical, and in this case a full, open solution is an AI-complete problem (i.e. equivalent to creating a superhuman artificial intelligence), because it would need to understand motivations behind actions, and not just actions themselves.
zanny 11y ago
It is a valid proposal. Google is not just selling you a search algorithm with their google.com platform, but also the server infrastructure that maintains it, the brand name (a vast swathe of less tech savvy Internet users say google X instead of go to X website), and the uptime. Yes, the algorithm constitutes a portion of their value add, but if they open sourced google.com on its own they would not see their business destroyed for it. Would Bing suddenly become a lot better? Certainly. Would people start using Bing over Google if it just became as good as Google search? Certainly not. The only candidates that might take market share are DuckDuckGo and StartPage, who preach privacy and thus a lot of users (including myself) prefer them despite their poorer search results. If they could get Googles algorithms, they would produce better results and probably steal market share. How much market share? 1%? Do privacy savvy searchers even constitute 1% of search traffic now? Yes, it is absolutely a bad business decision for them to publish their source. They are much more likely to lose money than to see third party contributions to their code make their search so much better they offset the cost of everyone having access to the same quality search. But I still postulate it would not be much revenue and market share, and that there are tremendous applications for extremely sophisticated search algorithms like Googles that could produce tremendous economic prosperity for other disciplines, and I imagine their work might be applied in completely unrelated industries for other search domain problems. Their algorithm is ultra-specific to web page indexing, but I'm sure in that Goliath beast of code there is some novel ingenuity that we are missing due to its closed nature.

by lemming 11y ago

sloanesturz 11y ago

Maybe because thousands of people have spent millions of hours making the best search engine in the world and they should be rewarded for their work by making money off of it instead of giving it away for free?

damoe 11y ago
They have been rewarded for their work. Perhaps there should be limits on these rewards?
- ra1n85 11y ago
  As determined by who?
  - SapphireSun 11y ago
    Well clearly if the rewards included all the money on the planet, that would be egregious. It seems fairly likely that there would be limits that are lower than that (all the money in a country) and possibly below that....
- verinus 11y ago
  this is a seriuous problem with all digital products and comes down to fixed vs. variable costs: - development costs are fixed costs- they are independet of the number of products sold. - production costs are variable costs- they have to be paid for every unit sold. as digital copies in most cases have no or negligible variable costs (support may be regarded as variable) the earnings for certain products can be way out of any sensible relation- but who should say: enough is enough? als long as there is no sensible answer to this question there can only be one: let the market decide...
  - TuringTest 11y ago
    > let the market decide... Are you talking about a market with or without a regulated strong copyright law?
- vfdfv 11y ago
  This is a great question. What would the world look like if no individual could earn more than a million dollars a year, or if companies were taxed at exceedingly high rates once they reached a valuation of 100 millions dollars? I realize it would be tricky to implement, but considering the societal benefit of more even wealth distribution the idea itself is worth exploring.
ekianjo 11y ago
Linux is also made of millions of man-hours of work and yet it is free and Free and it has become a great gift to Humanity as a whole.
zurn 11y ago
Publishing source code doesn't preclude making money off it. There are many natural experiments in this category, where source code of proprietary products was leaked with little ill effects. It's happened eg to Windows, many games, VMware... This pretty closely models the scenario of making source code public but not giving anyone license to use it for purposes other than study.
Tinyyy 11y ago
I think patents exists for this very reason.
- davexunit 11y ago
  But software patents are clearly a scam, too.

abecedarius 11y ago

Bruce Schneier made a similar proposal in Data and Goliath, his latest book. I forget exactly how similar, and of course the details matter; but the purpose behind it was much as you say.

danso 11y ago

Why do you need to see Google's source code when you already know that Google is personalizing the search results for you? Hypothetically, what kind of parameters discernible in Google's search code would make the difference between "OK meddling" versus "Evil meddling"? The bigger question is: why do you think that there is some kind of pure, objective ranking of websites that Google is now tampering with? Do you think that someone whose IP is located in Utah should get the same result for "good hamburgers late night" as someone in New York? If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things that we don't need a review of source code to debate. But your suspicions toward them seems to be based off of a worldview in which there is One True Web for everyone, which seems as problematic as the mindset that surely Google can do no evil. Given that Google uses personal data to shape the web its users see...isn't it even more relevant to see the data they collect? AFAIK, Google still allows us to download virtually every bit of data we've explicitly generated on its services, including all the emails and search requests we've conducted.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
> If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things I don't find this one so complicated; they're better sent to en.wikipedia.org, because that page, like their query, is written in english.
- Ao7bei3s 11y ago
  Additionally, it could depend on whether they are using google.com or google.vn.
- danso 11y ago
  Sorry if this is already evident to you...but the differences between Wikipedia sites is not just about the language. vi.wikipedia.org is independently edited and maintained from en.wikipedia.org. The Vietnamese wikipedia page [1] is not as lengthy as the English one. And I'm not as good as reading Vietnamese as I should be, but the Vietnamese page doesn't seem to have the same content for "Media and censorship" that the English one does...among other differences. So I don't think it's as simple as "Send them to whatever language they used" (though I guess this is one case where seeing Google's source code would be enlightening, so...touché?) [1] https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Việt_Nam

easytiger 11y ago

> For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, That's their problem.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it? That's a double-edged sword here. The current problem with search, and one of the reasons the exact algorithms stay undisclosed, is not Google. It's your average Joe the small business owner, who sees no problem with poisoning the Internet with spam and fake websites, just to gain a competitive edge. There's even a whole industry (SEO/SEM) serving such Joes, that specializes in extreme "meddling with search results". As long as Google maintains some control over it, it can tweak and twist their algorithms to counteract the manipulation, or even explicitly penalize biggest offenders. Take that control away and the Internet will go to shit. Search is a common resource, and it needs to be managed. I'm far more willing to trust Google than a mob of hundreds of millions "entrepreneurs" trying to one-up one another at the cost of everyone else.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago
This sounds similar to security through obscurity.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Yes, but you don't have much other choice. Security through obscurity can and often is practical, and in this case a full, open solution is an AI-complete problem (i.e. equivalent to creating a superhuman artificial intelligence), because it would need to understand motivations behind actions, and not just actions themselves.

zanny 11y ago

It is a valid proposal. Google is not just selling you a search algorithm with their google.com platform, but also the server infrastructure that maintains it, the brand name (a vast swathe of less tech savvy Internet users say google X instead of go to X website), and the uptime. Yes, the algorithm constitutes a portion of their value add, but if they open sourced google.com on its own they would not see their business destroyed for it. Would Bing suddenly become a lot better? Certainly. Would people start using Bing over Google if it just became as good as Google search? Certainly not. The only candidates that might take market share are DuckDuckGo and StartPage, who preach privacy and thus a lot of users (including myself) prefer them despite their poorer search results. If they could get Googles algorithms, they would produce better results and probably steal market share. How much market share? 1%? Do privacy savvy searchers even constitute 1% of search traffic now? Yes, it is absolutely a bad business decision for them to publish their source. They are much more likely to lose money than to see third party contributions to their code make their search so much better they offset the cost of everyone having access to the same quality search. But I still postulate it would not be much revenue and market share, and that there are tremendous applications for extremely sophisticated search algorithms like Googles that could produce tremendous economic prosperity for other disciplines, and I imagine their work might be applied in completely unrelated industries for other search domain problems. Their algorithm is ultra-specific to web page indexing, but I'm sure in that Goliath beast of code there is some novel ingenuity that we are missing due to its closed nature.