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I think people might underestimate the power of an open source search engine. In my eyes it is like wikipedia versus the old paper encyclopedia books. Improveme
by whazor 11y ago
I think people might underestimate the power of an open source search engine. In my eyes it is like wikipedia versus the old paper encyclopedia books. Improvements to search results in Google are done by a relatively small amount of people from Google. Google decides where you buy, what you think and how you live. Behind their algorithms they probably have made dozens of subjective choices. Public debate, more attention to details, and open politics are as I see it, great tools to improve search engine quality.
- schoen 11y agoAnd even if organizations smaller and less sophisticated than Google can't match the kind of search quality that Google has achieved, the autonomy and transparency issues are still important. An interesting metaphor for search engines' power is in http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/Library.markdown http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/Library.markdown
- praxulus 11y ago>Improvements to search results in Google are done by a relatively small amount of people from Google How many open source projects log more engineering hours than Google's search team? It's the flagship product of one of the largest corporations in the world.
- whazor 11y agoWikipedia has 133,621 active registered users, and 27,755,916 users. Furthermore, Wikipedia has 819,043,068 page edits. While Google will probably have better and more engineers, but they rely on usage statistics, and not experts in the specific search domains.