5 ms·

At the moment yes you are right, but if we want it to stay that way we need to do something about it now. I agree that people mainly use Google because it's the

At the moment yes you are right, but if we want it to stay that way we need to do something about it now. I agree that people mainly use Google because it's the default, but if we aren't careful there won't be an alternative left that can stand up against them. The only hope we'll have then is that Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft decide to tackle Google head on, but in most cases where that has happened in the past Google has won. I'd already say that in terms of publishing online that Google is the only search engine publishers/marketers care about.

the_duke 10y ago
With search, we already approaching that point. No other search engine comes close to the quality of Google, at least for certain topics. Outside of Russia, China, Japan and some other countries Google is the dominant search with a big lead. And that is troubling indeed! Competition is good. And necessary for a healthy market. It also means that Google has a huge amount of control over what information can be discovered. What if MS decides Bing isn't worth their while anymore in 5 years? Yahoo will have dwindled away by then, leaving only Google. In Europe, Google has +90% everywhere (except Russia).
- antocv 10y ago
  Bing is still using Google as its backend. www.yandex.com is a really good alternative, I found it even offers better search results for most topic I look at.
  - Sindisil 10y ago
    Bing doesn't use Google as its back end ... I don't believe it ever did. Yahoo did switch to using Bing as its back end, some years ago.
    - jetpacktuxedo 10y ago
      Not that I agree with your parent comment that bing still uses google results on the backend, they did at least used to: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses...
- woliveirajr 10y ago
  And that's the point: quality. Altavista was a good search engine at it's time and now it's just memories. Because a "better" search engine appeared, giving results that were more useful.
- coldpie 10y ago
  If we continue down that road as you worry, at some point regulatory action might be appropriate. Google already seems to be breaking itself up via Alphabet, maybe they should just be cleaved entirely to avoid collusion and encourage competitors. On the other hand, the gov't avoided breaking up Microsoft back in the day, and this seems to have worked out OK as competitors sprung up into the gap the gov't wedged open anyway.
Asooka 10y ago
Between Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who do you want to be the overlords of the web? Each one of them is trying to win total dominance and eventually one will. Google seem like they would be the least evil of the five.
- lovingByDoing 10y ago
  The things is, this is exactly whagt their marketing department has been pushing us to believe since their inception. The motto, the glibly pedantic color schema, the focus on simplicity on their home site, and cleanly (yet viciously) integrated ad revenue, even the language of the letter in the original link, all of these things point to a naivete that ignores how corrupt the ethos of what Google's central argument is: meritocracy above all else, in other words: down with the dumb, down with the lesser, all hail the perfectly manufactured data stream that contains what seems like childlike wonder, but is instead an amalgam of people's minds. They are sucking the intelligence out of us and selling it back at a markup so high it begs disbelief. The fact that there is Bing is good, adn Bing's search isn't all that far below Google's in terms of getting good data from the web, but the point is: aren't we forgetting that there was a loooong time when we derived a lot of good data without their services? I find the aggressiveness of Google's ignorance to be quite frightening. I find that they are so far removed from the effects of their casual relationship with owning what happens to the data they are "curating" that it seems anathema to good governance, and governance it is because we are subject to the whims of their algorithm's ability to provide us with data that goes beyond what the mind can handle and handle sanely. There is a monumental schism between what the web is comprised of and the first page of Google's query results, and that is what I think is at issue. What about all of the rest of the data that we never see? How do we know it's not interesting? How could we ever spend the time to sift through it to make certain we aren't missing data that is far easier to comprehend? Long post, but a quick example: I program a fair amount. I like C++ for various reasons, but the C++ reference page is dry as the Red Sea after Moses played the downbeat of the 40 year cadence the slaves danced to after raising one too many pyramids. I would wager that there might be a great C++ reference page out there somewhere that has easy on the eyes detail, a fairly conversational tone and nice examples that aren't at the very end of the page. But, because Google's algorithm (and Bing's, Yahoo's, Duck Duck Go, etc) all get tons of traffic from the cppreference.com page, it or some Stack response is the go to answer for essentially every question for which I need an answer. How is that well crafted page ever going to get the right recognition if everyone is being diverted to the cppreference page? It's like the old trope, we do it that way because that's the way we've always done it. Sometimes this means we drive the speed limit because that's the safest way to drive according the engineers who calculated the road conditions when they were built, but it's a little different in this instance because it's the _quality_ of the road that matters, not merely the velocity we drive that dictates the "goodness" of the experience. Google (and the other big bots out there) are ignoring the quality in their algorithm(s) and merely settling for popularity as the guiding rubric, and I think we are all too aware of how that mentality can lead to unsalient choices.

the_duke 10y ago

With search, we already approaching that point. No other search engine comes close to the quality of Google, at least for certain topics. Outside of Russia, China, Japan and some other countries Google is the dominant search with a big lead. And that is troubling indeed! Competition is good. And necessary for a healthy market. It also means that Google has a huge amount of control over what information can be discovered. What if MS decides Bing isn't worth their while anymore in 5 years? Yahoo will have dwindled away by then, leaving only Google. In Europe, Google has +90% everywhere (except Russia).

antocv 10y ago
Bing is still using Google as its backend. www.yandex.com is a really good alternative, I found it even offers better search results for most topic I look at.
- Sindisil 10y ago
  Bing doesn't use Google as its back end ... I don't believe it ever did. Yahoo did switch to using Bing as its back end, some years ago.
  - jetpacktuxedo 10y ago
    Not that I agree with your parent comment that bing still uses google results on the backend, they did at least used to: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses...
woliveirajr 10y ago
And that's the point: quality. Altavista was a good search engine at it's time and now it's just memories. Because a "better" search engine appeared, giving results that were more useful.
coldpie 10y ago
If we continue down that road as you worry, at some point regulatory action might be appropriate. Google already seems to be breaking itself up via Alphabet, maybe they should just be cleaved entirely to avoid collusion and encourage competitors. On the other hand, the gov't avoided breaking up Microsoft back in the day, and this seems to have worked out OK as competitors sprung up into the gap the gov't wedged open anyway.

Asooka 10y ago

Between Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who do you want to be the overlords of the web? Each one of them is trying to win total dominance and eventually one will. Google seem like they would be the least evil of the five.

lovingByDoing 10y ago
The things is, this is exactly whagt their marketing department has been pushing us to believe since their inception. The motto, the glibly pedantic color schema, the focus on simplicity on their home site, and cleanly (yet viciously) integrated ad revenue, even the language of the letter in the original link, all of these things point to a naivete that ignores how corrupt the ethos of what Google's central argument is: meritocracy above all else, in other words: down with the dumb, down with the lesser, all hail the perfectly manufactured data stream that contains what seems like childlike wonder, but is instead an amalgam of people's minds. They are sucking the intelligence out of us and selling it back at a markup so high it begs disbelief. The fact that there is Bing is good, adn Bing's search isn't all that far below Google's in terms of getting good data from the web, but the point is: aren't we forgetting that there was a loooong time when we derived a lot of good data without their services? I find the aggressiveness of Google's ignorance to be quite frightening. I find that they are so far removed from the effects of their casual relationship with owning what happens to the data they are "curating" that it seems anathema to good governance, and governance it is because we are subject to the whims of their algorithm's ability to provide us with data that goes beyond what the mind can handle and handle sanely. There is a monumental schism between what the web is comprised of and the first page of Google's query results, and that is what I think is at issue. What about all of the rest of the data that we never see? How do we know it's not interesting? How could we ever spend the time to sift through it to make certain we aren't missing data that is far easier to comprehend? Long post, but a quick example: I program a fair amount. I like C++ for various reasons, but the C++ reference page is dry as the Red Sea after Moses played the downbeat of the 40 year cadence the slaves danced to after raising one too many pyramids. I would wager that there might be a great C++ reference page out there somewhere that has easy on the eyes detail, a fairly conversational tone and nice examples that aren't at the very end of the page. But, because Google's algorithm (and Bing's, Yahoo's, Duck Duck Go, etc) all get tons of traffic from the cppreference.com page, it or some Stack response is the go to answer for essentially every question for which I need an answer. How is that well crafted page ever going to get the right recognition if everyone is being diverted to the cppreference page? It's like the old trope, we do it that way because that's the way we've always done it. Sometimes this means we drive the speed limit because that's the safest way to drive according the engineers who calculated the road conditions when they were built, but it's a little different in this instance because it's the _quality_ of the road that matters, not merely the velocity we drive that dictates the "goodness" of the experience. Google (and the other big bots out there) are ignoring the quality in their algorithm(s) and merely settling for popularity as the guiding rubric, and I think we are all too aware of how that mentality can lead to unsalient choices.