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I don’t want to break Google’s monopoly on search. Google’s search is fantastic. It’s their advertising business knowing too much about me I care about.

mc32 7y ago
Google treads on censorship as it regards political discourse. I’m not referring to things beyond the pale. I mean they will censor seemingly small things like bury a politician’s peccadilloes or surface something that stains an opponent. That’s dangerous. One obvious search query string is: reddit + candidate and see some surfaced and some less so.
- judge2020 7y ago
  I know it's hard to get definite proof, but what really makes you think Google employees (only a subset of whom have production access) would go out of their way to censor websites or results? If I search for [any US candidate] I always get both a news carousel and their official website. Maybe this happens in other countries where Google can throw their weight around without anyone noticing?
gourou 7y ago
If you want Google search without tracking, you should try StartPage https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/
- dhimes 7y ago
  How do they make money?
  - vntok 7y ago
    Non-personalized ads.
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  It also seems to work much better. It finds exactly what I type, and not random things that google thinks might fit...
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> 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.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Like you said, the value of Google is the algo. The index is worth little. The limits of Bing, Qwant, DDG, etc. are not the number of the indexed pages. It's that, give them the same pages, and the same search terms, and they don't return results as good.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > the value of Google is the algo. The index is worth little. But it's worth something. Giving DuckDuckGo direct access to Google's index, including the ability to train models on said index, would improve the competitive landscape.
    - vntok 7y ago
      Or, you know, they could innovate by themselves instead of relying on Google to do all the heavy lifting?
      - sct202 7y ago
        Yeah it seems like this would spawn a lot of weak competitors who only exist because of the protections and would die off the second they're cut off from the API.
  - stereolambda 7y ago
    Maybe the practical indexing ability is worth more than the index itself. Most site owners happily let the Googlebot into their websites, while a competitor is likely to be caught into some sweeping anti-bot/Captcha measures.
wpietri 7y ago
And really, that seems like a good cutpoint to me. Search might be a natural monopoly. But advertising sure isn't. A lot of their ad stuff came via acquisition; what was bought can be spun off or sold again.
- criddell 7y ago
  Why would search be a natural monopoly? Compute time and network bandwidth is less expensive now than it's ever been.
  - klntsky 7y ago
    But the profit one can gain from crawling sure grows non-linearly with the number of pages consumed. Thus, small businesses are less likely to reach the threshold of the index size required to make profit ratio comparable with that of their bigger competitors.
throwaway8879 7y ago
I'm not so sure about search being fantastic anymore. I'm frustrated with how most times Google will completely ignore the exact query terms and return very clickbaity/popular links from medium/quota/etc. It's been happening for a bit now and usually for any serious search, I'll compare results with duckduckgo just to be sure.
fouc 7y ago
I think the better move is to find a way to kill the advertising business model that google relies on. If there's no advertising there's not as much need for all this data collection.
- jasode 7y ago
  >the better move is to find a way to kill the advertising business model that google relies on. If there's no advertising there's not as much need for all this data collection. What would be the alternative ad-free business model for Google to pay for its datacenters? Paid subscriptions? I've been performing google searches for 20 years. In an alternate past universe... if I was paying $9.99/month for paywall access to their ad-free search engine, Google Inc would have more sensitive data collection about me -- not less. Google would have decades of my (sometimes embarassing) search history specifically tied to my paid account. Ads can reduce privacy but they can also increase privacy by making explicit logins optional. (In other words, the anonymous google searches I did at the office during work are uncorrelated with the searches I do at home or at school. Without explicit Google account logins, the searches I do on my smartphone at Starbucks can be uncorrelated with the searches I do on the desktop at home.) I don't like ads but the alternative ad-free revenue model is worse: Google Inc having my credit-card payment info (which means my real identity) and all my private search queries tied to it.
- bllguo 7y ago
  the advertising model google relies on is just a reflection of how the attention economy and the internet work. I just don't see how this makes sense practically. People aren't going to seamlessly and happily go back to paying $$ for internet services
NoGravitas 7y ago
Google's search isn't even that great, to be honest. I use DDG for search, and use the !g operator when the DDG results aren't satisfying. But my experience with that is that the Google results are never good for those searches, either. The thing the article misses is that search isn't really Google's crown jewel anymore. It's their position at the top of the adtech ecosystem, and while they bootstrapped that with search, I kind of doubt that search is the main thing driving their ad views today.
Xixi 7y ago
I kinda disagree. 15 years ago you could generally type anything and expect the first search result to be the legitimate one. Now you have to dig through the list of SEO optimized scams (or at least dubious websites). Albeit it improved somewhat over the last couple of years. Example: if you type "broadway shows phantom of the opera", the first non-ad link redirect to www.broadway.com. But www.broadway.com doesn't do anything: they just buy tickets from the legitimate website (www.telecharge.com in that case) with an extra ~$30 fee per ticket tackled on top. I won't go as far as to claim that Google is ok with it because broadway.com must spend tons of money on ads, and not telecharge.com... but I'm suspicious. Counter example: "green card lottery" now points to the official us gov websites, while few years ago it was scams after scams all the way down.
bllguo 7y ago
but a big reason search is fantastic is because of the data the system has on us. I don't think you can separate the two.

mc32 7y ago

Google treads on censorship as it regards political discourse. I’m not referring to things beyond the pale. I mean they will censor seemingly small things like bury a politician’s peccadilloes or surface something that stains an opponent. That’s dangerous. One obvious search query string is: reddit + candidate and see some surfaced and some less so.

judge2020 7y ago
I know it's hard to get definite proof, but what really makes you think Google employees (only a subset of whom have production access) would go out of their way to censor websites or results? If I search for [any US candidate] I always get both a news carousel and their official website. Maybe this happens in other countries where Google can throw their weight around without anyone noticing?

gourou 7y ago

If you want Google search without tracking, you should try StartPage https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/

dhimes 7y ago
How do they make money?
- vntok 7y ago
  Non-personalized ads.
Double_a_92 7y ago
It also seems to work much better. It finds exactly what I type, and not random things that google thinks might fit...

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> 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.

sametmax 7y ago
Like you said, the value of Google is the algo. The index is worth little. The limits of Bing, Qwant, DDG, etc. are not the number of the indexed pages. It's that, give them the same pages, and the same search terms, and they don't return results as good.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > the value of Google is the algo. The index is worth little. But it's worth something. Giving DuckDuckGo direct access to Google's index, including the ability to train models on said index, would improve the competitive landscape.
  - vntok 7y ago
    Or, you know, they could innovate by themselves instead of relying on Google to do all the heavy lifting?
    - sct202 7y ago
      Yeah it seems like this would spawn a lot of weak competitors who only exist because of the protections and would die off the second they're cut off from the API.
- stereolambda 7y ago
  Maybe the practical indexing ability is worth more than the index itself. Most site owners happily let the Googlebot into their websites, while a competitor is likely to be caught into some sweeping anti-bot/Captcha measures.

wpietri 7y ago

And really, that seems like a good cutpoint to me. Search might be a natural monopoly. But advertising sure isn't. A lot of their ad stuff came via acquisition; what was bought can be spun off or sold again.

criddell 7y ago
Why would search be a natural monopoly? Compute time and network bandwidth is less expensive now than it's ever been.
- klntsky 7y ago
  But the profit one can gain from crawling sure grows non-linearly with the number of pages consumed. Thus, small businesses are less likely to reach the threshold of the index size required to make profit ratio comparable with that of their bigger competitors.

throwaway8879 7y ago

I'm not so sure about search being fantastic anymore. I'm frustrated with how most times Google will completely ignore the exact query terms and return very clickbaity/popular links from medium/quota/etc. It's been happening for a bit now and usually for any serious search, I'll compare results with duckduckgo just to be sure.

fouc 7y ago

I think the better move is to find a way to kill the advertising business model that google relies on. If there's no advertising there's not as much need for all this data collection.

jasode 7y ago
>the better move is to find a way to kill the advertising business model that google relies on. If there's no advertising there's not as much need for all this data collection. What would be the alternative ad-free business model for Google to pay for its datacenters? Paid subscriptions? I've been performing google searches for 20 years. In an alternate past universe... if I was paying $9.99/month for paywall access to their ad-free search engine, Google Inc would have more sensitive data collection about me -- not less. Google would have decades of my (sometimes embarassing) search history specifically tied to my paid account. Ads can reduce privacy but they can also increase privacy by making explicit logins optional. (In other words, the anonymous google searches I did at the office during work are uncorrelated with the searches I do at home or at school. Without explicit Google account logins, the searches I do on my smartphone at Starbucks can be uncorrelated with the searches I do on the desktop at home.) I don't like ads but the alternative ad-free revenue model is worse: Google Inc having my credit-card payment info (which means my real identity) and all my private search queries tied to it.
bllguo 7y ago
the advertising model google relies on is just a reflection of how the attention economy and the internet work. I just don't see how this makes sense practically. People aren't going to seamlessly and happily go back to paying $$ for internet services

NoGravitas 7y ago

Google's search isn't even that great, to be honest. I use DDG for search, and use the !g operator when the DDG results aren't satisfying. But my experience with that is that the Google results are never good for those searches, either. The thing the article misses is that search isn't really Google's crown jewel anymore. It's their position at the top of the adtech ecosystem, and while they bootstrapped that with search, I kind of doubt that search is the main thing driving their ad views today.

Xixi 7y ago

I kinda disagree. 15 years ago you could generally type anything and expect the first search result to be the legitimate one. Now you have to dig through the list of SEO optimized scams (or at least dubious websites). Albeit it improved somewhat over the last couple of years. Example: if you type "broadway shows phantom of the opera", the first non-ad link redirect to www.broadway.com. But www.broadway.com doesn't do anything: they just buy tickets from the legitimate website (www.telecharge.com in that case) with an extra ~$30 fee per ticket tackled on top. I won't go as far as to claim that Google is ok with it because broadway.com must spend tons of money on ads, and not telecharge.com... but I'm suspicious. Counter example: "green card lottery" now points to the official us gov websites, while few years ago it was scams after scams all the way down.

bllguo 7y ago

but a big reason search is fantastic is because of the data the system has on us. I don't think you can separate the two.