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> You agreed to their terms and services. Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any cont

> You agreed to their terms and services. Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. > you can use a competitor As a search engine user, I can and I do. However, the party most affected by the monopoly is web site owners. They can't do that. > start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality Where I live, I have a choice of 2 wired broadband ISPs, 3 wireless with comparable speeds (30-40 mbit/sec in practice). To my knowledge, none of them filters or prioritizes traffic. I generally support net neutrality but I'm not affected my the lack of these laws. This is unlike search engine monopoly: despite I don't personally use google search, most other people do.

joshuamorton 6y ago
> Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. robots.txt is obeyed by (ethical) search crawlers, including the ones from big search companies. If you don't want to be indexed, you have many tools to block things or to be served only by specific search engines.
- Const-me 6y ago
  > If you don't want to be indexed If I had a web site that actually makes money as opposed to only consuming money for domain and hosting, I would want it to be indexed, and I would want search results from that index to be fair. By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. I’m OK for search results to depend on the content of other pages on the internets which might link to it, helps to rank pages making search results more relevant. I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. I don’t do web development, but I have some understanding of the tech involved, and I think many people have reasons to be unhappy with the status quo.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. (I work at Google, but not on search). My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking. Performance affects ranking, and AMP affects performance. But so do many other things. There's also a similar conversation about placement (the "carousel"), which isn't ranking exactly, and that is affected by web technologies, in that certain placements require certain types of structure in the underlying site (metadata, etc.). AMP is one, but not the only, way to achieve this. > By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. This is a definition of fairness, but it's certainly not the only one, and it may not be the best one. As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me, which means that your ranking would depend on third parties (my priors). Like, as an alternative, Google could list all search results alphabetically by url, like a phone book. That's fair too. But probably worse. So discussions of fairness don't make sense, because there are tons of terrible but "fair" ranking strategies, and for basically any query, there's someone who thinks they should be higher and that the reason they aren't is that the system is unfair. > or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. Do you mean ad space, or something else?
    - Const-me 6y ago
      > My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking They tell they use AMP versions to measure performance, and the performance affects ranking. AMP is hosted by the same google who does ranking, they gonna measure better performance because it’s their local network. Not sure it was an oversight, looks more like cheating. Apparently, they’re planning to revert in 2021, but I think it’s too little too late. I think they only doing it due to public and political pressure. Unless regulated, they’ll continue to implement features which maximize their profit at the expense of everyone else on the internets, both users and web site owners. > As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me I certainly don’t, BTW that’s one of the reasons why I’m using duckduckgo instead. Why would you want personalized results? Doesn’t it effectively limit search space to things you already know, or like? That thing probably ain’t a filter technically, and neither it’s censorship legally, but practically speaking reordering stuff to later pages is as good as filtering. > Do you mean ad space, or something else? UX patterns to blur the line between fair and paid results. Try to disable ad.blockers, search for something generic and advertised worldwide like “web hosting”, and compare search result pages between google and DDG. Google’s “Ad” is barely noticeable, DDG’s “Ad” has very noticeable outline. Google doesn’t show URL, DDG does. Also, too much garbage in general. Google shows maps despite completely irrelevant for online-only services like web hosting. The result is more than a page of garbage before the first fair search result, and that’s on my 27” 4k monitor. Will probably be couple pages of garbage for a user with average display and without ad blockers.

joshuamorton 6y ago

> Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. robots.txt is obeyed by (ethical) search crawlers, including the ones from big search companies. If you don't want to be indexed, you have many tools to block things or to be served only by specific search engines.

Const-me 6y ago
> If you don't want to be indexed If I had a web site that actually makes money as opposed to only consuming money for domain and hosting, I would want it to be indexed, and I would want search results from that index to be fair. By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. I’m OK for search results to depend on the content of other pages on the internets which might link to it, helps to rank pages making search results more relevant. I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. I don’t do web development, but I have some understanding of the tech involved, and I think many people have reasons to be unhappy with the status quo.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. (I work at Google, but not on search). My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking. Performance affects ranking, and AMP affects performance. But so do many other things. There's also a similar conversation about placement (the "carousel"), which isn't ranking exactly, and that is affected by web technologies, in that certain placements require certain types of structure in the underlying site (metadata, etc.). AMP is one, but not the only, way to achieve this. > By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. This is a definition of fairness, but it's certainly not the only one, and it may not be the best one. As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me, which means that your ranking would depend on third parties (my priors). Like, as an alternative, Google could list all search results alphabetically by url, like a phone book. That's fair too. But probably worse. So discussions of fairness don't make sense, because there are tons of terrible but "fair" ranking strategies, and for basically any query, there's someone who thinks they should be higher and that the reason they aren't is that the system is unfair. > or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. Do you mean ad space, or something else?
  - Const-me 6y ago
    > My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking They tell they use AMP versions to measure performance, and the performance affects ranking. AMP is hosted by the same google who does ranking, they gonna measure better performance because it’s their local network. Not sure it was an oversight, looks more like cheating. Apparently, they’re planning to revert in 2021, but I think it’s too little too late. I think they only doing it due to public and political pressure. Unless regulated, they’ll continue to implement features which maximize their profit at the expense of everyone else on the internets, both users and web site owners. > As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me I certainly don’t, BTW that’s one of the reasons why I’m using duckduckgo instead. Why would you want personalized results? Doesn’t it effectively limit search space to things you already know, or like? That thing probably ain’t a filter technically, and neither it’s censorship legally, but practically speaking reordering stuff to later pages is as good as filtering. > Do you mean ad space, or something else? UX patterns to blur the line between fair and paid results. Try to disable ad.blockers, search for something generic and advertised worldwide like “web hosting”, and compare search result pages between google and DDG. Google’s “Ad” is barely noticeable, DDG’s “Ad” has very noticeable outline. Google doesn’t show URL, DDG does. Also, too much garbage in general. Google shows maps despite completely irrelevant for online-only services like web hosting. The result is more than a page of garbage before the first fair search result, and that’s on my 27” 4k monitor. Will probably be couple pages of garbage for a user with average display and without ad blockers.