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1# It's not expensive as 2 decades ago, most of the data is behind gardens now, Reddit, FB, Twitter, Amazon, and less than 1000 other sites. Everything else can

1# It's not expensive as 2 decades ago, most of the data is behind gardens now, Reddit, FB, Twitter, Amazon, and less than 1000 other sites. Everything else can be crawled slowly. 2# Search is one of THE primary usage of the device, they have enough throwaway money to take this on. Just like Maps. 3# Sounds suspicious. But anti trust discussion started few years back and if you look through those optics EVERYTHING will look suspicious this year. There is no non-suspicious time for one of biggest companies in the world/human history to compete with each other.

crazygringo 6y ago
The main cost of search isn't crawling. The main cost of search is developing incredibly sophisticated ML algorithms for parsing search queries, for ranking results, and parsing web pages to provide factual results (like Google's snippets and knowledge base items). And this is orders of magnitude more expensive than it was two decades ago. Because you've got to compete with Google which has a 20-year head start in throwing the best engineers in the world at these problems. Nobody's going to use a search engine that isn't at least 90% as good as Google in these things. See: Bing.
- nwienert 6y ago
  How do you explain Apple building Maps then and forgoing a huge chunk of money they made there? Also no reason they couldn’t sell ads so long as they don’t use personalization, people almost forget that invasion of privacy and ads need not be coupled.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- djanogo 6y ago
  Click tracking is MUCH more significant than ML/AI, Google results were very good even 10 years back when they were just based on click tracking. Whatever they are doing to parse/steal other websites data to show as snippets is only complicated because there is no schema. Look what Amazon did, they made people implement "skill" so it's all API now. All that was solved for majority of use cases and leaped ahead by Amazon in under 5 years with Alexa, deployed as tiny hardware. Remove click tracking and top 1000 sites from Google and it will be shit, no amount of ML/AI dance will solve that. Apple can just do top 1000 sites from each country with click tracking (to track which result users are preferring) and significantly cut traffic sent to Google. They already try to do this with Siri. Bing was chicken(user) and egg problem (click tracking to optimize results).
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    I'm sorry, but nothing of what you're saying makes any sense to me. All click tracking does is measure the quality of your results -- whether a user clicks on the first result or third or none at all. It doesn't help generate quality results in the first place. Google's main first innovation was PageRank, not click tracking. Click tracking is just a metric to judge the underlying algorithms. (There is one exception: it can be used to fine-tune the order of the top 5-10 results for the most popular queries, but of course most of search is in the long tail where that fine tuning can't be done. And in any case, you still need excellent candidates for your first 10 items to begin with.) Click tracking does nothing for parsing a query, nothing for ranking the top 10 items out of a million matches, and nothing for extracting information. And why are you talking about the top 1,000 sites? My whole point is crawling the web is the easy part.

crazygringo 6y ago

The main cost of search isn't crawling. The main cost of search is developing incredibly sophisticated ML algorithms for parsing search queries, for ranking results, and parsing web pages to provide factual results (like Google's snippets and knowledge base items). And this is orders of magnitude more expensive than it was two decades ago. Because you've got to compete with Google which has a 20-year head start in throwing the best engineers in the world at these problems. Nobody's going to use a search engine that isn't at least 90% as good as Google in these things. See: Bing.

nwienert 6y ago
How do you explain Apple building Maps then and forgoing a huge chunk of money they made there? Also no reason they couldn’t sell ads so long as they don’t use personalization, people almost forget that invasion of privacy and ads need not be coupled.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
djanogo 6y ago
Click tracking is MUCH more significant than ML/AI, Google results were very good even 10 years back when they were just based on click tracking. Whatever they are doing to parse/steal other websites data to show as snippets is only complicated because there is no schema. Look what Amazon did, they made people implement "skill" so it's all API now. All that was solved for majority of use cases and leaped ahead by Amazon in under 5 years with Alexa, deployed as tiny hardware. Remove click tracking and top 1000 sites from Google and it will be shit, no amount of ML/AI dance will solve that. Apple can just do top 1000 sites from each country with click tracking (to track which result users are preferring) and significantly cut traffic sent to Google. They already try to do this with Siri. Bing was chicken(user) and egg problem (click tracking to optimize results).
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but nothing of what you're saying makes any sense to me. All click tracking does is measure the quality of your results -- whether a user clicks on the first result or third or none at all. It doesn't help generate quality results in the first place. Google's main first innovation was PageRank, not click tracking. Click tracking is just a metric to judge the underlying algorithms. (There is one exception: it can be used to fine-tune the order of the top 5-10 results for the most popular queries, but of course most of search is in the long tail where that fine tuning can't be done. And in any case, you still need excellent candidates for your first 10 items to begin with.) Click tracking does nothing for parsing a query, nothing for ranking the top 10 items out of a million matches, and nothing for extracting information. And why are you talking about the top 1,000 sites? My whole point is crawling the web is the easy part.