5 ms·

For the past year or more I've found Google's search site extremely unpleasant to use. It's results are choked with ads (like half of the page), and its search

For the past year or more I've found Google's search site extremely unpleasant to use. It's results are choked with ads (like half of the page), and its search optimization heavily favors promotion of products, services, and brands. Unless that's what I'm looking for (and generally it's not) often I no longer can find what I'm looking for without repeated searches adding contextual clues, sometimes repeating the search 3 to 5 times. That's damned annoying, especially for a service that had none of these problems a couple years ago. Lately I've been using DuckDuckGo and even Bing more. I can't say Bing has added much value, but Duck seems to fare about as well as Google for simpler searches while generating none of the spam. Maybe Apple can do this better still. If so, more power to Apple. Frankly, I'd love to see the government step in and create a search engine as a public service that lets the user choose what emphasis they want when they search: commercial, non-commercial, regional, historic, etc. Since the WWW's arrival ~25 years ago it's become obvious to everyone how important web search is to EVERYTHING we do online. It's a primary window onto the world. To put that power entirely in the hands of one company, especially one who's lost its way as badly as Google (Do No Harm, indeed), is insane. It's time for search to become a public utility and adopt some basic design principles that serve the user as its primary mission. Maybe Jimmy Wales could offer some good ideas. Another service a gov't-funded search engine site should provide is phone number lookup. It's absurd that there's no directory for phone numbers any more. Do we really WANT to obstruct people's ability to stay in touch with each other?

sunir 6y ago
Would you trust the government to run a search engine so it can have direct access to your search queries?
- mmmateo 6y ago
  Corporations already have it. I can’t imagine they’re more well-intentioned than a democratic government.
  - qsort 6y ago
    The problem is, with all the due respect, that intentions don't matter. You would have the same exact problem of misaligned incentives even with a 'democratic government' replacing Google. If you really want the people to be in the loop, have the government regulate the business instead; at the very least it would be a transparent process.
    - lizardmancan 6y ago
      no, government has to add its sinister components secretly while pretending to serve the public. A corporation doesnt just do it openly, they are often legaly obligated to do so. Google is in no way obligated to serve the public.
  - sunir 6y ago
    You don’t have to imagine it. The Patriot Act section 215 gave the “well intentioned” US government the right to access library records as a general warrant.
neolog 6y ago
If bing and duck can't do it, why could the government?
- randcraw 6y ago
  Public libraries serve the public good in the way I'm proposing: no search there yields any spam or "optimized" results that serve ulterior agendas or biases. A government service, especially one whose design and contents are fully open to scrutiny by any interested party at any time -- this would be a big win in terms of encouraging trust in that service, as Wikipedia largely does now. No corporation will ever agree to serve solely that mission, especially under those constraints. Yet residents of an open democracy deserve nothing less -- open access to unbiased data. If ever the US needed such a thing, it would be now.
webmobdev 6y ago
My strategy is to deprive Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple of as much personal data as I can. So for search, I use various search engines - for generic search queries I turn to Yandex (A Russian search engine that helpfully provides an option in the bottom to search on Google and Bing, if you are not happy with their search results), Stackoverflow for programming queries, IMDB for TV / Movies, and even Wikipedia and Reddit for other types of queries. This is easier to do now a days since Opera (pre-Blink version) popularised adding search from any site to the browser.

sunir 6y ago

Would you trust the government to run a search engine so it can have direct access to your search queries?

mmmateo 6y ago
Corporations already have it. I can’t imagine they’re more well-intentioned than a democratic government.
- qsort 6y ago
  The problem is, with all the due respect, that intentions don't matter. You would have the same exact problem of misaligned incentives even with a 'democratic government' replacing Google. If you really want the people to be in the loop, have the government regulate the business instead; at the very least it would be a transparent process.
  - lizardmancan 6y ago
    no, government has to add its sinister components secretly while pretending to serve the public. A corporation doesnt just do it openly, they are often legaly obligated to do so. Google is in no way obligated to serve the public.
- sunir 6y ago
  You don’t have to imagine it. The Patriot Act section 215 gave the “well intentioned” US government the right to access library records as a general warrant.

neolog 6y ago

If bing and duck can't do it, why could the government?

randcraw 6y ago
Public libraries serve the public good in the way I'm proposing: no search there yields any spam or "optimized" results that serve ulterior agendas or biases. A government service, especially one whose design and contents are fully open to scrutiny by any interested party at any time -- this would be a big win in terms of encouraging trust in that service, as Wikipedia largely does now. No corporation will ever agree to serve solely that mission, especially under those constraints. Yet residents of an open democracy deserve nothing less -- open access to unbiased data. If ever the US needed such a thing, it would be now.

webmobdev 6y ago

My strategy is to deprive Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple of as much personal data as I can. So for search, I use various search engines - for generic search queries I turn to Yandex (A Russian search engine that helpfully provides an option in the bottom to search on Google and Bing, if you are not happy with their search results), Stackoverflow for programming queries, IMDB for TV / Movies, and even Wikipedia and Reddit for other types of queries. This is easier to do now a days since Opera (pre-Blink version) popularised adding search from any site to the browser.