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> The key to Google's dominance is not the fancy software or the ranking algorithms, but the sheer size of the index, said Zack Maril, a Washington DC software
by waynesonfire 6y ago
> The key to Google's dominance is not the fancy software or the ranking algorithms, but the sheer size of the index, said Zack Maril, a Washington DC software engineer who recently briefed US government investigators on Google's search monopoly.
Why is the ranking not that important? Index all you want but if the ranking is done poorly that's a bad user experience. Or is the state of the art in information retrieval good enough and thus, doesn't cost much?
- zinekeller 6y ago> Or is the state of the art in information retrieval good enough and thus, doesn't cost much? Yes. Of course, you need to find the correct bias so that a satisfactory result is perceived by the greatest amount of people possible, but otherwise the real challenge is to convince websites to allow them a competition besides Bing and Google (which are often the only whitelisted "bots" for websites outside Russia and east Asia). For example, DDG has tried to use "Orange" (the name of their bot) previously in exchange to Bing but it didn't really work as expected due to websites whitelisting only MSN/Bing and Google. Google, LinkedIn and some other sites blocks access to their site index, giving boost to only established spiders. Even Twitter blocks Bing [1] as we speak, therefore only Google (and Yandex and Yahoo! if their indexer is still alive) can reliably parse Tweets. 1: https://twitter.com/robots.txt https://twitter.com/robots.txt