4 ms·

Generally good comment, but if search is separated from ads, how does it make money? I'm totally on board with splitting up Google, but losing Google search (or

by ripdog 5y ago

Generally good comment, but if search is separated from ads, how does it make money? I'm totally on board with splitting up Google, but losing Google search (or search becoming notably worse) would not be worth it for me. The competition is just so bad, and always has been.

salawat 5y ago
Part of why searching is as painful as it is is because it has been deemed acceptable to pollute the search space. SEO should be neither encouraged or allowed. It is nothing less than adversarial corruption of a shared index. Boolean searching works. Go back to a library catalog sometime and be amazed at how quickly you can get relevant results when every Tom, Dick, and Methuseleh aren't shoveling extra irrelevant feces into the index.
- scarface74 5y ago
  Says someone who never used Altavista…
- nradov 5y ago
  There is no practical way to disallow SEO. Search results have to be ranked somehow in order to be usable for most people. And site owners will always figure out tricks to game the ranking algorithms.
  - zo1 5y ago
    It's not SEO that's the problem. SEO is a symptom of the perverse incentives. So Google has created incentives (via ad embedding in user-sites) for entities to generate content and compete with each-other for who can show the most ads. This in turn "pollutes the index" as the other poster phrased it, which makes it more and more difficult to find actual real (unique?) content, which then Google turns around and supposedly "helps" us with. Let's be honest. Despite it's surface-level gigantic scale, the internet is actually very tiny when it comes to real genuine content. My wild estimate is that 99% of it is spam. Even in the case of user-generated content, for every genuine blog where someone shares their thoughts and unique insights or content, there are a thousand blogs which are just there to get ad-views by generating any content that might get someone to look there. I can't even find the former type of blog/site anymore. The only place I still encounter those on occasion is when it's linked to from HN. And the ones I do encounter that way, I find that even when I try to, I can't find it via any sort of generic search (i.e. not cheating by using the site name / author / unique phrases). Splitting Google up won't fix this.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  How is searching painful? It's gotten better with almost every year. I only see this sentiment here on HN, along with many other shitty takes about how pure the internet used to be. Are you talking about that era when opening the wrong search result would bombard your screen with millions of popups and install 20 toolbars on your machine? Please tell me when this magical time of no spam in search results existed? 1995?
  - mianos 5y ago
    You do a search, it says millions of results, the first pages all have results without the quoted terms in the page at all. They don't show "we don't have any good results" if they can display a bunch of ads on a bunch of pages with useless results.
  - salawat 5y ago
    It wasn't a case of no spam; but rather predictable spam. After a while you'd start to recognize the Web rings. The "just link" pages became extremely obvious after a while, and you could generally reliably get the same results regardless of where you searched from or what you were doing when the time came to search. You had far fewer syndication mills, and you could even find resources reliably. The net was a reasonably navigable thing even to children doing school research. Nowadays, I have to explain to kids all the myriad pitfalls that exist nowadays, when they look up something, ho back a bit later, and can't find their resource anymore. And that's just the bloody legit stuff. When you talk malware, we're in a completely different world nowadays.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  It isn't deemed acceptable, encouraged or allowed. It occurs, like spam.
elcomet 5y ago
Google Search could still show ads. They would just be Google ads customers, like any other website, and they would get paid for displaying ads.
dalbasal 5y ago
Google will continue to make money as it does now, through adwords as a "search partner." This is also how other SEs make money. The biggest antitrust case Google has lost so far has related directly to this. Would they make less money? Yes, probably. It's hard to say how much, but it would still likely be enough to run Google. I think it's easier to understand the paradigm with Twitter or FB, since they're simpler. Facebook currently makes about $100bn pa from ads. Circa 2015, they were operating profitably on about $10bn ad revenue. Twitter has had a similar (more modest) trajectory. They spend a lot of money running FB & Twitter, because they can, but there's no reason to think FB or Google Search on far less revenue than they bring in currently. There are versions of what I'm suggesting that likely affect revenue moderately, and versions that could hit harder. IMO, in either case, I don't believe there is any meaningful consumer harm or ill effects outside of FB's shareholders or perhaps employees. This isn't true of all monopolies/sectors. It's true of FB, Google, maybe twitter.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  > it would still likely be enough to run Google. [emphasis mine] Is this arbitrary guess really worth risking the whole farm?
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    The farm is at risk at all time. That said, I think the risks are way smaller than previous era's trustbusting. I like FB as an example, as I said. I'm pretty confident that FB would be pretty much the same on far less revenue because they were pretty much the same on less revenue in recent years. Comparable social media services run of far less revenue (scaled whichever way you like). You can also look at their accounts, which reveal a lot. The simplest clue is profit margins. If we're wrong... one social media service declines and another takes its place. Personally, I see very little risk. The actual risk, IMO, is not really about keeping these services viable. There no "shit! I broke auto-manufacturing and now we don't have cars" risk. It's about share price. Smallish declines in revenue can mean big declines in profit. Any decline in revenue can lead to a collapse of share prices, regardless of profit. The big techs are a big part of the S&P, and high profile. Quite a lot of the S&P's value relates directly to monopoly, so antitrust (IMO) directly conflicts with equity values... and things could get "macroeconomic" from there. All that said, I'm not advocating anything intentionally destructive. Google is, I suspect, expecting to be broken up eventually. I think that was part of the Alphabet restructuring logic. The primary objection that comes to my mind, in the vein of your comment,is a hayek-esque information argument. A Hayekian logic though, is totally incompatible with paragraph 5 above though, and I'm quite confident about that... so I don't know where it fits in.

by ripdog 5y ago

salawat 5y ago

Part of why searching is as painful as it is is because it has been deemed acceptable to pollute the search space. SEO should be neither encouraged or allowed. It is nothing less than adversarial corruption of a shared index. Boolean searching works. Go back to a library catalog sometime and be amazed at how quickly you can get relevant results when every Tom, Dick, and Methuseleh aren't shoveling extra irrelevant feces into the index.

scarface74 5y ago
Says someone who never used Altavista…
nradov 5y ago
There is no practical way to disallow SEO. Search results have to be ranked somehow in order to be usable for most people. And site owners will always figure out tricks to game the ranking algorithms.
- zo1 5y ago
  It's not SEO that's the problem. SEO is a symptom of the perverse incentives. So Google has created incentives (via ad embedding in user-sites) for entities to generate content and compete with each-other for who can show the most ads. This in turn "pollutes the index" as the other poster phrased it, which makes it more and more difficult to find actual real (unique?) content, which then Google turns around and supposedly "helps" us with. Let's be honest. Despite it's surface-level gigantic scale, the internet is actually very tiny when it comes to real genuine content. My wild estimate is that 99% of it is spam. Even in the case of user-generated content, for every genuine blog where someone shares their thoughts and unique insights or content, there are a thousand blogs which are just there to get ad-views by generating any content that might get someone to look there. I can't even find the former type of blog/site anymore. The only place I still encounter those on occasion is when it's linked to from HN. And the ones I do encounter that way, I find that even when I try to, I can't find it via any sort of generic search (i.e. not cheating by using the site name / author / unique phrases). Splitting Google up won't fix this.
dntrkv 5y ago
How is searching painful? It's gotten better with almost every year. I only see this sentiment here on HN, along with many other shitty takes about how pure the internet used to be. Are you talking about that era when opening the wrong search result would bombard your screen with millions of popups and install 20 toolbars on your machine? Please tell me when this magical time of no spam in search results existed? 1995?
- mianos 5y ago
  You do a search, it says millions of results, the first pages all have results without the quoted terms in the page at all. They don't show "we don't have any good results" if they can display a bunch of ads on a bunch of pages with useless results.
- salawat 5y ago
  It wasn't a case of no spam; but rather predictable spam. After a while you'd start to recognize the Web rings. The "just link" pages became extremely obvious after a while, and you could generally reliably get the same results regardless of where you searched from or what you were doing when the time came to search. You had far fewer syndication mills, and you could even find resources reliably. The net was a reasonably navigable thing even to children doing school research. Nowadays, I have to explain to kids all the myriad pitfalls that exist nowadays, when they look up something, ho back a bit later, and can't find their resource anymore. And that's just the bloody legit stuff. When you talk malware, we're in a completely different world nowadays.
dalbasal 5y ago
It isn't deemed acceptable, encouraged or allowed. It occurs, like spam.

elcomet 5y ago

Google Search could still show ads. They would just be Google ads customers, like any other website, and they would get paid for displaying ads.

dalbasal 5y ago

Google will continue to make money as it does now, through adwords as a "search partner." This is also how other SEs make money. The biggest antitrust case Google has lost so far has related directly to this. Would they make less money? Yes, probably. It's hard to say how much, but it would still likely be enough to run Google. I think it's easier to understand the paradigm with Twitter or FB, since they're simpler. Facebook currently makes about $100bn pa from ads. Circa 2015, they were operating profitably on about $10bn ad revenue. Twitter has had a similar (more modest) trajectory. They spend a lot of money running FB & Twitter, because they can, but there's no reason to think FB or Google Search on far less revenue than they bring in currently. There are versions of what I'm suggesting that likely affect revenue moderately, and versions that could hit harder. IMO, in either case, I don't believe there is any meaningful consumer harm or ill effects outside of FB's shareholders or perhaps employees. This isn't true of all monopolies/sectors. It's true of FB, Google, maybe twitter.

thegrimmest 5y ago
> it would still likely be enough to run Google. [emphasis mine] Is this arbitrary guess really worth risking the whole farm?
- dalbasal 5y ago
  The farm is at risk at all time. That said, I think the risks are way smaller than previous era's trustbusting. I like FB as an example, as I said. I'm pretty confident that FB would be pretty much the same on far less revenue because they were pretty much the same on less revenue in recent years. Comparable social media services run of far less revenue (scaled whichever way you like). You can also look at their accounts, which reveal a lot. The simplest clue is profit margins. If we're wrong... one social media service declines and another takes its place. Personally, I see very little risk. The actual risk, IMO, is not really about keeping these services viable. There no "shit! I broke auto-manufacturing and now we don't have cars" risk. It's about share price. Smallish declines in revenue can mean big declines in profit. Any decline in revenue can lead to a collapse of share prices, regardless of profit. The big techs are a big part of the S&P, and high profile. Quite a lot of the S&P's value relates directly to monopoly, so antitrust (IMO) directly conflicts with equity values... and things could get "macroeconomic" from there. All that said, I'm not advocating anything intentionally destructive. Google is, I suspect, expecting to be broken up eventually. I think that was part of the Alphabet restructuring logic. The primary objection that comes to my mind, in the vein of your comment,is a hayek-esque information argument. A Hayekian logic though, is totally incompatible with paragraph 5 above though, and I'm quite confident about that... so I don't know where it fits in.