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Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome. Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and searc

Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome. Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results, with both Google Search and YouTube. Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. They artificially promote "authoritative sources" which are anything but, since they may be second-hand coverage of original videos that get buried in search results. Google's results are not only manipulated by clever SEO people[0], but by employees[1], in direct contradiction to Sundar Pichai's sworn testimony. Some of that is very defendable. But there's zero transparency. Given their search monopoly, and that most people aren't aware that search results are manipulated, Google Search is the web. Websites that get delisted are presumed to have ceased to exist. Focusing on browsers (Firefox) is good, but no longer enough. That's why Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more. [0]: how many times have you tried looking for a machine's user manual, mistyped the model number, and somehow "found" a webpage with the manual for a product that didn't exist? and then modified the model number further and found more results from the same website, with relevant keywords and yet another incorrect model number? My understanding of SEO isn't good enough to know how they do that. I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries. [1]: https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-interventions-in-search-results-a3b0cfd3e26c https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-interventions-...

agumonkey 5y ago
Isn't it an unavoidable social phenomenon ? as soon as any system / company starts to have weight in the group, they will face requests of accountability and responsability. They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work often.
- Xelbair 5y ago
  Simple, if company works only as a messenger they will be left alone. They just present user content, and leave users to find their content. As soon as they introduce their own bias(curating content, recommendations, emergence of so called "walled gardens") it opens the floodgates.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Untrue. The history of communications and information is rife with channels and sources of all description being controlled. If anything, "neutral" sources are all the more subject to influence as they simply abrogate the role of censor / amplifier to others. All the more so if they're heavily used and relied upon, as this means that there is an influenceable audience present. As my friend Woozle puts it: Because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  It is avoidable through traditions and institutionalized processes that engender neutrality.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    Google is an extension of American soft power. They're about as neutral as Huawei.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      There are degrees of control/alignment. It's not anywhere as absolute as you imply.
- chii 5y ago
  > They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work often. it should work - it's up to society to make this work by passing laws to that effect.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
djmips 5y ago
Is there any way to find things transparently on the 'open web' without using Google? Is there a real alternative?
- skinkestek 5y ago
  If you have a feeling something exists but doesn't show up you can try yandex, kagi or even search.marginalia.nu (the last one is a bit hit and miss but also fun/delightful, eye-opening and it seems a lot more resistant to black hat SEO due to their algorithms.)
  - lovelyviking 5y ago
    Please stop recommending yandex or any other service from Russia. Russia spreads lies propaganda and misinformation by all channels possible including RT yandex and anything under their control. If you unaware what russia does you should educate yourself. If you try to get any information from russia controlled channels not only you'll be heavily mislead and manipulated you'll also support that aggressive regime that actively attacks any light of democracy and freedom in the world. Russia already have used not only propaganda but also military to attack any attempts to build free society respecting democracy especially in neighboring countries. For instance in Ukraine yandex is simply completely blocked as result of a war that Russia started against Ukraine and it is done for a reason. Do not be less wise then Ukraine and just do not go there.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - simiones 5y ago
      While you're not wrong about Russia, similar things can be said about the US and its allies (of which my own country is one). True, the US typically attacks countries that are farther away, but their devastation of Irak and Afghanistan is much worse than Ukraine or Georgia (another victim of Russian aggression) have suffered in the last 20 years at least. And while Iraq and Afghanistan were by no means democratic regimes, we can see plenty of democratic governments toppled by American power and their allies - In Yemen in 2014 (mostly Saudi led, but with US arms and support), Haiti in 2004, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the late 1970s, Iran in 1953. There are also many other despotic regimes that the US successfully helped against revolutions that may have toppled them (most memorably, in South Vietnam, but also at various times in Iraq and much of South America). Empires are always evil, and they are always seeking to spread their propaganda. The only way of getting a slightly clearer picture is to use sources from multiple such empires and try to build a more accurate picture than any one of them wants you to. So yes, please use both Yandex and Google for search, read RT as well as the New York Times, Al Jazeera, AFP, etc.
thweriu2343 5y ago
DDG removes quite a few "dangerous" pages too. You need to use Yandex these days to get stuff the "ministry of truth" deems to sensitive. I'm sure the irony is lost on the Freedom-Democracy-landers.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  DDG pretty much just whitelabels Bing.
- terafo 5y ago
  You can't find many things that Russian government deems inappropriate in Yandex. Yandex, Google and Bing(DDG is basically Bing proxy) just have different sets of biases.
  - malka 5y ago
    It is time to go back to meta search engines I guess
    - millzlane 5y ago
      What about startpage?
      - starsep 5y ago
        Startpage is a Google proxy. The Pirate Bay is filtered out there as well.
      - Dah00n 5y ago
        Owned by an Ad company these days. But yes they do promise "We'll never do evil". They belong in the grey area. But at least they haven't been caught with their hands in the cookie-jar multiple times like Brave so they got that going for them. I'd stay clear.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      I don't think meta has a search engine yet, though.
skinkestek 5y ago
> Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more. This feels important to me, and at this point it actually feels like we have more choice than we have had in 15 years and we have a chance to change history. If you are one of the many who have noticed that Google has declined in recent years you can start by just changing to DDG, or even Bing as default. (Use Google as fallback if you want and see if you realize the same as me: their results are just as broken. If you don't, you can consider yourself lucky for now and go back to Google, but at least keep this in mind as they start heating your frog pot as well ;-). Do experiment with alternative engines: Kagi seems close to production ready now and search.marginalia.nu is just a delightful tour de force as to what can be done by a determined person!
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  But why is there no methadon to slowly quit google? A search engine, that just appends to its results the first page of google results?
  - vidarh 5y ago
    DDG is "close enough": Add "!g" to the search and you end up at Google. So I often use DDG first, and then fall back on Google afterwards. My search bar defaults to DDG. The many other shortcuts like that (e.g. !gi for google images, !b for bing, !gn for google news; and tons more) is a good incentive to stick to that default. Google still gets lots of searches from me, but the better DDG does, the less it'll happen.
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      DDG is mainly Bing, so you can just stop having/using !b
      - vidarh 5y ago
        They have very different interfaces, so there are times when !b is worthwhile. Not generally for the results, though.
dredmorbius 5y ago
The Web is a threat to the Open Web. Though that's in very large part an inevitable and widely-foreseen consequence of Google's other arm: advertising. The monetisation of content is the root of great evil: Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  100% agree on the advertising part. If we were to remove advertising from the Web (i.e. by law or if 90% of people would use adblockers) it would be a better place. When Instagram/Facebook/Linkedin suddenly charge 5$/Month for membership, you quickly check that you want your data to be portable and interoperable, as you probably will not be a lifetime member.
  - jpindar 5y ago
    A better place for people who have money, perhaps.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    There's a clearly obvious paygate for content access: Internet service providers, whether broadband or mobile. These provide services to areas which themselves can be generally ranked in terms of wealth, leading to the opportunity for a progressive, unmetered, universal payment mechanism. In this system, various publishers (and notably local news and information sources) would be afforded compensation or revenue, and subscribers would have access to any available information. Remote-but-locally-focused providers (e.g., the small-town paper across the state, or the country, or in another continent) would be compensated principally through their local service providers (with some balancing within states having widely-varying economic distributions, e.g., NYC / upstate New York, Chicago / downstate Illinois, coastal / inland California, etc. National / general-interest content (national or international news, e.g.) might receive a share of local/regional revenues, say, for national TV and radio broadcast news organisations, nationally-distributed newspapers (WSJ, NYT, WaPo in the US as examples), and book and magazine publishers. (Other countries and regions could make similar allocations.) Much of this would offset online advertising, which costs a typical household of four on the order of $1,800/year within North America and EU ($455 billion projected 2021 spend, ~1 billion population). This is what people *are already paying for "free" online content. Direct content spend is on the order of $100/person, or 1/4 the cost of advertising. Distributed across all households (pro-rated by wealth as noted), on an all-you-can-eat basis, would be a remarkable game-changer. Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27803591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27803591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15683719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15683719
mc32 5y ago
It would be helpful if search engines were honest an open about what they censor. Google could plainly say we blackhole this and that content and ignore these keywords and don’t autocomplete on these others, etc. same for Bing and any other. Just be open and transparent about the purposeful bias then the user can find and use the one that most matches what they’re looking to use.
- SiVal 5y ago
  Yes, what they censor and what they deliberately distort. Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for yourself. Google will show you that the majority of American inventors throughout history have been African-American. You may be skeptical of Google's claim (disguised as search results), but the next generation, working on their school reports, will see the world as Google wants them to see it. Now imagine how much of what we learn about the reality of current events is coming from the same source with the same agenda and policies regarding narrative vs. reality. But in case you are thinking of contradicting Google's claims, remember: that's what their campaign against "misinformation" is intended to silence. They are indeed serious about misinformation. A couple of years ago, when they were testifying to Congress that they did not deliberately distort search results. At the same time, someone else in the organization explained why they deliberately bias results. Oops. I can only guess that it was some underling who, in a sea of leftists back in the office (and probably a few non-leftists who know what would happen if they were outed) took for granted that biasing search results for political objectives was something to be proud of. They didn't realize what their execs knew, that if you're going to distort the truth for a higher objective, you don't admit doing so. On a Google web page that I can no longer find, they publicly explained (it was public, not an internal page) that search results that improved society were sometimes more important than simply reporting the facts. That must have sounded good to an internal audience, but apparently it had to be reworked into externally calling it a fight against misinformation.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I'm not sure we're seeing the same results -- when I (in the US) search for American inventors the majority of the people they show arek not obviously African American. It seems like "the leftists" haven't got to my results yet.
shadowgovt 5y ago
> I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries. One way to do it is to have some path through the site that lists relevant data, but also includes links at the bottom to typoed versions of the data. The web crawler will chase those links, and if each page that you retrieve generates more such typo links, you can feed the crawler an infinite stream of typos. Google will consume quite a large chunk of an infinite stream before it trips any kind of "circuit breaker" to cut off how much crawling they'll do on one site. They have a lot of storage.
- concinds 5y ago
  Fascinating. Thanks
Valakas_ 5y ago
DDG should change their name though. Seriously. Who wants to use such a ridiculous sounding search engine? AltaVista sounded good and had a meaning (seeing from above). Yahoo fine. Bing also ok. But duckduckgo seems like the most ridiculous name someone came up on a brainstorm meeting for search engine names. But then they did went with it.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  100% agree. It is so obviously a huge impediment. Weird names can be overcome (see "google"), but weird + clunky + needs to disrupt massive established players... what are they thinking? At least lose the "Go".. DuckDuck we can work with.
  - jdofaz 5y ago
    They already own duck.com
    - Griffinsauce 5y ago
      Well that has terrible SEO.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  Nah HotBot and AskJeeves didn't have a problem back in the day. Google sounded just as ridiculous when it came out.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    Dogpile
    - jachee 5y ago
      Lycos. Bing.
      - 5y ago
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
the problem with DuckduckGo and Qwant (i don't know about Brave's search) is they're all so heavily reliant on Bing results, and they're not really new engines but privacy respecting engines hitting the Bing API and then supplementing with "answers" from other sources like weather services, wolfram alpha, etc.. There no real alternative to the big players. It's google or bing, basically.
- generalizations 5y ago
  Or Yandex, which doesn't get mentioned very often. At least it's someone else's government that has access to the queries.
  - ok123456 5y ago
    yandex is my go to now.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Just be aware that just like mainstream media (and alternative media) it probably has a pretty huge bias. The reason I mention this is that just like with mainstream media and unlike alternative medias and newsletters it seems easier to forget the bias of search engines.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
> Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results Indeed, they co-opt every search now. Anything related to local businesses or directions, flights and hotels, etc. And everything I try to find about pop culture or new tech or video games seems to be a page full of YouTube links. I want to grab the appropriate people at Google by the ear, and scream, "I DO NOT WANT TO SIT THROUGH A VIDEO ABOUT THIS." I guess I'm just old or something, but video seems like SUCH an inefficient way to impart information that could just be typed out, and then read. It's not even like it would be more work for these video producers. They're typing out the script to read over some generic video loops. JUST PUT THE COPY ON A PAGE! GAH!
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  I hate the slow creep of video content everywhere. Especially in documentation. I can't ctrl-f a video looking for a keyword and never want to. Looking at you Hugging Face! For reference: https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html
  - _jal 5y ago
    One of the first things I do when evaluating something for work is look at the documentation. If it is video, I move on to the next contender. That's simply a hard no.
    - thekingofravens 5y ago
      Agreed. Videos can be nice as a support item for things that are visually oriented, but they do not replace a proper manual.
  - akolbe 5y ago
    Try clicking on the three dots and then "Open transcript".
- wraptile 5y ago
  Honestly, we need to rework what we consider to be an aggregator and what we consider to be a publisher. I'd argue that Google these days fall in line more of a publisher than a search engine. More often than not I'm feeling that the search engine is trying to sell me something rather than do the work requested and I don't mean ads (which I think are good monetization balance). Same goes for algorithm social networks.
laserlight 5y ago
I remember searching for a movie trailer on YouTube. I searched for the exact title of the video, yet the original trailer published by Warner Bros was buried down below spam reposts and stupid reaction videos.
- nradov 5y ago
  If you're looking for a Warner Bros movie trailer then why would you search on YouTube instead of visiting the Warner home page?
  - usui 5y ago
    Who thinks, “I want to look up a video trailer, so I’ll go to the Warner Brothers home page, whatever that is.”? No, the layman searches for it on the world’s second most-visited website.
  - Zenbit_UX 5y ago
    What an absurd thing to suggest. Should everyone in your opinion know the production companies of all upcoming films so they can look up their website to view trailers?
323 5y ago
I wonder how many people don't use DDG (like me) because of the stupid (in my opinion) name. It's so impossible to remember and pronounce. Whatever cool/hilarious/human reason they have for it (I don't care), I wish they also added another alias that is easy to remember and type.
- metabagel 5y ago
  It’s a riff on the children’s game “duck duck goose”.
  - simiones 5y ago
    The biggest problem is that it's the American (UK as well?) name for a children's game - not the sort of thing most English speakers would ever learn, unless they are really connected to US/UK culture. The game is probably more or less universal, but the name is unrecognizable.
    - metabagel 5y ago
      I feel like it’s such an oddball name that it sticks in my head.
  - quesera 5y ago
    Oddly, in some regions of the US, the same game is called "duck, duck, grey duck".
- shkkmo 5y ago
  I never type it because DDG is my default. I think Google was a harder name to remember for non-nerds who weren't familiar with the rather obscure word. There is a short alias: As someone else mentioned, duck.com redirects to duckduckgo.com
- akho 5y ago
  duck.com
- NoGravitas 5y ago
iso1631 5y ago
Film trailers on youtube are particularly bad, especially as you not only get other companies simply rereleasing them with a logo over the top, but you get fake trailers polluting the results
koonsolo 5y ago
> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web I don't believe that. I came from a time when Yahoo and Altavista were used. Google took over that market very fast (personal experience, not data ;)). So I'm sure that also now, people could shift very fast when the results are better somewhere else. Although I can agree on YouTube, because that's a different beast. They actually host almost all the web video content. So there is no 2nd party to easily switch to.
usrusr 5y ago
For now I'll grant them that they've removed the entirety of their old motto/claim - and not just the "Don't". I wonder how long that will last though, benefit of doubt is not an infinite resource.
musicale 5y ago
> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome. Google search seems to be something of a feedback loop at this point. Which is fine as 1) it's good for searching Google properties and 2) it opens the door for web search engines that search the web.
kolbe 5y ago
DDG is still bad, though. I use it out of principle, but whenever I'm doing a deep dive into some technical topic, DDG fails me badly. I almost always have to just search a second time on Google. Google may corrupt the top results, but DDG often doesn't give any relevant results.
madeofpalk 5y ago
> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome. I understand Google's utter dominance in search, but Google is not "the open web".
coffeecat 5y ago
> Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. I find this problem extremely frustrating. Does anyone have suggestions for how to easily find primary video sources, instead of the massive heap of commentary that a youtube search yields?

agumonkey 5y ago

Isn't it an unavoidable social phenomenon ? as soon as any system / company starts to have weight in the group, they will face requests of accountability and responsability. They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work often.

Xelbair 5y ago
Simple, if company works only as a messenger they will be left alone. They just present user content, and leave users to find their content. As soon as they introduce their own bias(curating content, recommendations, emergence of so called "walled gardens") it opens the floodgates.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Untrue. The history of communications and information is rife with channels and sources of all description being controlled. If anything, "neutral" sources are all the more subject to influence as they simply abrogate the role of censor / amplifier to others. All the more so if they're heavily used and relied upon, as this means that there is an influenceable audience present. As my friend Woozle puts it: Because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
CryptoPunk 5y ago
It is avoidable through traditions and institutionalized processes that engender neutrality.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Google is an extension of American soft power. They're about as neutral as Huawei.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    There are degrees of control/alignment. It's not anywhere as absolute as you imply.
chii 5y ago
> They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work often. it should work - it's up to society to make this work by passing laws to that effect.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

djmips 5y ago

Is there any way to find things transparently on the 'open web' without using Google? Is there a real alternative?

skinkestek 5y ago
If you have a feeling something exists but doesn't show up you can try yandex, kagi or even search.marginalia.nu (the last one is a bit hit and miss but also fun/delightful, eye-opening and it seems a lot more resistant to black hat SEO due to their algorithms.)
- lovelyviking 5y ago
  Please stop recommending yandex or any other service from Russia. Russia spreads lies propaganda and misinformation by all channels possible including RT yandex and anything under their control. If you unaware what russia does you should educate yourself. If you try to get any information from russia controlled channels not only you'll be heavily mislead and manipulated you'll also support that aggressive regime that actively attacks any light of democracy and freedom in the world. Russia already have used not only propaganda but also military to attack any attempts to build free society respecting democracy especially in neighboring countries. For instance in Ukraine yandex is simply completely blocked as result of a war that Russia started against Ukraine and it is done for a reason. Do not be less wise then Ukraine and just do not go there.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - simiones 5y ago
    While you're not wrong about Russia, similar things can be said about the US and its allies (of which my own country is one). True, the US typically attacks countries that are farther away, but their devastation of Irak and Afghanistan is much worse than Ukraine or Georgia (another victim of Russian aggression) have suffered in the last 20 years at least. And while Iraq and Afghanistan were by no means democratic regimes, we can see plenty of democratic governments toppled by American power and their allies - In Yemen in 2014 (mostly Saudi led, but with US arms and support), Haiti in 2004, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the late 1970s, Iran in 1953. There are also many other despotic regimes that the US successfully helped against revolutions that may have toppled them (most memorably, in South Vietnam, but also at various times in Iraq and much of South America). Empires are always evil, and they are always seeking to spread their propaganda. The only way of getting a slightly clearer picture is to use sources from multiple such empires and try to build a more accurate picture than any one of them wants you to. So yes, please use both Yandex and Google for search, read RT as well as the New York Times, Al Jazeera, AFP, etc.

thweriu2343 5y ago

DDG removes quite a few "dangerous" pages too. You need to use Yandex these days to get stuff the "ministry of truth" deems to sensitive. I'm sure the irony is lost on the Freedom-Democracy-landers.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
DDG pretty much just whitelabels Bing.
terafo 5y ago
You can't find many things that Russian government deems inappropriate in Yandex. Yandex, Google and Bing(DDG is basically Bing proxy) just have different sets of biases.
- malka 5y ago
  It is time to go back to meta search engines I guess
  - millzlane 5y ago
    What about startpage?
    - starsep 5y ago
      Startpage is a Google proxy. The Pirate Bay is filtered out there as well.
    - Dah00n 5y ago
      Owned by an Ad company these days. But yes they do promise "We'll never do evil". They belong in the grey area. But at least they haven't been caught with their hands in the cookie-jar multiple times like Brave so they got that going for them. I'd stay clear.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    I don't think meta has a search engine yet, though.

skinkestek 5y ago

> Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more. This feels important to me, and at this point it actually feels like we have more choice than we have had in 15 years and we have a chance to change history. If you are one of the many who have noticed that Google has declined in recent years you can start by just changing to DDG, or even Bing as default. (Use Google as fallback if you want and see if you realize the same as me: their results are just as broken. If you don't, you can consider yourself lucky for now and go back to Google, but at least keep this in mind as they start heating your frog pot as well ;-). Do experiment with alternative engines: Kagi seems close to production ready now and search.marginalia.nu is just a delightful tour de force as to what can be done by a determined person!

OneTimePetes 5y ago
But why is there no methadon to slowly quit google? A search engine, that just appends to its results the first page of google results?
- vidarh 5y ago
  DDG is "close enough": Add "!g" to the search and you end up at Google. So I often use DDG first, and then fall back on Google afterwards. My search bar defaults to DDG. The many other shortcuts like that (e.g. !gi for google images, !b for bing, !gn for google news; and tons more) is a good incentive to stick to that default. Google still gets lots of searches from me, but the better DDG does, the less it'll happen.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    DDG is mainly Bing, so you can just stop having/using !b
    - vidarh 5y ago
      They have very different interfaces, so there are times when !b is worthwhile. Not generally for the results, though.

dredmorbius 5y ago

The Web is a threat to the Open Web. Though that's in very large part an inevitable and widely-foreseen consequence of Google's other arm: advertising. The monetisation of content is the root of great evil: Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship

littlecranky67 5y ago
100% agree on the advertising part. If we were to remove advertising from the Web (i.e. by law or if 90% of people would use adblockers) it would be a better place. When Instagram/Facebook/Linkedin suddenly charge 5$/Month for membership, you quickly check that you want your data to be portable and interoperable, as you probably will not be a lifetime member.
- jpindar 5y ago
  A better place for people who have money, perhaps.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There's a clearly obvious paygate for content access: Internet service providers, whether broadband or mobile. These provide services to areas which themselves can be generally ranked in terms of wealth, leading to the opportunity for a progressive, unmetered, universal payment mechanism. In this system, various publishers (and notably local news and information sources) would be afforded compensation or revenue, and subscribers would have access to any available information. Remote-but-locally-focused providers (e.g., the small-town paper across the state, or the country, or in another continent) would be compensated principally through their local service providers (with some balancing within states having widely-varying economic distributions, e.g., NYC / upstate New York, Chicago / downstate Illinois, coastal / inland California, etc. National / general-interest content (national or international news, e.g.) might receive a share of local/regional revenues, say, for national TV and radio broadcast news organisations, nationally-distributed newspapers (WSJ, NYT, WaPo in the US as examples), and book and magazine publishers. (Other countries and regions could make similar allocations.) Much of this would offset online advertising, which costs a typical household of four on the order of $1,800/year within North America and EU ($455 billion projected 2021 spend, ~1 billion population). This is what people *are already paying for "free" online content. Direct content spend is on the order of $100/person, or 1/4 the cost of advertising. Distributed across all households (pro-rated by wealth as noted), on an all-you-can-eat basis, would be a remarkable game-changer. Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27803591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27803591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15683719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15683719

mc32 5y ago

It would be helpful if search engines were honest an open about what they censor. Google could plainly say we blackhole this and that content and ignore these keywords and don’t autocomplete on these others, etc. same for Bing and any other. Just be open and transparent about the purposeful bias then the user can find and use the one that most matches what they’re looking to use.

SiVal 5y ago
Yes, what they censor and what they deliberately distort. Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for yourself. Google will show you that the majority of American inventors throughout history have been African-American. You may be skeptical of Google's claim (disguised as search results), but the next generation, working on their school reports, will see the world as Google wants them to see it. Now imagine how much of what we learn about the reality of current events is coming from the same source with the same agenda and policies regarding narrative vs. reality. But in case you are thinking of contradicting Google's claims, remember: that's what their campaign against "misinformation" is intended to silence. They are indeed serious about misinformation. A couple of years ago, when they were testifying to Congress that they did not deliberately distort search results. At the same time, someone else in the organization explained why they deliberately bias results. Oops. I can only guess that it was some underling who, in a sea of leftists back in the office (and probably a few non-leftists who know what would happen if they were outed) took for granted that biasing search results for political objectives was something to be proud of. They didn't realize what their execs knew, that if you're going to distort the truth for a higher objective, you don't admit doing so. On a Google web page that I can no longer find, they publicly explained (it was public, not an internal page) that search results that improved society were sometimes more important than simply reporting the facts. That must have sounded good to an internal audience, but apparently it had to be reworked into externally calling it a fight against misinformation.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I'm not sure we're seeing the same results -- when I (in the US) search for American inventors the majority of the people they show arek not obviously African American. It seems like "the leftists" haven't got to my results yet.

shadowgovt 5y ago

> I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries. One way to do it is to have some path through the site that lists relevant data, but also includes links at the bottom to typoed versions of the data. The web crawler will chase those links, and if each page that you retrieve generates more such typo links, you can feed the crawler an infinite stream of typos. Google will consume quite a large chunk of an infinite stream before it trips any kind of "circuit breaker" to cut off how much crawling they'll do on one site. They have a lot of storage.

concinds 5y ago
Fascinating. Thanks

Valakas_ 5y ago

DDG should change their name though. Seriously. Who wants to use such a ridiculous sounding search engine? AltaVista sounded good and had a meaning (seeing from above). Yahoo fine. Bing also ok. But duckduckgo seems like the most ridiculous name someone came up on a brainstorm meeting for search engine names. But then they did went with it.

Griffinsauce 5y ago
100% agree. It is so obviously a huge impediment. Weird names can be overcome (see "google"), but weird + clunky + needs to disrupt massive established players... what are they thinking? At least lose the "Go".. DuckDuck we can work with.
- jdofaz 5y ago
  They already own duck.com
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    Well that has terrible SEO.
CountDrewku 5y ago
Nah HotBot and AskJeeves didn't have a problem back in the day. Google sounded just as ridiculous when it came out.
- iso1631 5y ago
  Dogpile
  - jachee 5y ago
    Lycos. Bing.
    - 5y ago

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

the problem with DuckduckGo and Qwant (i don't know about Brave's search) is they're all so heavily reliant on Bing results, and they're not really new engines but privacy respecting engines hitting the Bing API and then supplementing with "answers" from other sources like weather services, wolfram alpha, etc.. There no real alternative to the big players. It's google or bing, basically.

generalizations 5y ago
Or Yandex, which doesn't get mentioned very often. At least it's someone else's government that has access to the queries.
- ok123456 5y ago
  yandex is my go to now.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Just be aware that just like mainstream media (and alternative media) it probably has a pretty huge bias. The reason I mention this is that just like with mainstream media and unlike alternative medias and newsletters it seems easier to forget the bias of search engines.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

> Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results Indeed, they co-opt every search now. Anything related to local businesses or directions, flights and hotels, etc. And everything I try to find about pop culture or new tech or video games seems to be a page full of YouTube links. I want to grab the appropriate people at Google by the ear, and scream, "I DO NOT WANT TO SIT THROUGH A VIDEO ABOUT THIS." I guess I'm just old or something, but video seems like SUCH an inefficient way to impart information that could just be typed out, and then read. It's not even like it would be more work for these video producers. They're typing out the script to read over some generic video loops. JUST PUT THE COPY ON A PAGE! GAH!

monkeybutton 5y ago
I hate the slow creep of video content everywhere. Especially in documentation. I can't ctrl-f a video looking for a keyword and never want to. Looking at you Hugging Face! For reference: https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html
- _jal 5y ago
  One of the first things I do when evaluating something for work is look at the documentation. If it is video, I move on to the next contender. That's simply a hard no.
  - thekingofravens 5y ago
    Agreed. Videos can be nice as a support item for things that are visually oriented, but they do not replace a proper manual.
- akolbe 5y ago
  Try clicking on the three dots and then "Open transcript".
wraptile 5y ago
Honestly, we need to rework what we consider to be an aggregator and what we consider to be a publisher. I'd argue that Google these days fall in line more of a publisher than a search engine. More often than not I'm feeling that the search engine is trying to sell me something rather than do the work requested and I don't mean ads (which I think are good monetization balance). Same goes for algorithm social networks.

laserlight 5y ago

I remember searching for a movie trailer on YouTube. I searched for the exact title of the video, yet the original trailer published by Warner Bros was buried down below spam reposts and stupid reaction videos.

nradov 5y ago
If you're looking for a Warner Bros movie trailer then why would you search on YouTube instead of visiting the Warner home page?
- usui 5y ago
  Who thinks, “I want to look up a video trailer, so I’ll go to the Warner Brothers home page, whatever that is.”? No, the layman searches for it on the world’s second most-visited website.
- Zenbit_UX 5y ago
  What an absurd thing to suggest. Should everyone in your opinion know the production companies of all upcoming films so they can look up their website to view trailers?

323 5y ago

I wonder how many people don't use DDG (like me) because of the stupid (in my opinion) name. It's so impossible to remember and pronounce. Whatever cool/hilarious/human reason they have for it (I don't care), I wish they also added another alias that is easy to remember and type.

metabagel 5y ago
It’s a riff on the children’s game “duck duck goose”.
- simiones 5y ago
  The biggest problem is that it's the American (UK as well?) name for a children's game - not the sort of thing most English speakers would ever learn, unless they are really connected to US/UK culture. The game is probably more or less universal, but the name is unrecognizable.
  - metabagel 5y ago
    I feel like it’s such an oddball name that it sticks in my head.
- quesera 5y ago
  Oddly, in some regions of the US, the same game is called "duck, duck, grey duck".
shkkmo 5y ago
I never type it because DDG is my default. I think Google was a harder name to remember for non-nerds who weren't familiar with the rather obscure word. There is a short alias: As someone else mentioned, duck.com redirects to duckduckgo.com
akho 5y ago
duck.com
NoGravitas 5y ago

iso1631 5y ago

Film trailers on youtube are particularly bad, especially as you not only get other companies simply rereleasing them with a logo over the top, but you get fake trailers polluting the results

koonsolo 5y ago

> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web I don't believe that. I came from a time when Yahoo and Altavista were used. Google took over that market very fast (personal experience, not data ;)). So I'm sure that also now, people could shift very fast when the results are better somewhere else. Although I can agree on YouTube, because that's a different beast. They actually host almost all the web video content. So there is no 2nd party to easily switch to.

usrusr 5y ago

For now I'll grant them that they've removed the entirety of their old motto/claim - and not just the "Don't". I wonder how long that will last though, benefit of doubt is not an infinite resource.

musicale 5y ago

> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome. Google search seems to be something of a feedback loop at this point. Which is fine as 1) it's good for searching Google properties and 2) it opens the door for web search engines that search the web.

kolbe 5y ago

DDG is still bad, though. I use it out of principle, but whenever I'm doing a deep dive into some technical topic, DDG fails me badly. I almost always have to just search a second time on Google. Google may corrupt the top results, but DDG often doesn't give any relevant results.

madeofpalk 5y ago

> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome. I understand Google's utter dominance in search, but Google is not "the open web".

coffeecat 5y ago

> Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. I find this problem extremely frustrating. Does anyone have suggestions for how to easily find primary video sources, instead of the massive heap of commentary that a youtube search yields?