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We need alternatives to Google. We can't have one company deciding what gets seen on the WWW. It is a great search engine, Google changed the world. But now we

We need alternatives to Google. We can't have one company deciding what gets seen on the WWW. It is a great search engine, Google changed the world. But now we need alternatives. We can't have their editorial staff dictate what should and should not be seen on the WWW. If you look closely at the top search results, they're mostly big spenders in Adwords. Ebay, Amazon, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Answers.com and several others. It's blatant conflict of interests. There is no way those search results are "organic". Basically the WWW has become controlled and curated by Google and every site that gets seen must conform or be destroyed. We need alternatives to Google. We need them urgently.

richthegeek 12y ago
It's quite possible that the results are "organic" in the naive definition by following this process: 1. {site} starts at rank 1 due to low visitors/connectivity 2. {site} pays for adwords driving new visitors 3. visitors link to the site 4. rank of the site increases allowing increase adwords spend 5. goto 2 The suggestion that Google artificially inflates the rank of big spenders is maybe conflating correlation and causation. On the other hand, it's not impossible or even that difficult to believe.
username223 12y ago
> We need alternatives to Google. We need them urgently. Thanks to the 80/20 rule, we have them. Google is still unmatched for edge cases in maps and search, but something else works 80% of the time, and Google is spending 80% of the effort for that last 20%.
- ooOOoo 12y ago
  Isn't it the opposite? Google maps works 80% of the time, but for the 20% remaining, you need to look at more specialized maps. For example look at https://www.google.com/maps?q=lamma+island https://www.google.com/maps?q=lamma+island : almost nothing, just of few paths. Now look at http://www.map.gov.hk/ http://www.map.gov.hk/ : all paths and houses in Lamma are precisely described!
runn1ng 12y ago
I started to use Bing quite a lot lately. For a very simple reason - I use Tor browser a lot, Google blocks it and constantly shows me ugly captchas (not even ReCaptcha) and sometimes blocks me entirely, Bing just works. (Startpage - which is a Google skin basically - shows captchas too, and doesn't even redirect me to the actual search after the captcha. DuckDuckGo has unusable results.) So I am using a Microsoft service to be more anonymous. Which is kind of funny.
- andyrj 12y ago
  It isn't just the tor browser bundle that causes this. I believe it has more to do with either bots using tor to access google or google forcing captcha on access from known tor exit nodes. I have seen the same behaviour from vanilla firefox while trying to use google from tor. I would still rather input captcha than use bing!
  - runn1ng 12y ago
    > I believe it has more to do with either bots using tor to access google or google forcing captcha on access from known tor exit nodes. Yes of course, but I don't care. I want to search while using Tor. > I would still rather input captcha than use bing! Google uses really, really terrible captchas for this. Usually more in a row, with no indication if you did the previous one right or not. And sometimes they just refuse to show the results, period.
a3n 12y ago
Then stop using Google. Don't use their search, news or email, and don't be logged in to Google. There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple. Until people stop saying "yeah, but those other sites don't give me the same result as Google" then it's going to always be Google. It's really up to you.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  (Disclaimer: I'm generally biased in favour of Google) This logic absolutely doesn't work. The whole "vote with your wallet" attitude only works when a majority of consumers have a concrete choice in the matter. In the current case, even if the entire tech sector decided to "vote with their wallet" and stopped using Google, a phenomenally large amount of users would still be on Google due to partnerships with internet browsers, manufacturers, OEMs and so on. You need to be honest with yourself. When you say "If you don't like x, don't use it", it doesn't give the person a vote/voice. It's to get them off your back (as if they were on your back in the first place).
- _delirium 12y ago
  > There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple. For search at least, unfortunately, the alternatives are pretty questionable. I've been using DuckDuckGo experimentally for a few months now, which is mostly Bing as the backend, with some DDG-specific add-ons and tweaks. I find myself having to use the !g command to rerun the search in Google somewhere around 40% of the time. Some of this is site owners causing the problem: a surprising number of sites block all crawlers in robots.txt, but then whitelist Googlebot and only Googlebot. But even leaving aside those sites, DDG seems to miss a lot of results, and the quality of the first-page results, at least for how I search, is consistently lower. If you try searching in a language other than English the differences are even larger. I suspect that's because some of the infrastructure and datasets used for Google Translate are also used by search in some form, while Bing doesn't have a similarly solid multilingual stack. I'd like to see more competition in search, but the barrier to entry to produce a good full-web search engine seems quite high.
joshu 12y ago
what does this have to do with the article?

richthegeek 12y ago

It's quite possible that the results are "organic" in the naive definition by following this process: 1. {site} starts at rank 1 due to low visitors/connectivity 2. {site} pays for adwords driving new visitors 3. visitors link to the site 4. rank of the site increases allowing increase adwords spend 5. goto 2 The suggestion that Google artificially inflates the rank of big spenders is maybe conflating correlation and causation. On the other hand, it's not impossible or even that difficult to believe.

username223 12y ago

> We need alternatives to Google. We need them urgently. Thanks to the 80/20 rule, we have them. Google is still unmatched for edge cases in maps and search, but something else works 80% of the time, and Google is spending 80% of the effort for that last 20%.

ooOOoo 12y ago
Isn't it the opposite? Google maps works 80% of the time, but for the 20% remaining, you need to look at more specialized maps. For example look at https://www.google.com/maps?q=lamma+island https://www.google.com/maps?q=lamma+island : almost nothing, just of few paths. Now look at http://www.map.gov.hk/ http://www.map.gov.hk/ : all paths and houses in Lamma are precisely described!

runn1ng 12y ago

I started to use Bing quite a lot lately. For a very simple reason - I use Tor browser a lot, Google blocks it and constantly shows me ugly captchas (not even ReCaptcha) and sometimes blocks me entirely, Bing just works. (Startpage - which is a Google skin basically - shows captchas too, and doesn't even redirect me to the actual search after the captcha. DuckDuckGo has unusable results.) So I am using a Microsoft service to be more anonymous. Which is kind of funny.

andyrj 12y ago
It isn't just the tor browser bundle that causes this. I believe it has more to do with either bots using tor to access google or google forcing captcha on access from known tor exit nodes. I have seen the same behaviour from vanilla firefox while trying to use google from tor. I would still rather input captcha than use bing!
- runn1ng 12y ago
  > I believe it has more to do with either bots using tor to access google or google forcing captcha on access from known tor exit nodes. Yes of course, but I don't care. I want to search while using Tor. > I would still rather input captcha than use bing! Google uses really, really terrible captchas for this. Usually more in a row, with no indication if you did the previous one right or not. And sometimes they just refuse to show the results, period.

a3n 12y ago

Then stop using Google. Don't use their search, news or email, and don't be logged in to Google. There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple. Until people stop saying "yeah, but those other sites don't give me the same result as Google" then it's going to always be Google. It's really up to you.

scrollaway 12y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm generally biased in favour of Google) This logic absolutely doesn't work. The whole "vote with your wallet" attitude only works when a majority of consumers have a concrete choice in the matter. In the current case, even if the entire tech sector decided to "vote with their wallet" and stopped using Google, a phenomenally large amount of users would still be on Google due to partnerships with internet browsers, manufacturers, OEMs and so on. You need to be honest with yourself. When you say "If you don't like x, don't use it", it doesn't give the person a vote/voice. It's to get them off your back (as if they were on your back in the first place).
_delirium 12y ago
> There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple. For search at least, unfortunately, the alternatives are pretty questionable. I've been using DuckDuckGo experimentally for a few months now, which is mostly Bing as the backend, with some DDG-specific add-ons and tweaks. I find myself having to use the !g command to rerun the search in Google somewhere around 40% of the time. Some of this is site owners causing the problem: a surprising number of sites block all crawlers in robots.txt, but then whitelist Googlebot and only Googlebot. But even leaving aside those sites, DDG seems to miss a lot of results, and the quality of the first-page results, at least for how I search, is consistently lower. If you try searching in a language other than English the differences are even larger. I suspect that's because some of the infrastructure and datasets used for Google Translate are also used by search in some form, while Bing doesn't have a similarly solid multilingual stack. I'd like to see more competition in search, but the barrier to entry to produce a good full-web search engine seems quite high.

joshu 12y ago

what does this have to do with the article?