This proposal won't do very much. Indexing is the (relatively) easy part of building a search engine. CommonCrawl already indexes the top 3B+ pages on the web and makes it freely available on AWS. It costs about $50 to grep over it, $800 or so to run a moderately complex Hadoop job.

(For comparison, when I was at Google nearly all research & new features were done on the top 4B pages, and the remaining 150B+ pages were only consulted if no results in the top 4B turned up. Difficulty of running a MapReduce over that corpus was actually a little harder than running a Hadoop job over CommonCrawl, because there's less documentation available.)

The comments here that PageRank is Google's secret sauce also aren't really true - Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006. The ones about the search & clickthrough data being important are closer, but I suspect that if you made those public you still wouldn't have an effective Google competitor.

The real reason Google's still on top is that consumer habits are hard to change, and once people have 20 years of practice solving a problem one way, most of them are not going to switch unless the alternative isn't just better, it's way, way better. Same reason I still buy Quilted Northern toilet paper despite knowing that it supports the Koch brothers and their abhorrent political views, or drink Coca-Cola despite knowing how unhealthy it is.

If you really want to open the search-engine space to competition, you'd have to break Google up and then forbid any of the baby-Googles from using the Google brand or google.com domain name. (Needless to say, you'd also need to get rid of Chrome & Toolbar integration.) Same with all the other monopolies that plague the American business landscape. Once you get to a certain age, the majority of the business value is in the brand, and so the only way to keep the monopoly from dominating its industry again is to take away the brand and distribute the productive capacity to successor companies on relatively even footing.

I can no longer find anything remotely good quality, I discover new and quality stuff from social media like Twitter and HN.

The search results seem to be too general and too mainstream. Nothing new to discover, just a shortcut to the few websites like Reddit, StackOverflow for more techie thing and Wikipedia and the few mainstream news websites for the rest.

I usually end up to search HN, Reddit or StackOverflow directly as the resulting quality is better as I can get easily specific. Getting specific is harder on Google because it just omits or misinterprets my search query keywords quite often.

It's probably possible to build a search engine for a specific vertical that's better than Google. However, you face a few really big problems that make this not worthwhile:

1) Speaking from experience, it's very difficult to define what "better" means when you don't have exemplars of what queries are likely and what the results should be. The reason search engines are a product is that they let us find things we didn't know existed before; if we don't know they exist, how can we tweak the search engine to return them?

2) People go to a search engine because it has the answers for their question, no matter what their question is. If you had a specific search engine for games, and another for celebrities, and another for flights, and another for hotels, and another for books, and another for power tools, and another for current events, and another for technical documentation, and another for punditry, and another for history, and another to settle arguments on the Internet, then pretty soon you'd need a search engine to find the appropriate search engine. We call this "Google", and as a consumer, it's really convenient if they just give us the answer directly rather than directing us to another search engine where we need to refine our query again.

3) Google makes basically 80% of their revenue from searches for commercial products or services (insurance, lawyers, therapists, SaaS, flowers, etc.) The remainder is split between AdSense, Cloud, Android, Google Play, GFiber, YouTube, DoubleClick, etc. (may be a bit higher now). Many queries don't even run ads at all - when was the last time you saw an ad on a technical programming query, or a navigational query like [facebook login]? All of these are cross-subsidized by the commercial queries, because there's a benefit to Google from it being the one place you go to look for answers. If you build a niche site just to give good answers to programming queries or celebrity searches or current events, there's no business model there.

Funny, I don't disagree with this, but my perception has been that Google seems to detect when I've switched roles from one type of programmer to another. I don't know if that's organic from the topics I'm looking up or not, but if I'm looking up a generic string search, it seems to return whatever language I've been searching for recently. (very recently in fact)

My point is, it seems like the search engine intuitively understands my "vertical" already. Maybe it's just because developer searches are probably pretty optimized.

Google Ads (used to?) lets you target by "bahaviour" vs "in-market". They can tell the difference between someone who is passionate about beds, maybe involved in the bed business (behavior) and the people who are making the once-in-a-decade purchase of a bed (in-market).

Google can tell devices apart on the same google account and keep together search threads. I might be programming on my desktop making engineering searches but at the same time I'm googling memes on my phone; both logged into the same account.

Better is a search engine that takes your queries more literal. This is what everybody means when they say Google used to be better. The query keywords and no second guessing.

When you insist on Google using verbatim mode or something, you often don't get results. Which is bullshit because I remember 10 years ago, queries like these had me plowing through the results, so much that you actually had to refine the query -- you can't do that in Google any more, at least it's not refining, it's more like re-wording and re-rolling the dice. But it all feels very random and you don't get a feel for what's out there.

I mean sure there is a place for a search engine like this, if it works well. And in its own way, Google works well.

I sometimes do want my query to be loosely interpreted like I'm an idiot, and I head straight for the Google. Ever since I saw the "that guy wot gone painted them melty clocks"-meme, for certain types of queries I have indeed found that if I formulate my question like I got brain damage, I get superior results. Because that is the kind of audience Google wants you to be.

But sometimes you don't feel like the lowest common denominator and you don't want to be treated as such. And there should be a place for that, too.

I can't get better products by searching Google, I can get the best-spammed products or most promoted products only.

The fact that I am getting low-quality service and Google is printing money means that there is a place for good a good service and if that service cannot emerge due to Google's practices, it probably means that the regulators need to take action.

Or maybe the search is dead, long live social media.

The gist is, I am not happy with a service but the company that makes that product makes a lot of maney. Can't tell if I am an anomaly or if other people feel the same way because Google is a monopoly and maybe the regulators should make it possible to compete with Google and see if there's a space for a better service.

Yes yes, I am the product but I am the product only if I am happy with the stuff I'm getting in return.

Keep in mind when Google started, Yahoooooo! Was the big player and Google overtook them by simply being better

Definitely have seen malicious adds for "facebook login", though that was probably 2016 or 2017.

I can't help but think it's partially due to people using tools _specifically designed_ to make Google's job harder (FF SandBoxes, uBlock, etc) and not understanding the implications of using them... and then blaming Google for returning "bad" results.

Like, a lot more seo spam though.

I have this problem too. Google often thinks that I made a typo and presents me results for things I didn't searched for or care about and I have no way to force it to search for things I really want.

Maybe it just feels more successful because it lowers my expectations. But at least you get to mash the keyboard like a maniac, do no corrections, press return and watch it just work.

It's kind of like watching Google do a "customer is always right" squirm.

If I type in “<name> Pentagon” on Google, the first link is LinkedIn. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even list it at all. There’s countless examples where DuckDuckGo just can’t find basic information. DDG is just unreliable beyond it’s silly name.

Maybe it's because I don't have tracking enabled in Google (I'm not logged into my account when at work) and opt out of tracking where I can. Maybe this is the difference between the lack of difference I see and the huge difference so many others see. But I still don't see it as an issue because I generally find what I'm looking for with one search. Might be the third item, but that's not an issue to me.

I hear this so often that I assume something has to be different. I'm curious if others have ideas as to what it might be, or if I correctly identified them.

I'd estimate I'm doing that maybe 5% of the time. It seems to be even odds that I find a satisfying match, though, obviously those are all the hard queries.

The hardest queries are trying to dig up details about stories in the news.

(Search for bang queries with, not surprisingly, "!bang".)

But also, thank you. I didn't realise there were so many bangs.

I feel it might have even been better at one stage ?

The real power is in the "bangs", though; you can use the `!` to immediately jump to the first search result without seeing a search page, or use `!g` to switch to Google for this particular query, among others. It enables a sort of power-user usage that one wouldn't get with Google.

I understand that for some people that's not enough of a time savings to make a difference, but I know DDG well enough to be able to `!` things and almost always immediately get to a successful result. I treat it as an extension of my brain at this point.

I used to configure those as search keywords in Firefox (and before, Opera), which do roughly the same without the exclamation point. But on a new browser, even just configuring your favourite top 5 searches is a lot of hassle compared to just setting DDG as the default search and using their bangs.

If I'm working on python and numpy and I want to look up `argsort`, I know I want to search the numpy page, so !numpy argsort takes me right there.

Any kind of web dev is !mdn whatever and I don't have to scroll through a dozen BS tutorials, I just get the specs.

I've been using Bing for the past few months; it's not great or terrible but is it "viable" enough for people to shift to over time? Or is it not viable because it's backed by a major corporation?

I'm sure there are search quirks with each engine but I've seen issues with Google too and yet it's the "devil we know" ... so people unconsciously work around them.

Google simply has the best search product. They invest in it like crazy.

I’ve tried bing multiple times. It’s slow, it spams msn ads in your face on the homepage. Microsoft just doesn’t get the value of a clean UX.

DuckDuckGo results are pretty irrelevant the last time I tried them. There is nothing that comes close to their usability. To make the switchover, it has to be much much better than Google. Chances are that if something is, Google will buy them.

But what about when Google fails? Unlike DDG, there is no culture of switching between search engines when googling. Typically, you'll just rewrite the query for google. And as rewriting the query is an entrenched part of googling, you are less likely to notice this as a failure. It is this training that's the core advantage nostrademons points out.

I've been using DDG exclusively since I was a contractor at Google years ago and have never had a problem finding things with it...

Building the index itself is relatively easy. There are some subtleties that most people don't think about (eg. dupe detection and redirects are surprisingly complicated, and CJK segmentation is a pre-req for tokenizing), but things like tokenizing, building posting lists, and finding backlinks are trivial - a competent programmer could get basic English-only implementations of all three running in a day.

- Hardware infrastructure and data center presence for extremely fast search from anywhere in the world. - Near real-time search suggestion. - personalized search results based on past search + geolocation. - Search to get instant results without having to go to a website.

Just to name a few. Google Search is the gold standard of a search engine, not because its Google or because they have been around for a long time and the brand name sticks (I am sure it helps too), but for the simple fact is no search engine is even remotely close to being as good as google and I have tried them all more of the less and given them shot. They are just not good at all.

I also don't understand the hate towards google being in charge of so many products so many people use, ie, Mail, Maps, Chrome, Android, Docs (to name a few). It's simply because they are damn good at it. If its a crime to make a product so good that people continue to use it, then I don't know what else people are supposed to do. As if we are asking google to make shit products, I just don't understand the reasoning.

The best available doesn't necessarily mean the best possible. And Google is far from it, and it's getting worse, not better.

Using a bit of Google-fu I'm usually able to find what I need quickly but it's still more of a hassle than it used to be.

It's easier to return the most relevant 10 results when there's only 10 thousand options than when there's 10 trillion options with 10 thousand new ones created every day.

My guess is that it's because Google Search now also has to cater to queries from Assistant. Being required to handle web, mobile, and assistant probably necessitated tradeoffs in quality of one over another.

More generally I feel like as the company gets bigger it just gets much harder to handle all the complexity and keep things focused.

First, I think search results at Google have gotten worse because people are not actually good at finding the best example of what they're looking for. People go with whatever query result exceeds some minimum threshold. This means when Google looks at what people "land on" (e.g. something like the last link of 5 they clicked from the search page, and then which they spend the most time on according to that page's Google Analytics or whatever), they aren't optimizing for what's best, they're optimizing for what is the minimum acceptable result. And so what's happening is years and years of cumulative "Well, I suppose that's good enough" culminating in a perceptible drop in search result quality overall.

Second, Google has clearly been giving greater weight to results that are more recent. You'd think this would improve the quality of the results which "survive the test of time" but again, Google isn't optimizing for "best" results, they're optimizing for "the result which sucks the least among the top 3-5 actual non-ad results people might manage to look at before they are satisfied". So this has the effect of crowding out older results which are actually better, but which don't get shown as much because newer results have temporal weight.

My warning is this, too, which you've surely noticed: Google search has created a "consciousness" of the internet, and in the 90s it used to be that digitizing something was kind of like "it'll be here forever" and for some reason people still today think putting something online gives it some kind of temporal longevity, which it absolutely does not have. I did a big research project at the end of the last decade, and I was looking for links specifically from the turn of the century. And even in 2009, they were incredibly hard to find, and suffered immensely from bitrot, with links not working, and leaning heavily on archive.org. Google has been and is amplifying this tremendously, by twiddling the knob to give more recent results a positive weight in search. Google makes a shitload of money from mass media content companies (e.g. Buzzfeed) and whatever other sources meet the minimum-acceptable-threshold for some query, versus linking to some old university or personal blog site which has no ads whatsoever. So the span of accessible knowledge has greatly shrunk over the last few years. Not only has the playing field of mass media and social media companies shrunk, but the older stuff isn't even accessible anymore. So we're being forced once more into a "television" kind of attention span, by Google, because of ads.

I know it's not google proper, but I'd guess a significant number of their searches are specific to youtube.

This is not a proposal to just share the crawl data, but the actual searchable index, presumably at arms length cost both internally & externally.

The same ideas could be extended to the Knowledge Graph, etc.

IMO the goal here should not be to kill Google, but to keep Google on their toes by removing barriers to competition.

API access to either the unranked or ranked index in memory wouldn't do anything useful, BTW. To have a viable startup you need something a lot better than Google, which means that you need algorithms that do something fundamentally different from Google, which means you need to be able to touch memory yourself and not go through an API for every document you might need to examine. Remember, search touches (nearly) every indexed document on every query - if you throw in 200ms request latency for 4B documents your request will take roughly 25 years to complete.

Knowledge Graph is already public - it was an open dataset before it was bought by Google, and a snapshot of its state at the point Google closed it to further additions is still hosted by Google:

https://developers.google.com/freebase/

(It's only 22G gzipped, too - you can download that onto a personal laptop.)

Doesn't it only touch ones with at least one of the search terms in, or stemmed/varied words relating to some of the terms? And does that via an index?

Basically, yes, it uses an index and touches only documents that appear in one of the relevant posting lists. However, after stemming, spell-correcting, synonyms, and a number of other expansions I'm not at liberty to discuss, there can be a lot of query terms that it needs to look through, covering a significant portion of the index. Each one of these needs to be scored (well, sorta - there are various tricks you can use to avoid scoring some docs, which again I'm not at liberty to discuss), and it's usually beneficial to merge the scores only after they have been computed for all query terms, because you have more information about context available then.

There's a reason Google uses an in-memory index: it gives you a lot more flexibility about what information you can use to score documents at query time, which in turn lets you use more of the query as context. With an on-disk index you basically have to precompute scores for each term and can only merge them with simple arithmetic formulas.

But, reading through the other comments, leaving out this part would make it better than Google.

Maybe stemming. I remember when Google added stemming (somewhere in the early 2000s). I was conflicted about it because I didnt want a search engine to second-guess my query (can you imagine??), but I also saw the use because I was already in the habit of trying multiple variations.

Auto spelling correct is a no-no. Just say "did you mean X?" and let people click it if they misspelled X. No sense in querying for both the "typo" and "corrected" keywords, because the "typo" would rank much lower, right?

Similar for synonyms. Either it should be an operator like ~, or maybe it should just offer a list (like the "did you mean" question) of synonyms to help the user think/select similar words to help their query.

You mean like Wand or BMW?

That dump is outdated, not supported, and very incomplete comparing to what google has now.

That's quite a claim considering they were reporting PageRank in their toolbar until 2016, and toolbar PageRank was visible in Google Directory until 2011.

Are you talking about PageRank from the original patent?

https://searchengineland.com/google-has-confirmed-they-are-r...

https://twitter.com/methode/status/829755916895535104

This is the weird thing -- it feels smaller. Back in the early 2000s it really felt like I was navigating an ocean of knowledge. But these days it just feels like a couple of lakes.

(also, I'm pretty sure it was billions already quite early on?)

I agree about consumer's habits, but not about quality - i mean google of today is worse search engine than google of 5 years ago.

Now google tries to guess, badly, what you meant, instead of giving you what you asked for. The pleasure of dealing with IT systems is that they give you what you ask them for, not what you meant - it introduces extra error, and worse - one that cannot be fixed by user.

I can rephrase my querry, and google will still interpret it - leading to same batch of useless results.

https://www.datastreamer.io/

Common Crawl and other sources do in fact have a ton of data that can be used which is very affordable.

The DATA itself stopped being a real competitive advantage probably 2008-2010.

Google's major advantage now is its algorithms and the fact that they've proven it works and is reliable.

Most importantly, its the brand. Google MEANS search in the US and that won't change anytime soon.

PS,... if you need tons of web and social data Datastreamer can hook you up too :)

Interesting I would have thought that crawling at this scale and finishing in a reasonable amount of time would still be somewhat challenging. Might you have any suggested reading for how this is done in practice?

>"It costs about $50 to grep over it, $800 or so to run a moderately complex Hadoop job." Curious what type of Hadoop job you might referring to here. Would this be building smaller more specific indexes or simply sharding a master index?

>"Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006." Wow that's a long time now. What did they replace it with? Might you have any links regarding this?

$50 gets you basically a Hadoop job that can run a regular expression over the plain text in a reasonably-efficient programing language (I tested with both Kotlin and Rust and they were in that ballpark). $800 was for a custom MapReduce I wrote that did something moderately complex - it would look at an arbitrary website, determine if it was a forum page, and then develop a strategy for extracting parsed & dated posts from the page and crawling it in the future.

A straight inverted index (where you tokenize the plaintext and store a posting list of documents for each term) would likely be more towards the $50 end of the spectrum - this is a classic information retrieval exercise that's both pretty easy to program (you can do it in a half day or so) and not very computationally intensive. It's also pretty useless for a real consumer search engine - there's a reason Google replaced all the keyword-based search engines we used in the 80s. There's also no reason you would do it today, when you have open-source products like ElasticSearch that'd do it for you and have a lot more linguistic smarts built in. (Straight ElasticSearch with no ranking tweaks is also nowhere near as good as Google.)

For instance, if you were to forbid Google from operating on every odd-numbered day, then 50% of the search engine market and revenues would immediately be distributed among competitors and furthermore users would be forced to test multiple engines and they could find a better one to use even when Google is allowed to operate.

Obviously this has a short-term economic cost if other search engines aren't good enough as well as imposing an arbitrary restriction on business, so it's debatable whether this would be a reasonable course of action

Depends on how you count the date, this could create markets where people in different countries will sell Google search results to each other. New VPN providers pop up with the promise of 24h Google coverage. Software startups switch to a system where you bing work 16 hours straight, then get the next 32 hours break and repeat. "Breaking news" has a new Oxford definition, since newspapers change plan to publish news 5 minutes before Google opens for search. Electricity price increases for the first 2 hours of the odd-numbered day to combat the spike in demand. Comcast introduces a new fast lane at only $199 a month that has no slow down access to Google. University groups lobby for a new exemption in the law allowing unrestricted weekdays access. Political parties lobby for also blocking Google on the day of debates, regardless of whether it's an odd-numbered day. It's kinda fun to keep going.

This has other drawbacks of course.

I have no problem with advertising etc. but the tracking and selling of data is such an idiotic thing. We as consumers should have a global internet-law, and be reimbursed for data leaks or usage outside the scope of the application.

By no problem with ads I mean the original ads of google. Very clear they were ads and not intermingled with the results. Scrolling down for the results is nuts. I will click ads if they’re relevant, regardless of if they’re on the right or in the results. So please stop supporting this fraud against advertisers.

Instead, what might help DDG is a plugin that detects when you go past the first or second page of Google search results, and suggests that you might get better results on DDG. It's a little intrusive, but the mental nudge becomes "$oldReliableStrategy has flaws, try $newRiskyStrategy". You get a positive emotional interaction with DDG rather than "forcing" yourself to use it all of the time and "failing back" to Google.

This may help to explain the poor quality of some the results on queries I run on Google lately that return content obviously written for ranking in SEO but that have very little value.

I have 2 questions:

- What make"the top 3B+" the top ones?

- How can I "force"a search on the other 150B+ pages?

Just let "google" become the generic term for search, as it's already well on its way.

The main problem is, I think the author is wrong about what Google's "crown jewel" is. Yes, Google has a huge index, but most queries aren't in the long tail. Indexing the top billion pages or so won't take as long as people think.

The things that Google has that are truly unique are 1) a record of searches and user clicks for the past 20 years and 2) 20 years of experience fighting SEO spam. 1 is especially hard to beat, because that's presumably the data Google uses to optimize the parameters of its search algorithm. 2 seems doable, but would take a giant up-front investment for a new search engine to achieve. Bing had the money and persistence to make that investment, but how many others will?

From what I can tell, Google cares a lot more about recency.

When I switch over to a new framework or language, search results are pretty bad for the first week, horrible actually as Google thinks I am still using /other language/. I have to keep appending the language / framework name to my queries.

After a week or so? The results are pure magic. I can search for something sort of describing what I want and Google returns the correct answer. If I search for 'array length' Google is going to tell me how to find the length of an array in whatever language I am currently immersed in!

As much as I try to use Duck Duck Go, Google is just too magic.

But I don't think it is because they have my complete search history.

Also people forget that the creepy stuff Google does is super useful.

For example, whatever framework I am using, Google will start pushing news updates to my Google Now (or whatever it is called on my phone) about new releases to that framework. I get a constant stream of learning resources, valuable blog posts, and best practices delivered to me every morning!

It really is impressive.

For the same reasons you’re exalting them, I have non-technical friends who asked me how Google knows so much about them (and suggestions on how to avoid it) because they found it too creepy.

I don’t think people forget Google’s results are useful; some just think they’re more creepy than valuable. You seem to have picked your side in that (im)balance, and other people prefer the other side.

There’s also the relevant consideration that no matter how useful they may be, they should have no right to impose themselves on you. By this I mean that one should be free to refuse their creepiness, understanding the price is their usefulness. Yet, Google is the subject of privacy violations all the time, and they are caught time and again lying about what they collect on users.

Just as a general observation without taking either side:

People routinely fail to recognize both sides of a particular thing. It's why we have sayings like "You don't know what you've got til it's gone."

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

But I have a hard time believing google truly partitions everything in a multi account setup.

Also, for incognito stuff, it'd be nice to have read-only basing on stock profiles related to various activities or people.

Tell that to the people who had their privacy violated by Street View[1]. And the people who specifically disabled location services on their Android devices but were still tracked[2]. Or all the people who have no idea what Google Analytics is and never consented to it, but are profiled by it everyday.

> All of their services are a choice you are making.

I do my best to avoid privacy invading companies, and as a technical user I find it tiring and know I deal with consequences (e.g. broken websites). It perplexes me that comments like yours still pop up. We’re not the only segment of the population that exists; non-technical users are the majority, and they have the same right to privacy as we do, with a modicum of transparency. If even technical people are regularly tripped by privacy invasions we didn’t know about, what chances do non-technical users have?

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/technology/google-pays-fi...

[2]: https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...

1.generally speaking I would think VERY few people care about an image of their property being on street views. 2. It's not really illegal to take pictures so even from a legal standpoint it seems like a gray area. 3. I understand there can be individual reasons for not wanting this, but it seems to be a very large net positive. And I would apply that statement to most other tracking and data policies they have.

If they are lying about how their services track people, that is definitely grounds for concern. The transparency can definitely be improved, but still these are people with Android phones and people using Google Analytics. No one is forced to use these things they are free to use any other service or create their own.

And my attitude is out of pragmatism and how I think privacy issues should be handled. I don't have any problem with the way Google uses my data so I don't care to fix a non problem. And I don't see it as their responsibility to change a way of business when anyone is free to use any other service or create their own, since I don't find it offensive.

> Google on Tuesday acknowledged to state officials that it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project when it casually scooped up passwords, e-mail and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users.

That answers your first three paragraphs. There’s no “if” to their lying and privacy invasions. They’ve been caught and admitted their actions time and again.

> No one is forced to use these things they are free to use any other service or create their own.

It is here I will respectfully give up on continuing the conversation with you. You’re either ignoring my main point or truly don’t care for the majority of users. Most people don’t understand the ramifications of these choices and for good reason; they are hard to understand. By suggesting non-technical users create their own services and devices, I’m now wondering it you’re trolling me.

> And my attitude is out of pragmatism (…) I don't have any problem with the way Google uses my data

Which is valid, but irrelevant. I’ve already mentioned in the top post different people make different choices. I presented another side and used facts to justify it. If you’re going to answer with mere opinion, you’re not adding to the points made by the original poster.

This is information that Google doesn't have any need for (noise) and didn't want in the first place.

They also self-reported the failure, where they could have just nuked it and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

My first points were about the streetview product. Scooping up passwords is obviously not the intent of that product, maybe that was an error or they changed the core product at some point? I can't read the paywalled article.

I'm not suggesting non-technical users create products... you're reading so far out of context. Just because user X can't create a new product does not mean that we should place sanctions on company Y. I'm glad you used facts somewhere else because in this post you just illogically connect a bunch of dots.

Yes some of it is my opinion and alot of this is yours. But a fact is still no one is forcing you to use these products, then you went off about stolen passwords and trolling and resigned yourself from the argument. That sounds like a rationality of a completely one-sided biased individual in itself, respectfully.

Yes everyone agrees transparency is good and lying is bad. Google is not Evil Or Benevolent. They're just people...

"And I don’t use them. I hoped that by continuing to mention non-technical users you’d get it, but this was never about me. You keep bringing up that argument, but read what you replied to in the first post — I recounted the experience of non-technical people I know, not my experience. Stop telling me I have a choice; the point is not us, it’s non-technical users who don’t have the knowledge to make informed choices!"

Haha you are so ridiculous. This was your first post:

There’s also the relevant consideration that no matter how useful they may be, they should have no right to impose themselves on you.

Then you say you don't know why I bring up that you don't need to use Googles services... C'mon man get real. That's why the point about using alternatives or creating new ones is very relevant and this entire thread is about sanctions. Don't start a convo you can't participate in and then just claim you won and leave, that's childish behavior.

Some writer from Gizmodo tried that last February. Let's just say that you are technically correct that you don't need any of the big tech firms.

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...

Sо I wonder how much of the magic you perceive might be just your interests matching the interests of the most other people using Google and thus it's not just Google magically guessing you're into Javascript (for example) now, but Javascript being popular and this being the cause of both Google returning matches for it and you starting to use it? Did you ever do a clean experiment - e.g. try to learn APL or some other relatively obscure language and have Google return all results about APL and none about Javascript?

So it could very well be that as more users adopt the new language/framework in the first couple of weeks they have taught google those associations.

Google isn’t a search company. They are a distributed machine learning company that make most of their money from learning what people want and showing relevant ads to them.

Really good or really bad only exists if there is something else to compare it to.

Same when I owned a Pixel after hearing about Google Now and their ML magic there. Nothing more magical than an iPhone in terms of suggestions. The camera was amazing, but not all this supposed contextual stuff.

https://myactivity.google.com/

For many people it is enough to be totally creeped out about Google.

Also, that Google remembers context can be handy but it is not essential. Without context, I am sure you would be equally capable of finding what you are looking for, although it might take a little more typing since you'll have to supply the context yourself. Imho, convenience is not a good argument for giving away your personal information.

There's no arguing what you're describing is useful, but it's nice to keep in mind that there are downsides even if you ignore the privacy argument (which, IMO, shouldn't be ignored).

I'm not quite sure about that. 15% of Google searches per day are unique, as in, Google has never seen them before. [1]. That's quite an insane number.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

http://commoncrawl.org/ http://commoncrawl.org/the-data/ http://index.commoncrawl.org/

related.. Mark's blog is amazing and worth more than any data science degree imho.

https://tech.marksblogg.com/petabytes-of-website-data-spark-... https://tech.marksblogg.com

[edit] in my experience yacy works really well. You have it crawl the sites you frequently visit and their external links and it quickly accumulates to something more accurate than google.

Without some clear numbers on that from a major search engine, I think this might be very difficulty to infer.

Or do you mean queries forwarded by home assistants trying to parse inputs?

The calling card of the developer realising that real users never act like you expect :)

As a developer, I search using keywords; for example, if I was looking for property for sale in Inverness, I might search for "property Inverness", whereas I've seen and heard "typical" users use something like "find me a 2 bedroom house with a garden for sale in the North of Inverness" - much more verbose, and containing stop words and phrases unlikely to help (I think!).

So did I.

Around the time I left Google behind I had started to search like my wife did, using full sentences. it sometimes worked better I think.

Natural language is likely the preferred search input method for kids under a certain age, who cannot yet type fluently. My kids formulate very long, complex queries verbally. The other day my son asked Alexa why the machine gun is such a deadly weapon. She replied with a snippet from Wikipedia that was surprisingly relevant.

is not atypical.

I mean with the newest advantages like machine learning it's more and more possible to _semantically_ link queries. If that's the case, those 15% could become 5% truly unique searches or even less.

"how dumb is trump" and "how dumb is donald trump" are two different searches but they semantically belong together because they mean the same.

Some of the new things are probably variation as well - as others have mentioned, sentences and voice commands can give lots of new stuff.

A unique search query could still land you on Wikipedia.

(And they don’t even need to store all searches for all time for this, thanks to Bloom filters.)

Assume Google receives 1 trillion queries per year, and has been around for 20 years. Using a bloom filter you can achieve a 1% error rate with ~10 bits per item. So a 200 terabyte bloom filter would be more than sufficient to estimate the number of unique queries.

If you have a list of 20 trillion query strings, and each query string is on average < 100 bytes, you're looking at a three line MapReduce and < 1 PiB of disk to create a table which has the frequency of every query ever issued. Add a counter to your final reduce to count how often the # times seen is 1.

A bloom filter is the most appropriate data structure for this use-case. How is it overkill when it uses less space and is faster to query?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count-distinct_problem

To find the fraction of queries each day which are new, you would want to add a second field to your aggregation (or just change the count), the first date the query was seen. After you get the first date each query was seen, sum up the total number of queries first seen on each date, compare it to the traffic for each date.

You could still hand the problem to a new hire (with the appropriate logs access), expect them to code up the MapReduce before lunch (or after if they need to read all the documentation), farm out the job to a few thousand workers, and expect to have the answer when you come back from lunch.

I haven't thought this through, but take all the queries as they're made and create a bloom filter for every hour of searches. Depending when this process was started, an analytics group could then take a day of unique searches, and run them against this probabilistic history, and get a reasonable estimation with low error. Although the people who work on this sort of thing probably know it far better than I.

The real question though might be assuming the 15% is right, do we care about those 15%, are they typo's that don't merge, are they semantically different, are they bots search for dates or hashes, etc.

Of course, Google knows better but to treat every search query literally. Slight deviations and synonyms work for the majority of the people, even if us techies highly oppose them and look for alternative solutions (like DDG) that still treat our searches quite literally.

Tangential - but does anyone else feel that google results are useless a lot of the time? If you search for something, you will get 100% SEO optimized shitty ad-ridden blog/commercial pages giving surface level info about what you searched about. I find for programming/IT topics its pretty good, but for other topics it is horrible. Unless you are very specific with your searches, "good" resources don't really percolate to the top. There isn't nearly enough filtering of "trash".

There are 2 issues, I think.

Firstly, the SE-optimised spam, which has become very good as masquerading as genuine content.

Secondly, Google has dumbed search syntax down a bit, and often seems to outright ignore double quoted phrases, presumably thinking it knows better than I what I want.

As a dev, I do accept I may be an outlier though - with the incredible wealth of search history and location data that Google holds, it seems likely things have actually improved for typical users.

I suspect that the AI models powering the search results develop a sort of symbiotic relationship with the spam - if the user actually finds what they are looking for by clicking through an ad on an otherwise spammy page, everyone “wins”; the user found what they were looking for with minimum effort, google got their ad revenue, and the spammy page got a little cut for generating content that best approximating the local minimum that links the users keywords to actual intent...

Some of the sites that were hit like Suite101.com went offline. eHow is still off well over 90%. ArticlesBase sold on Flippa for like $10k or some such. One of the few wins hiding in all the rubble was HubPages, but even they had to rebrand and split out sites & merged into a company with a market cap of about $26 million ... and the CEO of Hubpages is brilliant.

Even with IAC on some sites they are suggesting ad revenues won't be enough http://www.tearsheet.co/culture-and-talent/investopedia-laun... "As Investopedia charts its course as a media brand, it’s coming up against the roadblock all publishers eventually hit — the reality that display revenue alone won’t be enough. ... Siegel said he expects course revenue to exceed what’s generated from the site’s free content. While he wouldn’t say what the company’s annual revenue was, Siegel said it grew an average of around 30 percent for each of the last three years."

There is also other factors which parallel the panda update that further diminish the quick-n-thin rehash publishing business model - Google's featured snippets & knowledge graph pulling content into the SERPs so there is no outbound click on many searches - programmatic advertising redirecting advertiser ad spend away from content targeting to retargeting & other forms of behavioral targeting (an advertiser can use a URL as a custom audience for AdWords ad targeting even if that site does not carry any Google ads on it) - mobile search results have a smaller screen space where if there is any commercial intent whatsoever the ads push the organic results below the fold

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo and have found I have this problem less. I don’t always find what I mean on DDG, as of now I’d say Google is still better if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for is called, but if you know the keywords you need DDG is often better.

But for increasingly more basic searches about a product I'm interested in or a medication or anything else non-complicated that would have gotten me a clean list of decent, non-paid results even 5 years, I'm now getting half a page of sponsored BS and then another half a page of 'created content' written by a bot or shyster explicitly for gaming Google's SEO.

Not only has Google lost almost all their good will (i.e. Don't be evil), but their products aren't even that good anymore, at least not so much better than alternatives where the negatives of using Google outweigh the difference in quality.

I would agree that programming search results tend to be quite good, but I think this is likely in large part because the average person attracted to programming both has a high IQ and has experience building some part of the web stack. Thus the sites that are quite manipulative in nature would have a hard time trying to fake it until they make it in such a vertical where people are hard to monetize and are very good at distinguishing real from fake. And even if a fake site started to rank for a bit it would quickly fall off as discerning users gave it negative engagement signals.

This is also perhaps part of the reason sites like Stack Overflow monetize indirectly with employment related ads targeted to high value candidates versus say a set of contextually targeted ads on a typical forum page or teeth whitening gizmo ads on the Facebook ad feed.

The lack of filtering of "trash" probably comes from a bunch of different areas

- I think there was a quote that people are most alike in their base instincts and most refined in areas where they are unique. some of the most common queries are related to celebrity gossip & such. There are also flaws in human nature where inferior experiences win based on those flaws. For example, try to buy flowers online and see how many layers of junk fees are pushed on top of the advertised upfront low price. shipping, handling, care, weekend delivery, holiday delivery, etc etc etc

- some efforts to filter trash based on folding in end user data may promote low quality stuff that people believe in. a neutral & objective political report is less appealing than one which confirms a person's political biases. and in many areas people are less likely to share or consider paying for something neutral versus something slanted toward their worldview.

- as the barrier to entry on the web has increased some of the companies that grew confident they had a dominant position in a market may have decided to buy out other smaller players in the vertical & then degrade the user experience as real competition faded. there was a Facebook exec email mentioning they were buying Instagram to eliminate a competitor. Facebook's ad load is now much higher than it was when they were smaller. But the same sort of behavior is true in other verticals too. Expedia & Booking own most the top travel portals.

There has also been a ton of collateral damage in filtering all the trash. So many quirky niche blogs & tiny ecommerce businesses were essentially scrubbed from the web between Panda, Penguin & other related algo updates.

Google doesn't make money from you finding what you're looking for. Google makes money from you searching for what you're looking for.

For example, suppose I do a google image search for "pear", because I want images of pears obviously. The first result is indeed a pear, good job google! Except the first search result just happens to come from Amazon, and also happens to be a pretty shitty thumbnail quality photograph (355x336). It's a pear alright, but why is this particular image of a pear first? Google didn't try to give me the best image of a pear, they tried to give me the pear image they thought most likely to induce a financial transaction. Or alternatively, google let itself get cheaply manipulated by Amazon's SEO. Neither is a good look.

A much better pear image, 3758x3336 from wikipedia, is further down the search results. So it's not like google was unable to find good pictures of pears. And a non-image search for "pear" returns the wikipedia page first, so it's not like google failed to noticed the relevancy of the wikipedia article about pears. Yet the shitty amazon thumbnail of a pear shows up higher in the image search results than a high resolution photograph of a pear from wikipedia.

The user data helps/ed Google create the superior UX, as you say. The reach is what makes Google & FB valuable to advertisers. A search engine with 0.1% of Google's user volume cannot charge advertisers 0.1% of Google's as revenue. Returns to scale/reach/market-share are very substantial in online advertising.

I'm glad we're talking though. Those tech giants are too powerful.

Ultimately, the old antitrust toolkit is near useless today, for dealing with tech monopolies. It's not obvious what "break up Google" even means. There are strong network effects and other returns-to-scale. It's a zero-marginal cost business, which was rare enough in the past that economists a ignored it.

We need fresh thinking, a new vocabulary, new tools, but we do need to deal with it.

* an Office suite / enterprise company (Google Cloud + Docs + Gmail + Business)

* a phone company (Android)

* a search company (Google Search + Advertisement)

* and a media company (Google Play Movies, Music, Books and YouTube)

The names would probably become different in time, but you get the gist.

Amazon and Microsoft could be broken up much the same way, in neat categorical 'silos'. Facebook should be trisected into Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram again. I have no idea how you would break Apple up without utterly destroying their core principle, vertical integration. There is no way to do what Apple does with MacBooks or iPhones if they don't control the entire stack. I'm not saying they shouldn't be, I just see no way.

(1) This doesn't actually reduce market share, since each of these are basically different market categories.

(2) Almost all the revenue is from search. That company is the revenue generating arm for the other ones.

In contrast to most people here, I think breaking up Amazon is far more important to Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and many other tech companies. Only Google is as bad.

Before Google Maps we had a few online map services and they were terrible. Google Maps redefined what it means to have free access to web based interactive global maps, it changed how people find things and it was all payed by the ad business. Later on some monetizing efforts were made for it and competitors started to appear, mostly trying to catch up and copy what Google Maps did, but without the huge cash infusion of the ad business none of this would have happened.

A decade later, people take these things for granted and just want to split services up. I guess it makes sense from their point of view but to me it's not that clear what should happen while still allowing for the type of creativity and speed of development that allowed things like Google Maps to appear because I'm afraid "the next big" thing that could redefine our lives (and improve them) would be slowed down or simply made non-feasible.

As was, like, an app that could reroute live instead of relying on pre-printed paper instructions.

Gmaps had both before MapQuest.

I've seen mid-roll ads on songs on YouTube.

Hosting costs & delivery costs (per byte) drop every year. Every year their compression gets better. Every year their ad revenues goes up. YouTube ad revenues have been growing at something like 30% a year for many years.

I think one reason Google doesn't break out YouTube profitability is because as soon as they show they are profitable they end up getting some of their biggest partners (like music labels) using those profits to readjust revshares.

Also if Google claims YouTube is not profitable they can be painted as the victim for extremist content or hate content they host, whereas if they show they were making a couple billion year a year in profits these narratives would be significantly less effective.

Core search ad prices haven't really been falling yet Google blended click prices keep falling about 20% a year while ad click volume is growing about 60% a year. This is driven primarily by increasing watch time on YouTube and increasing ad load on YouTube. Google blends video ad views in with their "clicks" count.

You are right though, it doesn't deal with the dominance of the search directly. My hope is a complimentary effect to the above also happens: Google no longer gets gobs of personal data from its other services, allowing other search engines to approach its efficacy.

As is clear I'm not really a fan of direct intervention in a single market, I see it as more of a problem when these giants muscle their way and control more and more markets, creating a vicious feedback loop.

I think it's instructive to look at the rest of the market. How is Mozilla funded? Basically a single gigantic contract with Google. Even Apple accepts payment from google to become the default, and it's not cheap: https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en... The same logic applies to pretty much anything Alphabet spins off -- there's little difference between ownership and those contract.

About the only competition this setup produces is the ability for Mozilla to walk away to a competitor bid, which they did for like a year before bailing out at the first opportunity. There's a huge incumbency bias in these contracts. The first parallel that comes to mind is employer provided health insurance. Everyone gets to bid, but the incumbent knows the claims history far better than the competition and we'd only expect them to lose bids to companies overly optimistic about that history. Google knows how valuable various traffic sources are, but their competitors have to guess, and only when their guess is higher than Google's does it pay off. Does anyone think Yahoo winning Firefox was a good deal? I haven't seen any analysis to support that.

> My hope is a complimentary effect to the above also happens: Google no longer gets gobs of personal data from its other services, allowing other search engines to approach its efficacy.

Wouldn't the most profitable thing for these broken up companies be to sell their slice of the personal data pie as many parties as possible? This seems like a net loss for privacy. How much extra would it be worth to set up an exclusive arrangement?

The biggest blow to Google wouldn't be to break it up into lots of small companies, you just need to separate the advertising business from everything else and you've effectively neutered the monopoly. Google's genius isn't in hiring the best engineers to providing a ton of services, it's in convincing people that they're not an advertising company, and that is where Facebook has been falling out of favor recently (I'm guessing that's why they bought Instagram, and why Google bought YouTube).

This is a supposition - while perhaps it seems to makes sense, seems true, “must be true”, it doesn’t mean it is true!

Unless you worked on search quality at google you really aren’t in a position to know if, say, google cloud, or android provides useful signals to search (outside of the signals they’d collect anyways if they were different companies).

One thing people are obscuring is just how crazily effective AdWords are. They work for the advertisers, and they earn google like 70+% of the revenue. Confirmed via sec filings which does break that out. Go play with creating an AdWords campaign and try to infer just how much data google really needs to deliver those ads - it’s less than you’d think.

In short: this overall move is more wishful thinking than solidly reasoned. Surveying the field of streaming video, given the amount of studio driven consolidation, is there really a tons of competitors being held down and will spring up? I am skeptical.

But my thinking was that if you simply cut off advertising all the products still have massive marketshares and could lean on each other, as long as some succeed. Not to mention investors probably willing to prop up such a massive aggregate marketshare (one only has to look at Uber).

If you 'silo' them, success of one division of previously-Google won't lead to all of them dominating.

Who is going to sell those ‘neat silos’ cheap advertising to survive with no other business model? Google?

The cloud services (Enterprise apps, hosting, etc) don't need it.

  I think we'd probably see a worse Gmail (worse ads or aggressive upsells).

Granted most of your examples wouldn't be, except for search, but it still seems more interesting to me to just have a bunch of mini googles made from cleaving teams. Certainly that would make for some crazier competition.

What do folks even mean by "Google's index"?? Google results combine tons of signals, including personal histories for each user. Sharing metadata for the top billion urls wouldn't cover half the functionality, or make a competitive engine. And on the other hand, there may not be a single other organization in the world prepared to manage a replica of the entire data plane that impacts seatch. The proposal is somewhere between underspecified and nonsense.

I hypothesized once with an ex Microsoft HIGH up that it probably took 10B to launch bing. He said I was almost exactly on the nose.

Also this is a ridiculous thing to ask for. How much money do you think Google pays for the bandwidth to crawl the web? How much do you think it costs to run the machines that create indexes out of that? How do you value the IP involved in the process?

Google should give away the fruits of that labor for free, plus invest in a reasonable API to download that index? Plus the bandwidth of sharing that index with third parties? It’s probably not even feasible aside from putting disks or tapes on multiple semis to send to clients. The index is 100 petabytes according to [0]. With dual fiber lines, and no latency for mind bending numbers of API calls, that would take 12.6 YEARS to download a single snapshot.

[0] https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexi...

This is what makes me wonder why we don't have a LOT of competing search engines. Perhaps i'm vastly under-estimating the technology and difficulty (I could well be - it's not my domain) but it surely it can't be THAT hard to spawn Google-like weighted crawl-based search results?

It's a long-since solved problem - heck, pageRank's first iteration recently came out of patent protection - it could just be copy'pastad. Why aren't all the big companies Doing Search?

The spammers won. Google gave up and settled for "we like the right kind of spam—the kind that took a little effort, and makes us money".

Searching for "north face glaciation" did help as the first page of search results did have one entry on the topic I was actually searching on!

Maybe they should have a "I'm not buying anything" flag!

Many of the top search queries are navigational searches for brands.

And so if tons of people are searching for your brand then if there is a potentially related query that contains the brand term & some other stuff then they'll likely return at least a result or two from the core brand just in case it was what you were looking for.

Google pays some large number of people to do search and grade the various results they get to see if the answers are good, which then helps feed back ML.

Heck, according to this article[0], google has been paying people to evaluate their search results since 2004.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/interview-google-search-quality...

Google for general search. Duckduckgo fir general if you want something a bit more private but not extreme enough to run your own spiders. Bing mostly for porn search - not being snarky some people do consider it to have better results.

It's easy to gather the necessary data, but it's hard to know which parts of that data are the most relevant for finding good content and avoiding bad content. Is it more relevant if key words show up in links or titles than in the body of the text? If so, SEO spam sites will include a bunch of keywords in links and titles. Is it more relevant if keywords show up in the first 200 visible words of the page? If so, spam pages will make tons of pages with relevant keywords at the top.

The hard part about building a search engine isn't indexing the internet, it's adapting to spam. Spammers are continually adapting to changes in the algorithm, so the algorithm needs to adapt as well. And the more popular your search engine is, the more money you make and the more able you are too adapt to spam (and the more spammers focus on your engine).

So, the problem isn't that Google has a better index (though I'm sure it does), the problem is that nobody else has the will to spend the money necessary to tune the search algorithm to stay on top of spammers. When Google started, companies didn't care as much about improving their index and instead focused on building their other content (Yahoo, MSN, etc). Google saw the value of search and got a lead on everyone else in terms of curating results, and now they have the momentum to stay in front and have shifted to building content to improve monetization. Nobody else has the monetization network for search that Google has, so they'll continue having the problem that other companies had (Microsoft wants to point you to their other services, DuckDuckGo is limited by their commitment to privacy, etc).

In short, Google wins because:

- it was better when it mattered - it makes money directly from search - its other services improve their ability to understand what users want, which improves search quality and ad relevance

You can't make a better algorithm by being clever, you make a better algorithm by having better data, and that's hard to come by these days. The only way I can think of a competitor stepping in is if they target an underserved demographic and focus data collection and monetization there, and DuckDuckGo is close by targeting privacy conscious power users.

The irony there is that DuckDuckGo can't collect much of that data precisely because of their privacy focus.

Adaptive crawlers?

You didn't just hit the nail on the head; you drove it all the way in with a single blow. Bravo.

Outside of ad revenue, search has always been seen as something of a "charity" effort for the internet. It's "boring" infrastructure work that can be critically useful but doesn't really make money directly on its own. No one wants to pay a "search toll" and there's no government agency in the world that the internet would trust as a neutral index to run it as actual tax-basis infrastructure.

This is far more valuable than the general page rank algorithms that were initially developed and have already been duplicated many times in academia and business.

Google custom tailors results for each and every machine. Even if you're not signed in, Google uses your browser fingerprint, the OS it's reporting and location/IP data to custom fit results. There is no "stock" google result.

This is something DuckDuckGo et. al. can't do if they want to focus on a privacy model. DDG does offer location specific searches, which can be helpful.

Consider DuckDuckGo, which sells itself on privacy, but after more than a decade has only 0.18% market share. Without the power to make it the default in an OS or browser, you'd have to have a really strong value proposition to convince people to switch.

They are.

If a government was serious about getting more players in the search industry, they would force Google (and all other players) to make this data public.

Simply say "All user-behaviour data used to improve the service must be freely published".

Make the law apply to any web service with more than 20 million users globally so small businesses aren't burdened.

If the data cannot be published for privacy reasons, the private parts must be seperated and not used by google or it's competitors.

> the private parts must be seperated

This means literally making legal interpretation of all documents on the net, to determine whether each of them is private or not.

As a user that notices the impact of this data: please no, thanks though.

Have you ever visited youtube's home page in incognito mode? It's... bad. Really bad. Not allowing any company to use this (obviously very private) information in ranking would simply make their products suck, horribly, compared to today.

Do you like the personalized recommendations because of channel subscriptions?

I always get the "anonymous default" home page with YouTube and don't care. The home page is just a wasted load before I can start typing in the search bar. As a bonus, staying incognito means all the videos on the right-side panel are related to the current video. Not related to a music video I have playing in another tab.