Unless you want remotely objective results for searches about US politics. Here's a good experiment, search for "Kamala Harris" in DuckDuckGo and Google, then compare the results. It makes me think spreading Google's influence is about more than just helping users find the "best" search engine.
Edit: Try to search Google anonymously to get somewhat consistent results, and for an added challenge see how many pages you have to go through to see an article about her and Willie Brown.
The Washington Examiner pot story is #4 on Google's "top stories" section in my search results. You see pro-Harris bias; I see you looking for more tabloid-y results.
The "tabloid-y results" are also the truth of how her career started, strangely missing from Google. I think the biggest bias here is people wanting to believe Google's search results can still be trusted.
#4 on the top stories hardly seems like "missing", and I can't say I fault the news algorithm for weighting a senator and presidential candidate's current policy proposals over a blurry memory of what song she listened to while smoking pot in college, or a relationship from twenty years ago.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The "tabloid-y results" that are also the truth of how her career started are not her smoking pot in college. You don't even know what I'm referring to because Google's results don't mention it.
> You don't even know what I'm referring to because Google's results don't mention it.
I'm well aware of both stories you highlighted.
Both are far less important than the current policy proposals of a presidential contender, so I argue Google is correct not to highlight them as the top couple of stories about Harris if you search for her.
Sleeping with a married superior to get a better job really brings someone's character into question, but maybe the bar for corruption in US politics is set so high people don't care anymore.
With Google you get her policy proposals, with DDG you get that too and the actual dirt on the politician. I like to have all the information.
The assertion that she slept with him "to get a better job" is just that - an assertion.
> As Siders notes, suggesting that Brown had any influence over Harris’s professional ascent obscures the fact that he broadly exerted the same influence over numerous politicians in the region, given his wide-ranging position of power.
> “It is difficult to find any successful politician in San Francisco who does not have history with Brown,” writes Siders. “Before being elected mayor of San Francisco the same year Harris ran for district attorney, Newsom owed his start in San Francisco politics to an appointment by Brown to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission, and later, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.”
You're really only reinforcing my point - that Google's correctly selecting the more meaningful news stories here.
This information is all available on Google (hell, that's how I found it). It's just not the "top story", per Google's algorithmic judgement call.
There's nothing wrong with them having sex in itself, there's nothing wrong with him helping her get a job in itself. When those things are connected though there's a problem. And I doubt that's the case with Newsom, so it's a misleading comparison.
And wow, you found an article that whitewashes the whole thing. Proves Google's fair, right?
Your comment made me check out DuckDuckGo for the first time in a long while.
To support your point, there's also a huge difference in the auto-fill suggestions, and I'd guess DuckDuckGo is more accurate to what users actually search.
How is it possible that this woman had an affair with the mayor of San Francisco, and the top auto-fill suggestions on Google are "parents," "sister," "mother," and "breakfast club," rather than "affair," "willie brown," and so forth (on DuckDuckGo)?
This perception of bias stems from a technical illiteracy of search autocomplete. Even your example is a removed autocomplete result because of sexual content [1].
Google recently re-explained how their autocomplete policy works [2] because partisan hacks were cherry-picking queries to accuse Google of bias [3], not unlike GP is doing here.
What happens when a human being reports a prediction? Is that done purely by an algorithm? I still see nothing with real technical details in the three articles you linked to.
Yes, reading manual submissions is almost certainly algorithmically scanned, validated, and scaled.
If an outsider like yourself could see 'the technical details' then it would be too easy to game results, like you were already complaining about in another comment.
So we don't really get to know how it works as there's nothing but vague details. I've known from the beginning that it's mainly done through algorithms.
I'm sorry, I don't trust Google simply because they assure me they can be trusted. I don't have that level of faith in a religion, much less a corporation.
DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they have some worrying connections to Bing/Yahoo. Interesting note, Bing's results are much more similar to Google's, with no mention of what happened between Harris and Willie Brown.
There's a whole industry built around manipulating search results, what you see is not simply an "artifacts of different search engine technology". There's a very biased, politicized, human element to all of this. The moment you create an "objective" search algorithm, people are going to reverse-engineer it and exploit it. Then results can be rigged simply by selective enforcement of the rules.
DuckDuckGo is a search aggregation of Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. Yahoo has been Bing search for over a decade, so unless you're searching in Russian, it's Bing search results.
I'm not sure if you even know who you're talking about, since you originally claimed the search engines were biased, but now you're accusing the SEO 'manipulators' of being the bad actors. Again, I think you're perceiving bias where you want it to exist, not where the evidence shows it existing.
Both Alphabet and marketers are biased, I have no idea why it would have to be one or the other.
A search engine fails to produce results about the biggest scandal of a politician's career, and I'm supposed to believe it's simply being objective and I'm the one being biased.
Wikipedia lists her relationship as a footnote in her personal life, hardly the mountain you're making it out to be. Are you going to accuse Wikipedia of being biased too?
You're free to set your own burden of proof and believe whatever you want to, but that doesn't necessarily make it fact.
No, if anything I'm more convinced they're different because they produce significantly different results when searching for "Kamala Harris".
She slept with Willie Brown, who was already married, and then he helped her get a nice job. I guess if Wikipedia tells you it's not important, it's not important because Wikipedia is unbiased. Did read that on Wikipedia, does it tell you it's unbiased? I'm a writer for Wikipedia, by the way, and I'm biased. In fact every human being has biases.
Apple is sure concerned about privacy of their users until the Google dump truck full of cash arrives. Apple isn't the one tracking you everywhere but they're happy to sell access (to you) to someone who does!
Clearly people want Google, Facebook and Amazon despite the potential for harm. But Apple champions your privacy, and these companies do not. Hence, the ethical conundrum.
We should remember this, the next time Cook or anyone from Apple makes public statements about privacy. I would very much like to hear a journalist ask these tough questions (my apologies of someone already has).
Apple is essentially handing these customers to Google and they know it - otherwise they wouldn't be able to ask for so much money in return.
Most people will never change their default search. This is why Google's dominance mostly started with pushing Google Toolbar installs which changed your default in IE for you, and later, of course, with it's push into Chrome and Android and paying Apple to be default there.
If Chrome switched it's default search to DDG (no, this is not a plausible scenario), most people would be using DDG for search in a week.
My question is, would Apple default to different search engine if they weren't getting paid? Given Google's utter dominance in search, it would likely be seen as anti-user behavior to default to something else.
This one and the fact that Microsoft takes all the licensing revenue from Android seem to bubble up every few months. Head-scratching stuff from companies playing on levels of scale where strange things start to make sense.
But did they switch because they could get more money from Google, because they could give users better search results with Google, or because they didn't want to confuse users who google things and get confused that the google is broken and says bing instead?
If they weren't getting paid they'd just switch to Bing or DuckDuckGo. As much as Google might like to believe that people will specifically seek them out because they are a better product, search is a utility and most people will be fine with Bing/DuckDuckGo. We know this exactly because Google pays TAC.
I agree in general but if 1.4 billion devices simultaneously started using duckduckgo their servers would melt through the mantle and merge with the inner core.
Google's market share is slightly more than 3/4 of all search [0]. They have a strong majority of all searches, and they dominant some submarkets of search, but they are far from total market dominance.
I feel like 3/4 is pretty much dominance. If Ford sold 3/4 of all cars purchased in America, I think you'd say they were dominating the automobile market.
I think Apple has the power to establish a competitor - After all most searches are simple and DuckDuckGo well satisfies those. I stil seek out Google every once in a while, but how many users will go through the trouble to change the default, especially when you have !g?.
My next question is even if they do lose on search, with all their very successful "side" businesses, how much would it impact them at this point?
Google is actually pretty well optimized for the simplest, most mindless searches. It sucks for anything complex, though - Bing/DDG is a lot better there.
I think mindless and complex might not be the right words to use here.
I find google searching to be similar to writing. If I distill the question down to the crucial elements and use clear english, I get great results. If I throw all the elements of my question in and hope for the best, I usually am disappointed.
> My next question is even if they do lose on search, with all their very successful "side" businesses, how much would it impact them at this point?
Are you talking about Apple or Google?
If Apple launches a search engine that fails it'll have huge brand image implications. Their brand is their most valuable asset.
If Google Search were to fail then Google would lose the majority of their revenue. Sure, they could continue, but they probably would not be considered part of the Big Four anymore.
If they could not receive any kind of payment or kickback from any company I would give it a 70% chance they pick Google. As it stands, Apple knows that it can charge Google and Google knows its worth paying so they stay in the mutually beneficial relationship.
It would be hard to imagine actually be disappointed that my preferred service is an option, but not the default. I use few of the defaults on my phone.
To put that back into relatable numbers, there are about 1B installed iOS devices. So Google is paying $9/year for each device to be the default search engine.
Interesting, it's also important to keep in mind that (1) this number is slightly higher per user because some people have multiple iOS devices and (2) given the device price points, iOS users are typically considered more valuable than the average person.
There's absolute no way they can do, the search engine is very very expensive to operate, to be successful you have to be better than Google and that require none existing technologies (such quantum storage).
edit: Google is not doing the best at searching, they are doing the best by budget current economy allows, to be better than Google you have to cut cost of operation in very dramatic way, so you can expand the beyond where Google stands now, other than that, you can't outperform Google.
I suppose that depends on how you finance it. For Apple, it could be a feature of their ecosystem; for Google, the search engine is just there to lure you in so they can show you ads. That would be a totally different story: does Google actually have incentive to provide you with the best organic results next to which the ads would look out of place and bad?
I don't think it would be a good business decision for Apple though, and there's no guarantee that they could even get there with throwing billions of dollars at it.
yep, some mad scientists are trying to create storage device with huge space, trying with biological and quantum means, the promise is to store all of internet information in a single device
if that happen, it would be possible to INDEX all of internet at very low cost and being competitive with Google. just think about how much it cost Google or BING to index 1 billion static pages.
>>There's absolute no way they can do, the search engine is very very expensive to operate, to be successful you have to be better than Google and that require none existing technologies (such quantum storage).
There's absolute no way they can do, Maps is very very expensive to operate, to be successful you have to be better than Google and that require none existing technologies (such quantum storage).
OK, but the term "good enough" exists for a reason. How many users did Apple lose by not using G Maps?
So, Apple would need a "good enough" search engine and they'd buy DDG over a cup of coffee. Invest in improving it. And, yes, they're for sale, just as Microsoft or Exxon is (for the right amount of money)
Meanwhile DuckDuckGo (probably valued at under $50 million) is worth less than 1% of that fee. No wonder Google continues to retain a monopolistic market share.
If Apple didn't want to push a search engine and take financial advantage of it, it could show a prompt the first time the user opens the browser, asking the user to select the search engine from a list.
But I guess Apple just loves that nice shiny pile of cash too much to give it up!
That seems like a really low estimate but I have no clue what DDG is currently valued at. They raised $10 million recently but after a little search I wasn't able to see at what valuation they raised the money at.
DuckDuckGo is basically a reskin of Bing search (unless you search in Russian, then it's Yandex). Their value-add is minimal, even if you trust them to respect privacy, despite not being open-sourced or audited.
DDG isn't a search engine in the same way Bing and Google are.
I looked it up: "Cost of revenues was $59.5 billion, consisting of [traffic acquisition cost] TAC of $26.7 billion and other cost of revenues of $32.8 billion. Our TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 23%." So yeah, you have to spend money to make money. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204419...
In Apple's reporting where they don't have the breakdown in iPhone sales any more there is talk of revenue from other services going up. Maybe this is part of that success story.
The concept of owning demand is explored really well in this blog post[1]. A good excerpt:
> In short, if somebody successfully inserts themselves between you and your customer, they can exercise tremendous control over you, including taking a big chunk of your profits or outright killing you.
106 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadEdit: Try to search Google anonymously to get somewhat consistent results, and for an added challenge see how many pages you have to go through to see an article about her and Willie Brown.
Google:
"2020 candidate Kamala Harris says her top priority is raising incomes"
"Kamala Harris: young, black, female – and the Democrats' best bet"
"2020 candidate Kamala Harris wants to give working class families $500 a month"
DuckDuckGo:
"Kamala Harris says she smoked marijuana in college while listening to music that didn't exist yet"
"Extramarital affair with Kamala Harris?"
"Willie Brown on Kamala Harris: 'We dated,' I 'influenced her ..."
There's clear favoritism there.
I'm well aware of both stories you highlighted.
Both are far less important than the current policy proposals of a presidential contender, so I argue Google is correct not to highlight them as the top couple of stories about Harris if you search for her.
With Google you get her policy proposals, with DDG you get that too and the actual dirt on the politician. I like to have all the information.
The assertion that she slept with him "to get a better job" is just that - an assertion.
> As Siders notes, suggesting that Brown had any influence over Harris’s professional ascent obscures the fact that he broadly exerted the same influence over numerous politicians in the region, given his wide-ranging position of power.
> “It is difficult to find any successful politician in San Francisco who does not have history with Brown,” writes Siders. “Before being elected mayor of San Francisco the same year Harris ran for district attorney, Newsom owed his start in San Francisco politics to an appointment by Brown to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission, and later, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.”
You're really only reinforcing my point - that Google's correctly selecting the more meaningful news stories here.
This information is all available on Google (hell, that's how I found it). It's just not the "top story", per Google's algorithmic judgement call.
And wow, you found an article that whitewashes the whole thing. Proves Google's fair, right?
To support your point, there's also a huge difference in the auto-fill suggestions, and I'd guess DuckDuckGo is more accurate to what users actually search.
How is it possible that this woman had an affair with the mayor of San Francisco, and the top auto-fill suggestions on Google are "parents," "sister," "mother," and "breakfast club," rather than "affair," "willie brown," and so forth (on DuckDuckGo)?
Google recently re-explained how their autocomplete policy works [2] because partisan hacks were cherry-picking queries to accuse Google of bias [3], not unlike GP is doing here.
[1] https://www.blog.google/products/search/how-google-autocompl...
[2] https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-autocomple...
[3] https://medium.com/@rhea/hillary-clintons-search-results-man...
If an outsider like yourself could see 'the technical details' then it would be too easy to game results, like you were already complaining about in another comment.
I'm sorry, I don't trust Google simply because they assure me they can be trusted. I don't have that level of faith in a religion, much less a corporation.
What you're doing is seeing artifacts of different search engine technology and chalking it up to favoritism because you want to perceive a bias.
There's a whole industry built around manipulating search results, what you see is not simply an "artifacts of different search engine technology". There's a very biased, politicized, human element to all of this. The moment you create an "objective" search algorithm, people are going to reverse-engineer it and exploit it. Then results can be rigged simply by selective enforcement of the rules.
I'm not sure if you even know who you're talking about, since you originally claimed the search engines were biased, but now you're accusing the SEO 'manipulators' of being the bad actors. Again, I think you're perceiving bias where you want it to exist, not where the evidence shows it existing.
A search engine fails to produce results about the biggest scandal of a politician's career, and I'm supposed to believe it's simply being objective and I'm the one being biased.
Wikipedia lists her relationship as a footnote in her personal life, hardly the mountain you're making it out to be. Are you going to accuse Wikipedia of being biased too?
You're free to set your own burden of proof and believe whatever you want to, but that doesn't necessarily make it fact.
She slept with Willie Brown, who was already married, and then he helped her get a nice job. I guess if Wikipedia tells you it's not important, it's not important because Wikipedia is unbiased. Did read that on Wikipedia, does it tell you it's unbiased? I'm a writer for Wikipedia, by the way, and I'm biased. In fact every human being has biases.
Then why is it worth $9.4 billion?
We should remember this, the next time Cook or anyone from Apple makes public statements about privacy. I would very much like to hear a journalist ask these tough questions (my apologies of someone already has).
Apple is essentially handing these customers to Google and they know it - otherwise they wouldn't be able to ask for so much money in return.
There is nothing wrong with google but at least go through ddg with a hashbang.
If Chrome switched it's default search to DDG (no, this is not a plausible scenario), most people would be using DDG for search in a week.
This one and the fact that Microsoft takes all the licensing revenue from Android seem to bubble up every few months. Head-scratching stuff from companies playing on levels of scale where strange things start to make sense.
Apple would definitely go to Microsoft to get payment for pushing traffic to their MSN network instead.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.as...
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
But I think what these statistics do not reflect is the growing share of Amazon in product search.
My next question is even if they do lose on search, with all their very successful "side" businesses, how much would it impact them at this point?
I find google searching to be similar to writing. If I distill the question down to the crucial elements and use clear english, I get great results. If I throw all the elements of my question in and hope for the best, I usually am disappointed.
Are you talking about Apple or Google?
If Apple launches a search engine that fails it'll have huge brand image implications. Their brand is their most valuable asset.
If Google Search were to fail then Google would lose the majority of their revenue. Sure, they could continue, but they probably would not be considered part of the Big Four anymore.
You will see Siri Suggested websites coming up before Google’s results.
You can still use the web browser all the way back to the original iPhone. Updates are irrelevant.
Source: Googled using Safari on my launch day iPhone just a few days ago.
It's currently Google...and if they want to change it, they'd have to update these EOL devices. This could significantly increase the price per device
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18202736/apple-devices-io...
edit: Google is not doing the best at searching, they are doing the best by budget current economy allows, to be better than Google you have to cut cost of operation in very dramatic way, so you can expand the beyond where Google stands now, other than that, you can't outperform Google.
I don't think it would be a good business decision for Apple though, and there's no guarantee that they could even get there with throwing billions of dollars at it.
Sorry, what? Can you clarify?
if that happen, it would be possible to INDEX all of internet at very low cost and being competitive with Google. just think about how much it cost Google or BING to index 1 billion static pages.
There's absolute no way they can do, Maps is very very expensive to operate, to be successful you have to be better than Google and that require none existing technologies (such quantum storage).
It is very hard to catch up with them.
So, Apple would need a "good enough" search engine and they'd buy DDG over a cup of coffee. Invest in improving it. And, yes, they're for sale, just as Microsoft or Exxon is (for the right amount of money)
Launching, perhaps. Creating? No one knows.
Maybe one day when Google decides it doesn't need Apple anymore, Tim Cook will pull a "One more thing..." at WWDC.
Most people don't enjoy configuring systems and leave most of the defaults most of the time.
Apple could easily add a user choice prompt, where users can pick from the top 3 search engines in a country.
But I guess they like that $10B very much.
Settings > Safari > Search Engine
Ask Siri "Do a web search for {search query}" and you'll see google'logo at the bottom of the list.
If Apple didn't want to push a search engine and take financial advantage of it, it could show a prompt the first time the user opens the browser, asking the user to select the search engine from a list.
But I guess Apple just loves that nice shiny pile of cash too much to give it up!
Or perhaps a company that is focused on the user experience decided not to make 98% of its users change the setting.
Right...
DDG isn't a search engine in the same way Bing and Google are.
> In short, if somebody successfully inserts themselves between you and your customer, they can exercise tremendous control over you, including taking a big chunk of your profits or outright killing you.
[1] https://florentcrivello.com/index.php/2018/10/22/own-the-dem...