> “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall.
> Paraphrasing Monty Python: “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall.
I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search business. We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole.
The article rightly points out that Google is a new "Cambridge Analytica" (even on steroids), we should not passively wait for our democracies to break down because information is controlled by a single private entity. Let's step out of our comfort zones, try new products, support the ones we like!
That was an interesting choice of paraphrase. Does the author realize it's part of a gag where the characters go on to list all of the ways that the Roman government had materially improved quality of life for the people under its rule and thereby make their rebellion seem farcical? ;)
That doesn't make sense. In the movie the joke is clearly on Reg, the guy who says the words "What have the Romans ever done for us?". I still think the author didn't really get the joke...
They're German, many Germans are great Python fans. I think you can safely assume they have seen the Life of Brian and analysed it carefully. And yes they got the joke.
> We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole.
There are plenty of alternatives. But people don't use them as much because they are worse.
Consider Bing ( http://www.bing.com/ ). It is backed by a company even bigger than Google. MSFT's market cap is 1.155T; Google's is 899B. MSFT is 30% bigger than Google. Why haven't they put more resources on their Bing search engine? Spend a few billion dollars, hire away some of the top search engine experts from Google, and build away!
Google receive over 100 Billion USD per year from ads revenue.
If spending a few billion dollars can get you a new Google, then every one would have done it a long time ago.
Maybe the solution is not in the free market, but by taking the background of pubmed and create a search.gov.
No ads, no algorithms, no bullshit ranking and metrics, no tracking, just pure boolean search with a heavy handed spam filter and jam packed with features for the sake of utility and not engagement.
I'm sorry, but a heavy handed spam filter is the absolute last thing I want the government to have. This basically gives the government the best censorship tool they ever had.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, all opinions are my own.
>just pure boolean search
So if I just repeat the word Facebook a hundred times in my personal website, I'd rank higher than facebook.com when people search for "facebook"?
I think simple boolean search works for things like searching books in a library, where you can assume good faith from all the authors.
But in the web you can't do that. It's just too easy to game.
> The article rightly points out that Google is a new "Cambridge Analytica"...
One of the most amusing patterns, both in newspapers and on HN, is how often whenever Facebook does something wrong, the response is "this is why Facebook and Google should be regulated/destroyed/broken up".
> Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers?
Hey, I work on Cliqz' adblocker (open-source here: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker). Cliqz browser comes built-in with adblocking, anti-tracking, anti-phishing and private search built-in so that users are protected by default.
You can also install another one if you prefer since all Firefox extension are also available from Cliqz! But the one built-in is pretty good already[^1] and we're happy to get more feedback about how we can improve it!
Finally, Cliqz search is also available standalone now so feel free to give it a try! https://beta.cliqz.com/
Hi, Marc here, I work at Cliqz. We (unfortunately) don’t (at least not a reasonable amount). We have an advertising model, but it does not rely on any personal data. We also always think (and tested) a paid product, which would be the purest and (In my view) best form. Experience unfortunately suggests, that only very few people would pay. But, I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. Going back to the article though: This is exactly why we believe there should be a lot of competition and a variety of different alternatives. And one or the other might figure out a new approach towards financing search.
Just an FYI: I wanted to add beta.cliqz.com to my Firefox search engine list to test it a bit over the next few days. Firefox doesn't seem to "recognize" it as a search engine so you cannot add it using the normal procedure that works on all the other search engines.
Lol, yeah. The HN headline is like "hell yeah, break up and/or nationalise Google/Alphabet," but the link is "get our product please think of us poor little oppressed advertising agencies" and, uh, no.
I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.
Beat me to it! Very happy here as well. I also love the bang short cuts. I am actually at the point where google is clearly inferior.
I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g
Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your query string.
For me it helped to switch over my mobile browser in addition to desktop. It's much more of a hassle to type !g so I try to make do with ddg and only use !g if I really have to. After a month or so it seems like my choice of search queries has adapted to better make use of Bing's algorithms, and when I do find myself trying !g, half the time it results in even worse results.
I use DDG but I still have to resort to Google for 5% of searches because it dosen't deliver the results as well. I desperately want to pay for something that has the quality of Google but the privacy of DDG.
We're trying to get a version that works with javascript disabled (for TOR), but are trying to avoid having to maintain two separate clients. We'll try to push it out soon. Many thanks for the feedback on our beta.
I try to use DDG as my default but it's so awful at knowledge-graph questions. I find myself using !g for knowledge queries before even attempting it.
An example would be something like "Rick and Morty episodes." I know google will give me a list with recent/upcoming episode names and air dates for pretty much any show. DDG will link me wikipedia and fan wikis. I make a "<show> episodes" query anytime I want to know when the next episode of something is released.
DDG's knowledge graph (and/or query parsing) is just so limited I skip it anytime I think google will be able to produce the answer directly. Similarly, there are things I'm confident asking a voice assistant, and there are things I won't even bother trying. If it's something I'd ask an assistant, I'm skipping DDG.
Lol, he's just saying that now. Everyone says that kind of stuff when they're not at the top. Then they get there and fully realize their constraints, and it dies down.
[[Disclaimer I work at Cliqz]] Your question is spot on, many of us ask ourselves the same question.
Whether Cliqz would become a bully like Google if successful or not, I believe it's impossible to answer.
But at least, we know, that the data we collect from our users to build the search engine is totally anonymous and is used only to build search and the browser.
So, in the case that Cliqz would turn evil, I would stop using it, knowing for a fact that there are no sessions about me on their data, none.
Someone on the thread mentioned fiduciary duties, true that companies must maximize profit, but that does not mean becoming a gear on global surveillance conglomerate.
I've heard that rhetoric somewhere else, and I expect having Google pay for it will go about as well as having Mexico fund a wall across the border with the US.
But the European taxpayer should absolutely pay for it.
We shall see. It has thus far been in Google's best financial interests to make nice in the European markets because of the size of the user base that they would leave on the table if they responded to EU pressure by shutting down services.
I'm unsure if that continues to be true if the EU siphons money off of them to build a direct competitor.
The EU represents close to 50% of potential/projected revenue to Google in the next 10 years, is my guess. That's what I meant when I wrote "loads of leverage".
I don't think it's in the basic values of the European Union to suddenly block Google. We're talking increasing taxation, over a 5-20 year period, that kind of thing. We're not North Korea or the PRC.
Or in some other other gradual way. Anyway: it's not a binary over-night thing based on a whim of some dictator.
Either way, I fully trust the competency of the people running these things; they have proven themselves in the past. I'm writing that as a Swedish citizen who is a little bit skeptic about whole the EU thing. This part though - I trust these EU bureaucrats. My impression is that there's a team of very sharp people working on this.
I would actually argue that making a good search engine with quality and responsiveness worldwide rivaling Google web search turns out to be an architecturally hard problem.
A basic web crawler is not. A semantic web crawler and associated search engine capable of mapping real human input to useful information and dealing with the heterogeneous structure of data on the web, with low millisecond latency?
Bing has been working on that problem for years now, how come they haven't caught up more with Google?
It's a much more well understood problem now than it was when google was founded and the tools and platforms available to assist are light-years beyond what was available then. Many failed search startups have shown again and again that marginally better results are not the deciding factor in using a search engine, it's what's the installed default and how trusted the brand is.
EU can just fine Google and use that money as a foundation to build competitors.
Need not to be more complicated than that. It is not like Google is the same darling it once was at home either. The public now has an appetite to go after US big techs not vice versa.
And Google won't have a valid defense against it, unless the US government comes to play
That is exactly the point of the article, by the way. Cliqz is built in Munich, Europe. And it does not rely on any other US search engine to provide results (contrary to DDG, Qwant and others).
Yes, I'm really looking forward to an inferior, super-censored version of Google (hate speech laws, anti-piracy laws, right to be forgotten laws, etc) paid with my taxes.
I'll save you some future embarrassment and point out that Google complies with all applicable laws in the territories it provides search (including "hate speech laws, anti-piracy laws, right to be forgotten laws").
They should focus on building a search index and then license that to European search engine startups. That's the capital intensive part that requires you to build datacenters next to power plants, etc. and where government money will even out the competitive playing field.
It will also help insofar as site owners will be less inclined to block "EUROPEAN SEARCH INDEX CRAWLER", just as they're less inclined to block google, despite being inclined to block "small time search index".
The creative, non-capital intensive part where having a diverse ecosystem will help the most is building a layer on top of the index to actually find stuff - e.g. a bit like how duckduckgo is built atop bing's index.
The Chinese empire is still there and quite happy. It's communist now, but no less of an empire. It's even currently involved with an aggressive territorial dispute with neighboring land that it used to have total control over, as empires do.
I would think that undergoing a rebellion or civil war after which the form of governance changes marks the end of an empire, even if the territorial lines are not redrawn.
Depends on how you look at it I guess. The history of the Chinese empire had periods of relative stability, separated by periods of rebellion, civil war, and strife, sometimes hundreds of years long. There were even periods where the empire was ruled by outsiders.
At the end of any given dynasty, it would be hard to say whether the empire is truly crumbling, or merely transitioning to a new dynasty. Who knows, maybe 1,000 years from now communism and the period of strife in the 20th century will just be seen as an unstable period preceding a dynastic transition.
By that metric, the United States ended in 1861 and another country took its place. The 13th-15th amendments fundamentally changed the understanding of the state / federal power dynamic.
It marked the end of that government, but the nation of China is still very much an empire, by definition of its ambition and cultural reach exceeding its borders. In the same sense that the US and UK are empires.
> In the same sense that the US and UK are empires.
UK was an empire, and it's already fallen, it is now on the brink of losing even the Kingdom and becoming an Island hosting borders and customs.
U.S. is not really an empire, never was. It is more the mandator of many bad things that happened in the last 70 years, that turned many countries into U.S. colonies through "exporting democracy" which actually translated too many times as "planting dictatorships befriended with U.S.A.". But it was good for U.S. and only U.S.
That's why Cliqz has reasons to exist, U.S. is an unreliable ally, even more now and Europe needs to
> building the foundation for a sovereign digital future of Europe
> develop digital key technologies as a European alternative to the market dominating US platforms.
> If We Don’t Act Now, We Will Become a Digital Colony
I'm going by the Wikipedia definition, to wit: "An imperial political structure can be established and maintained in two ways: (i) as a territorial empire of direct conquest and control with force or (ii) as a coercive, hegemonic empire of indirect conquest and control with power." The US and China are the latter. The UK's power has slipped, but it's still in this category with extraterritorial colonies. A specific emperor is structurally optional.
But the Chinese Empire has already fallen and changed radically, U.S.S.R. is not the same thing as the Russian Empire, even though they shared most of the same territory.
The point was that every empire falls sooner or later and that it happened to China as well.
I am not a historian, but I cannot think of any empire where there was no coercion. I read it in this context: Empires must fall, because "Absolute power corrupts absolutely".
In fairness, you'd also need to concede that there has never been a single independent village where there was no coercion. Mankind's history is mostly a story of how we have related to each other in forced groupings. (Forced by Mother Nature's many threats in the prehistoric past, but still, forced.)
So is it necessary that every grouping of man, "must fall", because there exists "coercion" in those groupings?
Just as a matter of full disclosure:
My own view is that any grouping must fall only when the grouping provides no, or very little, actual benefit to it's constituent members. Western Rome fell when people in Lutecia, Londonus, or even Ravenna were no longer deriving real benefit from being inside the Roman polity. Which arguably was long before Odoacer finally had enough and put an end to the charade.
Generally speaking, empires are negative entities. The work because they took advantage of being first (or first to be successful) and used that advantage to absorb the wealth of those they conquer. While a lot of productive things can come out of such an environment, at its heart the empire is sustained by consumption. When there is less to conquer, there is less wealth available for the wealthy, but the desires of the powerful is to always increase. The wealthy use power to to start pulling wealth from the empire. The common identity of the empire is destroyed and the wealth is no longer available to defend the empire, so the empire is ultimately absorbed by the next identity that comes along.
Wealth isn't some finite quantity that is merely taken or traded between a group of individuals. This is highly ignorant of economics and is a worldview that sadly what drives a lot of hysteria around wealth inequality (that when one person has more wealth it means they deprived it from another person who would have had it otherwise, combined with the idea it just sits there in a bank account not being used or it's all being spent like a consumer).
It is not a given that massive wealth accumulation involves depriving others of wealth but it's also very often the case.
While it's ridiculous to view wealth as a finite thing, it's just as ridiculous to imply hysteria over wealth inequality is based in ignorance. There is a long-standing trend of capitalists treating lower classes as exploitable resources undeserving of the means to have a healthy and happy existence beyond what keeps them productive inside the constraints of the current system.
Median salaries haven't been stagnant while the rich get richer because that's what's best for everyone, it's because that's what's best for the people with control.
Just for the record, many people who oppose and criticise massive wealth inequality are fully aware of the basics of economics (or even advanced economics).
Why? Because they hit a ceiling of the paradox of development. Development introduces problems that their current system cannot fix, and they face crisis: either breakthrough the ceiling or fail. Usually breakthrough is associated with figuring a new ways to extract more energy from the environment (industrial revolution).
This seems like a pretty blatant advertisement for their company's "Cliqz Browser".
You should at least acknowledge your bias by being transparent enough to show you have a vested interest. It's really disingenuous otherwise, and makes it hard to take what you have to say at face value.
Yes, according to the post, the "primary benefit" of using Cliqz is so that you can get access to their search engine, which is exclusive to their browser.
You're right, instead of saying exclusive feature I should have stuck with 'primary'. I can see how those two words have different enough meanings to cause confusion.
Though it's important to remember that not everyone on here has English as their first language, and we should generally be considerate of that when reading people's comments.
This is extremely true. It's one of the reasons that Google+ came into existence. And with Google+ being folded up, Google has basically refrained from competing further in social indexing.
I used to work for a vertical search engine (comparison shopping). For the most part, no one in that space was able to build a brand, and they all depended on either paid or organic traffic from Google to stay open. As the company I was at and competitors started to merge and die, the largest, Nextag, went on a PR campaign to tell people Google's a Monopoly[1].
These vertical search engines, at at least in the comparison shopping space, were never that good to begin with. Shopping (and possibly travel) is just the easiest vertical to monetize. All the sites were spammy, pages were optimized for clickouts, and results were optimized for yield, not relevancy, because everything was an ad. There's a reason none of them were recognizable brands and they all depended on Google for traffic.
So yes, not just what niche is there, but how can you make it profitable--or even break-even. Would you donate $10 per year to a non-profit search engine?
allow the end user to tweak the search criterion easily.
there are times when i dont want the "most relevant" results.
i want things like historical order or alphabetic order.
or even in order of ISBN number.
i really miss using an image itself for query terms.
I feel the problem most people have when thinking about monopolies is if a monopoly produces a product that people like right now (e.g. they like the features, they like the cost), people don't see the monopoly as a problem and even will even defend it thinking it's great ("I love company X, they make amazing products, they deserve their success!").
The problem with monopolies is when the company decides to e.g. price gouge or gets lazy by not innovating. Companies can only really get away with this and survive when they have a monopoly.
Monopolies also kill competing products and deter other companies from even attempting to enter the market - so you might love the product of a monopoly right now but if the monopoly had never existed an even better product could be available today.
I think people generally love Google's products but it would be good to see more competition. The upfront investment you would need to create a competing search engine is prohibitively high so most companies aren't going to attempt to make their own.
Hi, Marc from Cliqz (and one of the authors of the linked article): We at Cliqz do try and others (like mojeek in the UK or Seznam in Czech) are trying as well. But yes, it has very high costs. We did a lot of (I find smart) technical shortcuts (and will explain how in the next days in our blog), but it is still an investment. The main hurdle is however distribution. As said in the article, Google spends 1/4 of their revenue to block market access and this makes the investment case nearly impossible. It's their strategy to stop competitive innovation. This no company can solve and why e.g., in Europe you do see the 93% market share of Google. This is where this becomes a political topic. In fact since search tends to be a natural monopoly and information is so important this is where politics has to regulate and ensure competition. In an ideal world there would be 4-5 competing search engines in every region ...
search is not close to being a natural monopoly. you are vastly underestimating how strong google’s execution has been. perhaps because you need to convince yourself that you could compete, “if only” ...
One doesn't exclude the other. I admire a lot of what Google has done and agree on a very strong execution. This still doesn't change the fact, that a search engine (1) gets better with every query-click pair and hence favors the market leader, (2) is a highly profitable business, which allows to buy distribution (this is the biggest market entry barrier), and (3) there are many small points that add up (crawler access is one minor but annoying issue: Web-Sites very often see all crawlers except Google and Bing as "bad scrapers"; so small companies need to invest a lot of time to convince them to get access and many will still never allow it what users then rate as bad quality) ... but, yes, Google is doing a lot of things right, they have very good people. Many of them my friends or ex-colleagues. This still doesn't change the fact of the original article: A 93% market share is not great.
Im really tired of sites trying to centralize and own this content. The key to decentralizing and empowering individuals to own their content is enabling distribution and discovery. New search engines are essential to the web we want.
That would be nice especially since hopefully it would mean there would be a search engine I could use and not get shopping results. It seems like anytime I search for something I get shopping results so I have to be more specific and type more which is inconvenient. Wikipedia used to be the first result for many things I search for now it pretty much never is. It's been getting worse every year.
On a pretty unrelated note, it would also be nice if I could search the play app store without getting games in my results. There's pretty much a game related to everything I want to search for. Very annoying.
google will neatly incorporate their results in their index and then people will go back to searching in google. I mean it happens with all major sites (stackoverflow, shopping results, diy/pinterest). Only twitter and facebook , who completely block their content from google get away. Perhaps we should take a lesson or two from them.
This is an advertisement for the Cliqz search engine. Let's remember that Cliqz is the advertising company that the Mozilla Corporation sent our private history browsing to back in the day:
It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page.
I see two problems with their approach:
1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset.
More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and get it in front of them at first try, without the user having to tweak anything.
2. Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product.
Similar to how ICE cars had "monopoly" over transportation and the time for change has thankfully come. Not because monopolies are bad, but because electric cars are so freaking awesome.
Google perfected what the 'best search engine' is to 99% of population. This comes at an expense of really annoying 1% of users but it is the price they are willing to pay. To de-throne Google you really need to cater to broad population with a product that will be better both at capturing intent and delivering and presenting relevant results. This may or not come with a different business model.
Yes. Google has a superior product riding on top of a corrupting business model that cannot help but mis align Google's interests with those of the users they are claiming to serve. Google should unbundle the current business model from the technology and also offer clean, unbiased, private search service that is paid by the user on a subscription basis. I would jump on the chance to pay say $10 a month for Google quality search if I knew my search was private and the results were not influenced by outside parties.
I would probably pay at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me, for privacy and freedom from ads or any other manipulation I did not explicitly permit. Note I consider the latter at least as important as privacy.
> Note I consider the latter [manipulation] at least as important as privacy.
I second that. It's somewhat reassuring to know that others realize that as well. Most people just have no idea how marketing and now 'deep learned' algorithms (applied psychology) make puppets out of human beings.
I consider "user feed control" (that users choose what, how, where, when and why things are presented to them) of equal importance to e.g. democracy as far as human freedom is concerned. But the current manipulation is so insiduous that from now to mainstream awareness to generally implementing solutions is a long, long ways away.
> at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me
I think this tends close to an upper bound — not many people willing to pay, and even fewer at that level — but certainly one more anecdotal proof that premium services are totally viable for a certain group. The question is 'how big' that group, what's the market for that, but I'd wager it's enough to sustain a few 'premium' businesses (or alternative plans) for most common services (some are harder; search notably).
I've noticed things on the spectrum of articles <-> blogspam crowding out the top results in many queries, and that it's substantially more difficult to find forum content discussing related topics to the query. It's a shame, as I think there is often more interesting content on such forums.
Anti-SEO is my first guess, that and tweaking for fears of regulation or bad non-grown-up PR...
Google's algo changes since about panda have been burying good web sites and content while bringing quicker answers and 'sanitized' aka semi-censored results to the top.
Some of this is over reaction to SEO and trying to out do the spammers - but the collateral damage to the results and thus the end users who believe that google brings the truth is hard to calculate.
Combine that with regulation like dmca, right to be forgotten and others.. results are even more censored, and the general population does not know what they are not seeing, as they still trust google to be bringing the truth.
worry about bad PR from various factions - tweak the algorithms.. and you can say for sure that the results the more adolescent google brought a decade ago were often more of what people were looking for.. and the results today are often like cheap irradiated / sanitized snacks, not the full enchilada that was once a G search away.
Much of this started happening when whats his name became that adult in the room and started putting the finger on the scale to change what millions could find, it's gotten more and more censored every update since then, and less transparent about that.
in my biased opinion.. your searches and the results will vary. I still use other engines for different things, and I feel strongly that we need more search engines. Anyone who wants to create a better adult engine, let me know.
it’s useful for google to demote wikipedia in favor of showing more diverse results. wikipedia is very very very easy for you to just search directly before turning to google
Google does seem to have their 'recency bias' setting set to 11. If any of your search terms have been in the news in the last 2 weeks, those articles are all you are going to get.
Even if you break up Google or Alphabet, the search division would probably remain a single company. It won't solve anything.
So You get Google Search Inc. Adsense Inc. AdWords Inc, Gmail Inc, I imagine.
This would be just restructuring, Googlers are too smart to get hold back by this and they probably already have an emergency plan if it remotely comes as a possibility.
It will, no worries. What would prevent Google AdWords Inc providing ads to Google Search Inc? It's like any other company signing up for an ad network.
My point is that if your company sells information rather physical products then breaking it up is pointless.
I don't think it would be possible to split off AdWords from Search. Search would either partner with AdWords or roll its own ads and then we'd be back to square one.
When Bell Telephone was split it was cut along geographic lines. That would also not work on a tech company for obvious reasons --- software knows no borders. I don't know of a sensible way to break up tech giants because the efficiencies of scale create a natural winner take all market.
So, as part of the deal, you prohibit the companies from engaging in the businesses that you broke up. So search, inc can't expand to ads, and adwords can't expand to internet search.
Search, inc is still going to want ads, presumably, so they'll contract with someone. Setup rules for the contract. Maybe require at least N ad providers with each getting a minimum of Y% of pageviews, and contract terms have to be FRAND.
Strongly restrict personal information passing between the companies.
Or, i guess you could go all Bell on them and divide the US into different territories and have Pacific Google and Southewestern Google and what not. Would be kind of weird to geofence search and ads though.
Google Search is aleady geofenced. Wven if you switch search language, it will still apply filters depending on the geolocation of the request IP. So splitting Google along geographic boundaries wouldn't change much on the technical side of things at all.
However Bell was broken up in a consent decree that didn't have to do with its monopoly over the networks, not explicitly at least.
Bell was broken up because they owned Western Electric and used it to vertically integrate the telco stack for the entire country.
A hypothetical breakup of Alphabet could mirror the breakup of the Bell system, as Alphabet controls the data collection -> advertisement stack. Spin off Search + AdWords as an independent business, while services targeting data collection services that feed it (Chrome/Chromium, Android, GSuite, Google Home, etc).
Personally I could see a lot of consumer benefits.
I don't think that if Google vanished tomorrow, a new crop of superior search engines would suddenly pop out of the ether to replace it.
Is Google somehow suppressing the creation of a good search engine? No, on the contrary it has created the best web search engine we've ever seen. I would personally be sad if you took it away from me, and I suspect that 99% or more of its users would be in the same boat (don't judge the zeitgeist by web forum echo chambers). You break up monopolies when they are harming users, not in order to cause harm to users.
Google's search engine is a unique portal into the WWW in that it heavily controls what parts of the web people get to see. Opinions can be shaped, facts can be suppressed, lifes can be ruined by the decisions that go into search result prioritizing.
With the world being what it is today, Google Search is in an extremely powerful position. We depend a lot on information that we find on the web. And these free form search queries are the best UI we have at the moment to retrieve it.
It is a good thing that Google Search is good and is getting better, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they wield a lot of power that needs to be checked somehow.
You are wrong. When a product makes the world a worse place—say fridges that deplete the ozone layer—the right thing to do is to ban the product.
In the case of petroleum fueled cars, they are significantly contributing to a massive climate emergency and should be banned regardless of the existence of a superior product. In the case of the Google search engine... Well in the case of the Google company, it should be forced to split up because it is a massive monopoly that hinders competitors from entering any of their dominated markets, and they use their domination of one market to increase their dominance of another.
And this is should be done regardless of the existence of superior products. Goggle as a single company is making the world a worse place, and the right thing to do in that scenario is to split it up.
That's such a vague standard - every single big company has people claiming they make the world a worse place, are we going to break up nestle, every oil company, every agribusiness and pharmaceutical and car company along with google? That could make the world a much worse place
Would it? Big food producers like Nestle buy ingredients globally, ship them in masses between comtinents to produce highly engineered products. Would a company that is smaller do all of the same things? Would less energy be wasted on production in those factorie? Would the products have fewer additives, etc...?
Would smaller farms with smaller fields and a larger variety of crops be better for the environment? Would those farmers grow more organic food?
I don't think that this is black and white. But smaller companies would likely be a whiter shade of gray in some cases.
In some cases highly engineered products are not ideal for human health.
But highly engineered products are often ideal for:
1. Having a longer shelf life. (Ideal for countries without the same standards for food preservation)
2. Having yields large enough to feed populations.
3. Increased ability for transport.
I agree that there are gray areas, but it's these qualities that help feed a world.
So, what's different about cliqz? You promise not to keep logs, skew results, and sell data?
Also,
> With 93% of the search market, Google’s algorithms decide what becomes truth. Can you think of a TV channel with a 93% audience? Would you find it acceptable if there were only one TV channel?
Seems to me like Google is more analogous to the TV remote.
As blog post mentions, more than half of Google searches do not result in an (out-)click, but stay on Google. So, the comparison is not completely outlandish.
I was around too. The problem is you think the Google of 2000 is the Google of 2019.
It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game.
It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.
I'm not sure applying antitrust laws (which have been in place for longer than anyone has been alive) to a monopoly (which has been acting monopolistic for years) qualifies as knee-jerk.
> I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity.
They were well behaved when they had competition to worry about. Once they effectively achieved a monopoly, ethics slowly got relegated to the back seat. They started leveraging the search monopoly to take over other industries, to undermine the open web, to engage in political censorship (hello Project Dragonfly) and much more.
Everything you say here is an excellent argument why search should not be a monopoly. We need competition to keep the search engines honest. Regulation won’t help, since orgs like the FCC are vulnerable to regulatory capture, and there’s no other way to "hold them to a higher standard" than taking your business elsewhere. As long as you continue using their products and thus earning them money, they don’t have any reason to care what you think about their business practises.
Isn't "project dragonfly" the Google search engine version for China? Google was trying to comply with the law. It's a law you might not agree with, but come on. The reason all these governments want Google split up is more censorship, not less. From torrents to negative reporting on EU commissars. From everyone's interpretation of hate speech to pages pointing out that sometimes social services are the abusers in children's lives, not so much their savior. Scihub, Schwartz, Snowden, Yellow vest demonstrations, Hong Kong student injuries and disappearances, Twitter making some tax agency officer's abuse of power a big deal, ...
That's why they want Google and Facebook broken. And of course, they're unwilling to spend any money, change any law anywhere, accommodate anyone, or put in any kind of effort whatsoever.
Fundamentally they want the internet to disappear. They want the control of information out of the hands of these idiotic American nerds that refuse to control information !
One the other hand, Google is so big that it could just ignore demands from smaller countries, especially when they are a small drop on the bucket in terms of revenue. Multiple small, regional companies can't afford to go against the government in their area and aren't present in other areas.
Right now the only country that could actually do anything about Google is the US, but they won't because we benefit from having the number one internet search company be American.
Also, the rank and file employees in Google are largely liberal and tend to make a big fuss over things like censorship. If Google is broken up a company that is more friendly to state interference could emerge and take it's place.
You've nailed it. Back when tech was the underdog, it was trying to make things more open, accessible, free-as-in-speech. I remember when the internet was very pro Ron Paul, and against government regulating technology (remember the losing battle against DMCA and DRM and the PATRIOT act?). Now that tech has become successful, the losers (those who want the control) are trying their hardest to create new narratives about tech companies' abuse / monopoly. Can tech be improved? Or course, but with small iterations, not complete overhauls.
Google was trying to gain the Chinese market by implementing political censorship. And once they knelt and swore allegiance to the Chinese regime, every other totalitarian regime around the world would be lining up with demands that they do the same in their countries.
Expecting Google to stand up to EU on anything is naïve. They already got massive fines, they don’t have the spine to risk more. They will do as the commisars dictates, whether they’re split up or not.
> Google was trying to gain the Chinese market by implementing political censorship. And once they knelt and swore allegiance to the Chinese regime, every other totalitarian regime around the world would be lining up with demands that they do the same in their countries.
I'm super glad that google didn't go through with dragonfly and it's really sad that they even went as far as they did. However, going through with it would have just made them the same as basically every other company.
Apple, microsoft, and basically every other company all operate in china, following chinese "law". Ironically, it's two of the worst/most hated companies (google, facebook) in the US, and most frequently demanded to be broken up here on HN, are two of the very, very few companies that haven't bent over for china.
I think it’s pretty clear that Google would have gone through with Dragonfly if it wasn’t for the protests against it, both from the public and Google employees.
In other words, their refraining from Dragonfly wasn’t because of moral courage or a principled stance. It was just to avoid a PR disaster.
And it was only because Dragonfly was leaked that that we ever heard of it. Imagine what other interesting programs they’ve got going on that we haven’t heard of yet.
When they started doing partisan Democrat shit like screwing with legitimate searches to place their favored information at the top or just simply diminish the importance of other points of view, they went evil big time. We can't survive this and still be free people. We will end up like China and it doesn't matter how we got there. If corporations are doing this to us, then corporations are the enemy of the people.
And look, the brave kids in Hong Kong are the ones we ought to be emulating RIGHT NOW because if we wait until we are as weak as them, we're screwed, just like they are. The reason they are fighting now is because they finally realized they have no future but a gunshot to the back of the head and a quick fall into a ditch, covered over by a bulldozer. That is your future under collectivism--the boot on your neck forever with no escape, which is what modern day China is right now.
The only way to avoid it is to have INDIVIDUAL rights and have government and its fascist corporations treat you like an individual and value your rights. Corporations are doing the collectivizing that our government can't do, but imagine a corporation with the power to kill you. That's the course America is on right now.
If you want my true opinion, I don't think we get back out now without bloodshed. The oligarchs believe us to be doormats and without push back we are doormats.
It's not so much the "anti-success" wars as that Google's story is a microcosm of the "tendency towards monopolies" that ultimately plague the upper end of capitalism.
Even as a Google Employee I agree that the concentration of marketshare and infrastructure that Google has distorts the market. But without radical intervention either by normal humans collectively or by governments using legislative and military power to shape corporations into their vision (again, probably collectively to be effective) the problem can't go away.
At the very least, we need to stop pretending that pointing our the problems of rent economies and monopoly tendencies in capitalism is not "an anti-success rhetoric" but rather a candid and informed discussion. Markets do not function well (defined as delivering utility to the largest number of people, we could of course define this in other ways) when you need to render the player's assets on a log scale.
> Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom”
For many people in the world, the US already is a country that matches this exact description - what with toothless antitrust laws, anti-union actions being tolerated, and what the ICE camps look like is something we don't even have to talk about.
Sure, China would be worse, but you should strive for more than just "the second worst developed country(tm)"
In fact, yours is the perfect argument why we in Europe should try to end the dominance of Google and break it up.
The US has what we might call "better" libel and slander laws than some actors in the EU and with the UK being a popular example of the most ridiculously bad laws historically.
"Hate speech" is such a glaring flaw in "freedom of speech (EU version)" that it invalidates the concept. These laws differ by country, which makes it a nightmare to follow. Some of them have historically been quite silly. There was a case in 2008, where a protestor was fined because he wrote something along the lines of "get lost, jerk" on a sign directed at the president. This eventually got overruled, but it should never have been a case at all. Then there are also the obvious cases such as Count Dancula or whatever he's called.
Has Europe’s pro-union climate led to more competitive software companies, or better pay and benefits for its software engineers?
Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits. How have the unions helped you in this regard? How have they helped your tech companies be more competitive in the global economy?
> Has Europe’s pro-union climate led to more competitive software companies, or better pay and benefits for its software engineers?
E.g. we get health insurance even if we quit or switch jobs.
The thing about European software companies tho is that they are hardly unionized at all.
>Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits.
I am not, to be honest. Sure, at a first glance it might seem the US devs make tons of money. But once you account for cost of living (like the astronomical rents in every major tech hub city) things do not look that rosy anymore. I know US people who make twice or trice what I make, and yet they live in dumps that you can hardly call apartment and they say they cannot afford any better. That, combined with the at-will nature of US employment, really doesn't strike me as desirable.
I like living in a country where I have a pretty awesome standard of living, a nice apartment that I don't have to share (unless I want to) and a safety net that is (at least for now) able to catch me should I ever struggle or become sick, so I won't go homeless.
Those things are largely thanks to work the unions did in the past and keep doing.
Europe is really diverse in wealth and business climate. The wealth gap between different European nations is so large that the US probably seems like the pinnacle of equality. It's hard to talk about Europe in general in this sense. I've worked as a developer, where I made less than $600-800 a month. Although I was underpaid, but it probably wouldn't have been possible to make double that in my country. I think you might want to dial your question in slightly more than "Europe", perhaps "Western Europe".
> they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity
Were. When though? The founders said in their original university paper that selling advertising was wrong and would inherently corrupt a search engine. Of course once they realised how much money was being made in search, that fundamental tenet of don't be evil lapsed before the phrase was even coined.
History and Google's progress of updates seems to have borne their claim out. Google is worse than it was, in good measure as they have twisted results to push more sales. It's a shopping search first and foremost, and frankly not a very good search any more. With an obscene overreach of data gathering that is almost impossible to evade. Every opportunity to gather data they gather more. Remember the Google war driving guy who "accidentally" gathered all that extra wifi info from streetview cars? Entirely by accident. How many believe in that "accident" who isn't on Google payroll?
So no, I don't see it as anti-success, more that they became far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive - e.g. demanding everyone train the self-driving fleet to pass a captcha. Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition.
Given they have the data, and the holy trinity of search, advertising and monitoring, regulation is not enough. Split off advertising or analytics and monitoring, or break it up some other way. That's to serve the public interest, not as some anti-success crusade.
> Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition.
That proposition failed precisely because it was regarded - rightly or wrongly, it's not clear that it matters - as a "far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive" endeavor.
I thought it was more that the necessary licensing fell through, or was agreed and then fell apart. Added to which the Google Books interface was and is dire.
Your post and post history is a great illustration of what I've talked about before here on ycombinator.
Lots of your posts I can agree with, you're a reasonable individual. so why the huge blind spot when it comes to this topic?
When they colluded to force wages down, you defended them. There is absolutely no need for you to. And yet I know you will not stop even after this comment to you.
For what purpose have you written this abolute garbage bag of neoliberal-strung-together-with-gum-and-baling wire comment?
Your post has far too many platitudes and half-ideas and gobbledeygook. "anti success rhetoric"? how bout I classify your post in 3 words too? "Corporate apologist rhetoric"
not a single. sentence. has merit. it reads like ad copy or a poorly programmed bot.
You even put air quotes on "freedom" I mean, come. ON.
I try not to make too big a habit of calling people out, because that leads to poor commenting quality on my end but you sir have put a really, really bad comment on display.
I invite others to read each sentence, one by one, and see if they even follow.
Do they?
They do not.
They read like someone who wants to defend google and just threw up a bunch of worthless words in order to confuse.
Now I already suspect your reasons, but perhaps you can enlighten me and the others here how I could possibly take your opinion seriously?
The key piece missing is regulation, which he called out. It sounds like you disagree with him on going as far to break up a company like Google (which it sounds like you support).
But then you turned this into a personal attack and questioning his motivation, which you already “suspect”.
Regulation is missing, in my opinion, and breaking them up doesn’t address the problem and is a dicey proposition all together. But attacking people is breaking rules and only makes you lose credibility.
> what I've talked about before here on ycombinator
Please don’t lower the quality of discussion like this. It’d be nice if you could discuss the content of the comment itself, politely, and refrain from attacking the poster by claiming they have a hidden agenda.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, and especially please don't cross into personal attack.
We're here for curious conversation. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Are you reacting to the blog post, or something else? I didn't see any anti-success rhetoric, only anti-monopoly rhetoric. But for the record, success isn't sacred, especially if people succeed at something that sucks. I'd be decidedly anti-success where genocidal dictators were concerned, for example. I'd be explicitly against their ambition, their drive, and their personal fulfillment and growth journeys, sorry.
I disagree here. Billionaires are often pretty awesome. Once someone gets way more money than the could ever need, they tend to pursue other activities that they enjoy more than making money, which is frequently giving it away (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) or starting moonshot space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic. Even Zuckerberg donates to projects like these.
Rich people take on projects that may not be viable yet, but are important nonetheless, essentially filling the role that government used to play in R&D.
Yeah. And even if their hobby is tearing up cash to mulch their back yard, I don't think it inherently harms anyone. There's a lot of talk about a wealth gap but it still feels like those caught on the wrong side are more prosperous than they used to be (eg they have smart phones and many other modern conveniences which didn't exist a few decades ago).
It is not anti success. Tons of us got good value and watched Google do great things.
Now that they have that success, lacking threats, the value is evaporating.
Lots of people do not care how much others make. If the value is there, world better, game on!
But, getting very large amounts of money and those things aren't really happening and lots of people will definitely express negatives about it.
As they should.
I see links are back in my search results now. But my trust is not back with those links. I have found all the other search tools I need and am using them, encouraging greater success.
These companies with almost impossible to think about type large amounts of money can be doing better by people. Expecting that makes great sense.
And where that is not effective, seeking various remedies does too.
Competition, use of the State, protest, all on the table.
Anyone concerned about the potential impact of those things is completely free to avoid them. Just make sure the value to people is there and they won't really care about the money.
Knee jerk, break them up helped create this net we are seeing consolidated and increasingly devoid of value.
People calling for that again is understandable.
Finally, breakups are super expensive. A real, material threat of that happening makes for a real, material cost and risk assessment, which can justify hedging all of that with better value to the people too.
> It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric
Oh, come on!
Google is not doing its job well, other could do parts of it much better, but Google is too big to allow others to enter its same space, so we need alternatives that can put pressure on Google more than we need Google.
The "people hate success" rhetoric is so sad it can't even be measured.
i don't see anywhere in the linked article that talks about breaking up google, so it's hard to know what you're responding to. the article does make a central claim that google has an information monopoly, and that the search market needs competition (and oh, look at that, they made a new search engine!).
search isn't a naturally monopolistic market, because although there are some initial high fixed costs, much of those costs can be roughly scaled with size. there aren't really any other significant barriers to entry.
marginally but noticeably better search results (e.g., pagerank) did provide an early advantage for google, which is how it established its monopoly over time in the first place (combined with the ad auction model from overture, which gave it economic & political might), but that advantage has eroded with its lack of focus on search. google also has a giant suite of data gathering products but it's not clear that those provide a true competitive advantage in search (again, search results aren't much better than the competition).
the other interesting characteristic of search is that its competition isn't necessarily zero-sum. a user might do the same search on multiple search engines, providing each competitor with a full marginal revenue opportunity, rather than only one competitor winning the business (as in classic competition).
because of all this, i'm neutral on the breakup argument but am bullish on the "increasing competition" argument for search.
548 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] thread> Paraphrasing Monty Python: “What has Google ever done for us?”. They have done an awful lot for society, for the web and probably saved it a few times a long time ago. But it is time to also see them as the empire they have become. And empires must fall.
I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search business. We really need more diversity and competition in this space, not just for quality of results and convenience of services; but for society as a whole.
The article rightly points out that Google is a new "Cambridge Analytica" (even on steroids), we should not passively wait for our democracies to break down because information is controlled by a single private entity. Let's step out of our comfort zones, try new products, support the ones we like!
There are plenty of alternatives. But people don't use them as much because they are worse.
Consider Bing ( http://www.bing.com/ ). It is backed by a company even bigger than Google. MSFT's market cap is 1.155T; Google's is 899B. MSFT is 30% bigger than Google. Why haven't they put more resources on their Bing search engine? Spend a few billion dollars, hire away some of the top search engine experts from Google, and build away!
No ads, no algorithms, no bullshit ranking and metrics, no tracking, just pure boolean search with a heavy handed spam filter and jam packed with features for the sake of utility and not engagement.
>just pure boolean search
So if I just repeat the word Facebook a hundred times in my personal website, I'd rank higher than facebook.com when people search for "facebook"?
I think simple boolean search works for things like searching books in a library, where you can assume good faith from all the authors. But in the web you can't do that. It's just too easy to game.
Maybe you should've disclosed that you work at this company?
'far-fetched' (meaning implausible) should be 'far-reaching', right?
One of the most amusing patterns, both in newspapers and on HN, is how often whenever Facebook does something wrong, the response is "this is why Facebook and Google should be regulated/destroyed/broken up".
I don’t trust a browser nor a search engine if an ad imperium paid for it and gives it away for free.
Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers?
Hey, I work on Cliqz' adblocker (open-source here: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker). Cliqz browser comes built-in with adblocking, anti-tracking, anti-phishing and private search built-in so that users are protected by default.
You can also install another one if you prefer since all Firefox extension are also available from Cliqz! But the one built-in is pretty good already[^1] and we're happy to get more feedback about how we can improve it!
Finally, Cliqz search is also available standalone now so feel free to give it a try! https://beta.cliqz.com/
[^1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
Yeah, that’s why I don’t trust chrome or google search.
Still, I was referring to the Burda conglomerate. Why would we want to replace one ad giant’s tech with that of another (more regional) ad tycoon?
Lol, yeah. The HN headline is like "hell yeah, break up and/or nationalise Google/Alphabet," but the link is "get our product please think of us poor little oppressed advertising agencies" and, uh, no.
I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g
Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your query string.
“This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once”
Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch back to google because what’s the point?
I really do hope to one day get off of google though.
An example would be something like "Rick and Morty episodes." I know google will give me a list with recent/upcoming episode names and air dates for pretty much any show. DDG will link me wikipedia and fan wikis. I make a "<show> episodes" query anytime I want to know when the next episode of something is released.
DDG's knowledge graph (and/or query parsing) is just so limited I skip it anytime I think google will be able to produce the answer directly. Similarly, there are things I'm confident asking a voice assistant, and there are things I won't even bother trying. If it's something I'd ask an assistant, I'm skipping DDG.
Don't you have fiduciary duty for the owners of the company to maximize profits? Why do you want competition?
Whether Cliqz would become a bully like Google if successful or not, I believe it's impossible to answer.
But at least, we know, that the data we collect from our users to build the search engine is totally anonymous and is used only to build search and the browser.
So, in the case that Cliqz would turn evil, I would stop using it, knowing for a fact that there are no sessions about me on their data, none.
Someone on the thread mentioned fiduciary duties, true that companies must maximize profit, but that does not mean becoming a gear on global surveillance conglomerate.
EU should have its own search engine. They should subsidize this effort and have Google pay for it.
But the European taxpayer should absolutely pay for it.
I'm unsure if that continues to be true if the EU siphons money off of them to build a direct competitor.
Or in some other other gradual way. Anyway: it's not a binary over-night thing based on a whim of some dictator.
Either way, I fully trust the competency of the people running these things; they have proven themselves in the past. I'm writing that as a Swedish citizen who is a little bit skeptic about whole the EU thing. This part though - I trust these EU bureaucrats. My impression is that there's a team of very sharp people working on this.
A basic web crawler is not. A semantic web crawler and associated search engine capable of mapping real human input to useful information and dealing with the heterogeneous structure of data on the web, with low millisecond latency?
Bing has been working on that problem for years now, how come they haven't caught up more with Google?
But then again, there are also a lot of other problems Microsoft haven't been able to solve...
Need not to be more complicated than that. It is not like Google is the same darling it once was at home either. The public now has an appetite to go after US big techs not vice versa.
And Google won't have a valid defense against it, unless the US government comes to play
It will also help insofar as site owners will be less inclined to block "EUROPEAN SEARCH INDEX CRAWLER", just as they're less inclined to block google, despite being inclined to block "small time search index".
The creative, non-capital intensive part where having a diverse ecosystem will help the most is building a layer on top of the index to actually find stuff - e.g. a bit like how duckduckgo is built atop bing's index.
Google already payed a bit, now EU can begin :D
Why?
Brittle empires fall.
The Chinese empire has a history (including mutations to its government) spanning thousands of years.
[Edited for unnecessary snark; my apologies]
At the end of any given dynasty, it would be hard to say whether the empire is truly crumbling, or merely transitioning to a new dynasty. Who knows, maybe 1,000 years from now communism and the period of strife in the 20th century will just be seen as an unstable period preceding a dynastic transition.
But no, it wasn't just the end of the government, it also meant losing almost 30% of its territory.
https://imgur.com/r/mapporn/Cdi6KOL
> In the same sense that the US and UK are empires.
UK was an empire, and it's already fallen, it is now on the brink of losing even the Kingdom and becoming an Island hosting borders and customs.
U.S. is not really an empire, never was. It is more the mandator of many bad things that happened in the last 70 years, that turned many countries into U.S. colonies through "exporting democracy" which actually translated too many times as "planting dictatorships befriended with U.S.A.". But it was good for U.S. and only U.S.
That's why Cliqz has reasons to exist, U.S. is an unreliable ally, even more now and Europe needs to
> building the foundation for a sovereign digital future of Europe
> develop digital key technologies as a European alternative to the market dominating US platforms.
> If We Don’t Act Now, We Will Become a Digital Colony
The point was that every empire falls sooner or later and that it happened to China as well.
Disclosure: I work at Cliqz.
So is it necessary that every grouping of man, "must fall", because there exists "coercion" in those groupings?
Just as a matter of full disclosure:
My own view is that any grouping must fall only when the grouping provides no, or very little, actual benefit to it's constituent members. Western Rome fell when people in Lutecia, Londonus, or even Ravenna were no longer deriving real benefit from being inside the Roman polity. Which arguably was long before Odoacer finally had enough and put an end to the charade.
While it's ridiculous to view wealth as a finite thing, it's just as ridiculous to imply hysteria over wealth inequality is based in ignorance. There is a long-standing trend of capitalists treating lower classes as exploitable resources undeserving of the means to have a healthy and happy existence beyond what keeps them productive inside the constraints of the current system.
Median salaries haven't been stagnant while the rich get richer because that's what's best for everyone, it's because that's what's best for the people with control.
You should at least acknowledge your bias by being transparent enough to show you have a vested interest. It's really disingenuous otherwise, and makes it hard to take what you have to say at face value.
Though it's important to remember that not everyone on here has English as their first language, and we should generally be considerate of that when reading people's comments.
But a search engine is only a smart part of the whole, where and how we get the information.
If you slice your market in convenient ways, you can make any company a monopoly.
If the answer is privacy, that’s a niche already occupied by DDG.
What other ways could a web search engine differentiate itself to be worth customers using more than one?
These vertical search engines, at at least in the comparison shopping space, were never that good to begin with. Shopping (and possibly travel) is just the easiest vertical to monetize. All the sites were spammy, pages were optimized for clickouts, and results were optimized for yield, not relevancy, because everything was an ad. There's a reason none of them were recognizable brands and they all depended on Google for traffic.
So yes, not just what niche is there, but how can you make it profitable--or even break-even. Would you donate $10 per year to a non-profit search engine?
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-mon...
i really miss using an image itself for query terms.
The problem with monopolies is when the company decides to e.g. price gouge or gets lazy by not innovating. Companies can only really get away with this and survive when they have a monopoly.
Monopolies also kill competing products and deter other companies from even attempting to enter the market - so you might love the product of a monopoly right now but if the monopoly had never existed an even better product could be available today.
I think people generally love Google's products but it would be good to see more competition. The upfront investment you would need to create a competing search engine is prohibitively high so most companies aren't going to attempt to make their own.
- a search engine for blogs
- a search engine for dev questions
- a search engine for shopping
- a search engine for diy
etc.
Im really tired of sites trying to centralize and own this content. The key to decentralizing and empowering individuals to own their content is enabling distribution and discovery. New search engines are essential to the web we want.
That would be nice especially since hopefully it would mean there would be a search engine I could use and not get shopping results. It seems like anytime I search for something I get shopping results so I have to be more specific and type more which is inconvenient. Wikipedia used to be the first result for many things I search for now it pretty much never is. It's been getting worse every year.
On a pretty unrelated note, it would also be nice if I could search the play app store without getting games in my results. There's pretty much a game related to everything I want to search for. Very annoying.
I'm pretty sure that we won't see a significant blog search engine again until blogs regain some of the power they lost to social media.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
Rather unfortunate typo, that.
most it's saved, some is lost forever
I see two problems with their approach:
1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset.
More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and get it in front of them at first try, without the user having to tweak anything.
2. Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product.
Similar to how ICE cars had "monopoly" over transportation and the time for change has thankfully come. Not because monopolies are bad, but because electric cars are so freaking awesome.
Google perfected what the 'best search engine' is to 99% of population. This comes at an expense of really annoying 1% of users but it is the price they are willing to pay. To de-throne Google you really need to cater to broad population with a product that will be better both at capturing intent and delivering and presenting relevant results. This may or not come with a different business model.
> One could rightfully counter that Google has a good product. They even offer it for free.
But Google Ads are not free. If Search is the product, then advertisers are the customers, not users.
I second that. It's somewhat reassuring to know that others realize that as well. Most people just have no idea how marketing and now 'deep learned' algorithms (applied psychology) make puppets out of human beings.
I consider "user feed control" (that users choose what, how, where, when and why things are presented to them) of equal importance to e.g. democracy as far as human freedom is concerned. But the current manipulation is so insiduous that from now to mainstream awareness to generally implementing solutions is a long, long ways away.
> at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me
I think this tends close to an upper bound — not many people willing to pay, and even fewer at that level — but certainly one more anecdotal proof that premium services are totally viable for a certain group. The question is 'how big' that group, what's the market for that, but I'd wager it's enough to sustain a few 'premium' businesses (or alternative plans) for most common services (some are harder; search notably).
When a Wikipedia/encyclopedia article is what I'm looking for, why is Google showing articles?
Wikipedia used to be the top result.
I've noticed things on the spectrum of articles <-> blogspam crowding out the top results in many queries, and that it's substantially more difficult to find forum content discussing related topics to the query. It's a shame, as I think there is often more interesting content on such forums.
Google's algo changes since about panda have been burying good web sites and content while bringing quicker answers and 'sanitized' aka semi-censored results to the top.
Some of this is over reaction to SEO and trying to out do the spammers - but the collateral damage to the results and thus the end users who believe that google brings the truth is hard to calculate.
Combine that with regulation like dmca, right to be forgotten and others.. results are even more censored, and the general population does not know what they are not seeing, as they still trust google to be bringing the truth.
worry about bad PR from various factions - tweak the algorithms.. and you can say for sure that the results the more adolescent google brought a decade ago were often more of what people were looking for.. and the results today are often like cheap irradiated / sanitized snacks, not the full enchilada that was once a G search away.
Much of this started happening when whats his name became that adult in the room and started putting the finger on the scale to change what millions could find, it's gotten more and more censored every update since then, and less transparent about that.
in my biased opinion.. your searches and the results will vary. I still use other engines for different things, and I feel strongly that we need more search engines. Anyone who wants to create a better adult engine, let me know.
One of the reasons for breaking up monopolies is that they make it harder for newcomers to build something better.
So You get Google Search Inc. Adsense Inc. AdWords Inc, Gmail Inc, I imagine.
This would be just restructuring, Googlers are too smart to get hold back by this and they probably already have an emergency plan if it remotely comes as a possibility.
My point is that if your company sells information rather physical products then breaking it up is pointless.
When Bell Telephone was split it was cut along geographic lines. That would also not work on a tech company for obvious reasons --- software knows no borders. I don't know of a sensible way to break up tech giants because the efficiencies of scale create a natural winner take all market.
Search, inc is still going to want ads, presumably, so they'll contract with someone. Setup rules for the contract. Maybe require at least N ad providers with each getting a minimum of Y% of pageviews, and contract terms have to be FRAND.
Strongly restrict personal information passing between the companies.
Or, i guess you could go all Bell on them and divide the US into different territories and have Pacific Google and Southewestern Google and what not. Would be kind of weird to geofence search and ads though.
Bell was broken up because they owned Western Electric and used it to vertically integrate the telco stack for the entire country.
A hypothetical breakup of Alphabet could mirror the breakup of the Bell system, as Alphabet controls the data collection -> advertisement stack. Spin off Search + AdWords as an independent business, while services targeting data collection services that feed it (Chrome/Chromium, Android, GSuite, Google Home, etc).
Personally I could see a lot of consumer benefits.
Is Google somehow suppressing the creation of a good search engine? No, on the contrary it has created the best web search engine we've ever seen. I would personally be sad if you took it away from me, and I suspect that 99% or more of its users would be in the same boat (don't judge the zeitgeist by web forum echo chambers). You break up monopolies when they are harming users, not in order to cause harm to users.
With the world being what it is today, Google Search is in an extremely powerful position. We depend a lot on information that we find on the web. And these free form search queries are the best UI we have at the moment to retrieve it.
It is a good thing that Google Search is good and is getting better, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they wield a lot of power that needs to be checked somehow.
In the case of petroleum fueled cars, they are significantly contributing to a massive climate emergency and should be banned regardless of the existence of a superior product. In the case of the Google search engine... Well in the case of the Google company, it should be forced to split up because it is a massive monopoly that hinders competitors from entering any of their dominated markets, and they use their domination of one market to increase their dominance of another.
And this is should be done regardless of the existence of superior products. Goggle as a single company is making the world a worse place, and the right thing to do in that scenario is to split it up.
Would smaller farms with smaller fields and a larger variety of crops be better for the environment? Would those farmers grow more organic food?
I don't think that this is black and white. But smaller companies would likely be a whiter shade of gray in some cases.
But highly engineered products are often ideal for:
1. Having a longer shelf life. (Ideal for countries without the same standards for food preservation) 2. Having yields large enough to feed populations. 3. Increased ability for transport.
I agree that there are gray areas, but it's these qualities that help feed a world.
Also,
> With 93% of the search market, Google’s algorithms decide what becomes truth. Can you think of a TV channel with a 93% audience? Would you find it acceptable if there were only one TV channel?
Seems to me like Google is more analogous to the TV remote.
I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity.
This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive.
Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!!
Regulate them, hold them to a higher standard!
But Will breaking them up do anything except destroy them and just empower the next competitor ( who will have to learn the same lessons?
Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom”
Are imbalances in power great? Nope
Are monopolies awesome? Most never
Are billionaires awesome? Nope
But this is the stage we are at due to an interconnect global economy. We built this.
Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything
What number of search engines is a good number, why? This line of thinking is subjective.
It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game.
It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.
They were well behaved when they had competition to worry about. Once they effectively achieved a monopoly, ethics slowly got relegated to the back seat. They started leveraging the search monopoly to take over other industries, to undermine the open web, to engage in political censorship (hello Project Dragonfly) and much more.
Everything you say here is an excellent argument why search should not be a monopoly. We need competition to keep the search engines honest. Regulation won’t help, since orgs like the FCC are vulnerable to regulatory capture, and there’s no other way to "hold them to a higher standard" than taking your business elsewhere. As long as you continue using their products and thus earning them money, they don’t have any reason to care what you think about their business practises.
That's why they want Google and Facebook broken. And of course, they're unwilling to spend any money, change any law anywhere, accommodate anyone, or put in any kind of effort whatsoever.
Fundamentally they want the internet to disappear. They want the control of information out of the hands of these idiotic American nerds that refuse to control information !
Right now the only country that could actually do anything about Google is the US, but they won't because we benefit from having the number one internet search company be American.
Also, the rank and file employees in Google are largely liberal and tend to make a big fuss over things like censorship. If Google is broken up a company that is more friendly to state interference could emerge and take it's place.
Google was trying to gain the Chinese market by implementing political censorship. And once they knelt and swore allegiance to the Chinese regime, every other totalitarian regime around the world would be lining up with demands that they do the same in their countries.
Expecting Google to stand up to EU on anything is naïve. They already got massive fines, they don’t have the spine to risk more. They will do as the commisars dictates, whether they’re split up or not.
I'm super glad that google didn't go through with dragonfly and it's really sad that they even went as far as they did. However, going through with it would have just made them the same as basically every other company.
Apple, microsoft, and basically every other company all operate in china, following chinese "law". Ironically, it's two of the worst/most hated companies (google, facebook) in the US, and most frequently demanded to be broken up here on HN, are two of the very, very few companies that haven't bent over for china.
In other words, their refraining from Dragonfly wasn’t because of moral courage or a principled stance. It was just to avoid a PR disaster.
And it was only because Dragonfly was leaked that that we ever heard of it. Imagine what other interesting programs they’ve got going on that we haven’t heard of yet.
And look, the brave kids in Hong Kong are the ones we ought to be emulating RIGHT NOW because if we wait until we are as weak as them, we're screwed, just like they are. The reason they are fighting now is because they finally realized they have no future but a gunshot to the back of the head and a quick fall into a ditch, covered over by a bulldozer. That is your future under collectivism--the boot on your neck forever with no escape, which is what modern day China is right now.
The only way to avoid it is to have INDIVIDUAL rights and have government and its fascist corporations treat you like an individual and value your rights. Corporations are doing the collectivizing that our government can't do, but imagine a corporation with the power to kill you. That's the course America is on right now.
If you want my true opinion, I don't think we get back out now without bloodshed. The oligarchs believe us to be doormats and without push back we are doormats.
Even as a Google Employee I agree that the concentration of marketshare and infrastructure that Google has distorts the market. But without radical intervention either by normal humans collectively or by governments using legislative and military power to shape corporations into their vision (again, probably collectively to be effective) the problem can't go away.
At the very least, we need to stop pretending that pointing our the problems of rent economies and monopoly tendencies in capitalism is not "an anti-success rhetoric" but rather a candid and informed discussion. Markets do not function well (defined as delivering utility to the largest number of people, we could of course define this in other ways) when you need to render the player's assets on a log scale.
For many people in the world, the US already is a country that matches this exact description - what with toothless antitrust laws, anti-union actions being tolerated, and what the ICE camps look like is something we don't even have to talk about.
Sure, China would be worse, but you should strive for more than just "the second worst developed country(tm)"
In fact, yours is the perfect argument why we in Europe should try to end the dominance of Google and break it up.
In the case of search engine balkanisation (I'd be in favour of it), I'd think that eurosearch would, on average, be more censorious than amerifind.
Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits. How have the unions helped you in this regard? How have they helped your tech companies be more competitive in the global economy?
E.g. we get health insurance even if we quit or switch jobs.
The thing about European software companies tho is that they are hardly unionized at all.
>Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits.
I am not, to be honest. Sure, at a first glance it might seem the US devs make tons of money. But once you account for cost of living (like the astronomical rents in every major tech hub city) things do not look that rosy anymore. I know US people who make twice or trice what I make, and yet they live in dumps that you can hardly call apartment and they say they cannot afford any better. That, combined with the at-will nature of US employment, really doesn't strike me as desirable.
I like living in a country where I have a pretty awesome standard of living, a nice apartment that I don't have to share (unless I want to) and a safety net that is (at least for now) able to catch me should I ever struggle or become sick, so I won't go homeless.
Those things are largely thanks to work the unions did in the past and keep doing.
If breaking up the American tech companies helped disperse jobs outside of Silicon Valley, that would be a good thing.
The title may be, but the article was not. Was a reasoned statement for why those folks bothered to build another search engine.
It was an inspirational company and story that many rooted for due to its culture and mission.
Were. When though? The founders said in their original university paper that selling advertising was wrong and would inherently corrupt a search engine. Of course once they realised how much money was being made in search, that fundamental tenet of don't be evil lapsed before the phrase was even coined.
History and Google's progress of updates seems to have borne their claim out. Google is worse than it was, in good measure as they have twisted results to push more sales. It's a shopping search first and foremost, and frankly not a very good search any more. With an obscene overreach of data gathering that is almost impossible to evade. Every opportunity to gather data they gather more. Remember the Google war driving guy who "accidentally" gathered all that extra wifi info from streetview cars? Entirely by accident. How many believe in that "accident" who isn't on Google payroll?
So no, I don't see it as anti-success, more that they became far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive - e.g. demanding everyone train the self-driving fleet to pass a captcha. Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition.
Given they have the data, and the holy trinity of search, advertising and monitoring, regulation is not enough. Split off advertising or analytics and monitoring, or break it up some other way. That's to serve the public interest, not as some anti-success crusade.
That proposition failed precisely because it was regarded - rightly or wrongly, it's not clear that it matters - as a "far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive" endeavor.
Lots of your posts I can agree with, you're a reasonable individual. so why the huge blind spot when it comes to this topic?
When they colluded to force wages down, you defended them. There is absolutely no need for you to. And yet I know you will not stop even after this comment to you.
For what purpose have you written this abolute garbage bag of neoliberal-strung-together-with-gum-and-baling wire comment?
Your post has far too many platitudes and half-ideas and gobbledeygook. "anti success rhetoric"? how bout I classify your post in 3 words too? "Corporate apologist rhetoric"
not a single. sentence. has merit. it reads like ad copy or a poorly programmed bot.
You even put air quotes on "freedom" I mean, come. ON.
I try not to make too big a habit of calling people out, because that leads to poor commenting quality on my end but you sir have put a really, really bad comment on display.
I invite others to read each sentence, one by one, and see if they even follow.
Do they?
They do not.
They read like someone who wants to defend google and just threw up a bunch of worthless words in order to confuse.
Now I already suspect your reasons, but perhaps you can enlighten me and the others here how I could possibly take your opinion seriously?
But then you turned this into a personal attack and questioning his motivation, which you already “suspect”.
Regulation is missing, in my opinion, and breaking them up doesn’t address the problem and is a dicey proposition all together. But attacking people is breaking rules and only makes you lose credibility.
Please don’t lower the quality of discussion like this. It’d be nice if you could discuss the content of the comment itself, politely, and refrain from attacking the poster by claiming they have a hidden agenda.
We're here for curious conversation. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I disagree here. Billionaires are often pretty awesome. Once someone gets way more money than the could ever need, they tend to pursue other activities that they enjoy more than making money, which is frequently giving it away (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) or starting moonshot space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic. Even Zuckerberg donates to projects like these.
Rich people take on projects that may not be viable yet, but are important nonetheless, essentially filling the role that government used to play in R&D.
generalizations are false a lot of the times
Now that they have that success, lacking threats, the value is evaporating.
Lots of people do not care how much others make. If the value is there, world better, game on!
But, getting very large amounts of money and those things aren't really happening and lots of people will definitely express negatives about it.
As they should.
I see links are back in my search results now. But my trust is not back with those links. I have found all the other search tools I need and am using them, encouraging greater success.
These companies with almost impossible to think about type large amounts of money can be doing better by people. Expecting that makes great sense.
And where that is not effective, seeking various remedies does too.
Competition, use of the State, protest, all on the table.
Anyone concerned about the potential impact of those things is completely free to avoid them. Just make sure the value to people is there and they won't really care about the money.
Knee jerk, break them up helped create this net we are seeing consolidated and increasingly devoid of value.
People calling for that again is understandable.
Finally, breakups are super expensive. A real, material threat of that happening makes for a real, material cost and risk assessment, which can justify hedging all of that with better value to the people too.
Oh, come on!
Google is not doing its job well, other could do parts of it much better, but Google is too big to allow others to enter its same space, so we need alternatives that can put pressure on Google more than we need Google.
The "people hate success" rhetoric is so sad it can't even be measured.
search isn't a naturally monopolistic market, because although there are some initial high fixed costs, much of those costs can be roughly scaled with size. there aren't really any other significant barriers to entry.
marginally but noticeably better search results (e.g., pagerank) did provide an early advantage for google, which is how it established its monopoly over time in the first place (combined with the ad auction model from overture, which gave it economic & political might), but that advantage has eroded with its lack of focus on search. google also has a giant suite of data gathering products but it's not clear that those provide a true competitive advantage in search (again, search results aren't much better than the competition).
the other interesting characteristic of search is that its competition isn't necessarily zero-sum. a user might do the same search on multiple search engines, providing each competitor with a full marginal revenue opportunity, rather than only one competitor winning the business (as in classic competition).
because of all this, i'm neutral on the breakup argument but am bullish on the "increasing competition" argument for search.