We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day “Google obviously has a monopoly in search. There are all sorts of questions about whether it is abusing that monopoly or not. But I distrust the power of the EU regulators to make things better. I think the technology industry is dynamic enough that the Google monopoly will not last for ever. In practice, anything [the EU does] to micromanage the Google product will produce a cure that’s worse than the disease.”
– Peter Thiel (quote is taken from the Financial Times, which is behind a registration wall).
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
I do not think the word ‘monopoly’ means what he thinks it means, as there are plenty of competitors even if most people do not choose to use them. I mostly use DuckDuckGo for searches.
Perry is correct – Google does not have a monopoly on “search” or even computer search engines.
But then the Financial Times is written by rather ignorant people.
Indeed. Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo does not (yet) measure up, as it does not provide the number of results for a particular search (if anyone knows of a search engine as comprehensive as Google that does that, I’d greatly appreciate the tip). I strongly dislike Google as a company because of their attitudes with regards to…pretty much everything, including the fact that they are way too omnipresent for my liking. But no one is forcing me to use it to the exclusion of alternatives.
Alisa, Ixquick. And it doesn’t track you.
Bing is the largest alternative – sadly Microsoft has much the same establishment left positions as Google itself.
And, yes, it does effect how they run their search engine – “it is all mathematics, there is no human imput” was exposed as nonsense, years ago.
Ixquick and Startpage (I think they’re basically the same thing) run off the Google search engine; they just layer on an anonymizing feature. (Which I very much like; I always use Startpage for that reason.)
But even if Google were a monopoly (it’s not), so what? Who is harmed by that? It’s free, FFS. The absolute worst you can say about it is that its algorithm skews the results toward favored sites. OK. And? Who exactly is harmed by that in any economic sense? And the only excuse for limiting “monopolies” is the economic harm they (purportedly) cause. That’s not the case here. The EU simply has no basis for involving itself in this matter.
Kudo’s to Mr. Thiel for the overall comment, but that first sentence makes him sound like an idiot.
I don’t like being tracked, but the thing that finally got me to stop using Google a couple of years ago was running identical searches on different computers and seeing how different the results were. Google prioritizes information about the browser, OS, IP address, and other things that they deem relevant over the parameters of the search itself, so you will get different results depending on where you search from. Google may have the most extensive database but, for me, the consistency of the results is just as important.
Thanks VftS and Laird – I’ll check them out. I anonymize Google by using browser addons, but if these are as good as, it would be worth taking my business away from Google entirely.
The fact that Google is free seems to me as being beside the point:, as I could stop using it even if I was paying for it. And, it is not really free in the wider sense of the word (as nothing else is), the only difference being that while I, as a Google user, am not paying for it with my money, I am paying for it with my information (unless I’m going to some length and hide it). I am not its customer, but rather its product (which it sells to its real customers, the advertisers).
The EU has previous form here. Does anyone remember the EU’s (failed) attempt to build a search engine. I can’t find anything about it now, but remember the reports (and skepticism) at the time – about 10 years ago. They had earmarked 400 million euros if I recall.
Never happened. For God’s sake, who would have used the bloody thing?
What Tedd said. I avoid Google and some others not just because of their ubiquitous stalking behavior, but also because they don’t return repeatable results that can be used to adjust arguments. I want a search engine that I enter in an argument, and it returns an un’corrected’ string of hits. I look at the hits and recalibrate my argument.
Instead, with Google and others I enter an argument, Google’s algorithms adjust my argument to what it thinks I want and returns hits. So looking at those hits I recalibrate my argument and it once again ‘corrects’ it to give me what I ‘really’ want.
It is impossible to refine a precise, narrow search with Google and other ‘correcting’ search engines.
I really liked the original Alta Vista. But when the Yahoos bought it, the turned it into Google wannabe. Had they left it alone, they would have retained a smaller but very reliable market share from serious searchers, by which I mean people who are not looking for necessarily popular pages but are searching deep into the net.
Somebody should start a search engine called something like “Deep Net” that follows rigorous search argument application.
The absolute worst you can say about it is that its algorithm skews the results toward favored sites. OK. And? Who exactly is harmed by that in any economic sense?
Internet search is a means by which immense numbers of people perceive the world. To have this mechanism under the sole control of a single unaccountable institution is very dangerous.
For instance, Google collaborates with the government of China to make inconvenient webcontent disappear. The content may still be accessible if the user knows the URL, but anyone searching for it will never see it.
The censorship doesn’t have to be absolute. If 9 out of 10 stories on a topic go away, if 9 out of 10 incidents of some type are hidden, that’s a very powerful tool for shaping public awareness.
Samizdata has noted how the establishment media promote “climate change” hysteria and suppress “climate change” skepticism. This prospiracy requires the collaboration of thousands of agents.
Google’s hyperdomination of internet search would enable a similar result at a single point of intervention.
As for economic disadvantages – Google can destroy or inflate the reputations of businesses or products while pretending impartiality. Google is supposed to be a sort of “common carrier”; but it can put its thumb on scales invisibly.
Nothing much can be done through regulation about Google doing this. However, not letting Google monopolize or de facto monopolize search would subject Google to the discipline of competition.
Mid, I don’t see how Google can tailor your search results for you, if you have your cookies (including flash ones) disabled?
What Rich said, other than this:
How can that be done?
OK, I now see Tedd’s comment which I missed before.
Mid:
You and I are simpatico on this. I was a big fan of AltaVista and didn’t switch to Google until they implemented similar Boolean syntax. Now I mostly use DuckDuckGo. It seems to use syntax similar to AltaVista’s, but that capability is undocumented (so far as I can tell), which is annoying.
I have now, very superficially, compared Ixquick, Startpage and Google, and all three give substantially different numbers of results for the same search…
Laird, they are by the same company, but one runs off Google, while the other off other engines.
Stuck-Record
This one?
Quaero
Cheers
Thanks, Alisa. I knew they were the same company but thought they were interchangeable. I now see that they’re not. I will need to start using both.
Yep, it sounds like combining the two should provide the best of both worlds for non-trivial searches. I’m going to experiment further – thanks for the tip again.
Tedd,
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo with marginally less muddled hits than Google. But it isn’t at all like the original Alta Vista was.
Curiously, I abandoned YouTube when they started messing around with the recommendations that show up on the right hand side. I used to treat each page as a fork in a tree and would scroll back and forth remembering other videos I wanted to see on prior screens. Then, one day, they weren’t there any more. It was new ones every time. Now YouTube not only requires the browser page to “phone home” every time you re-watch a page, they won’t even let you replay a part of a song or video without first “phoning home” and reporting your behavior to the User Stazi that build all of the behavior files. The YT changes including the volatile recommendations and user stalking all began when Don’t-Be-Evil acquired it.
I used to spend substantial time on YouTube. Now I can’t remember the last time I went to YT for anything other than a hotlink on a blog story. It’s frustrating as a user interface and creepy as a privacy threat.
J.M. Heinrichs
Thank you SO much. Been looking for that for ages. I obviously need a better search engine.
Alisa, thanks so much for the link! :>)
I too have been flummoxed as to the difference; on Laird’s recommendation I left DuckDuckGo (which at the time tended to miss finding a lot of things) and tried StartPage, but at the time (at least) it pointed users who wanted proxy searching to Ixquick, so I’ve been using that. I had no idea either of them ran off Google, which I too avoid except when pressed: Ixquick doesn’t seem to turn up as many results.
I never, EVER click on a Google ad! But then I nearly never click on ads at all. Which is unkind to weblog writers who depend on ad-click revenue to keep the cyberdoors open. Sigh….
Maybe it’s time to give DuckDuckGo another shot.
Is it immoral to click on a Google ad for a collectivist cause in the hope that the revenue thereby leaked to Google would diminish the funds for that cause and therefore its effectiveness?