Readit NewsThe ad industry's biggest accomplishment is making most users believe that they can have access to state of the art search engine, video streaming, messenging etc... for "free". It means that it's incredibly hard to compete with a different business model.
A few years ago my response to this would be that I'd gladly pay Google $10/year for access to Search without adverts, but over the past couple of years that's changed. Google have become so utterly terrible at handling customers that I no longer would. I'll only use Google services if they're free. The idea that Google might just kill my account without notice leaving me with no access to search would be catastrophic.
I would gladly pay a different search engine company for access to a good search service though.
Advertisers would compete within that search engine to have the most relevant and accurate product and service offerings to match demand, and would pay the search engine provider for the hosting.
The search engine provider could attribute and send credit back to the websites from which advertising requests from the user agent originated. This could be attributed based on requests, clicks, purchases, etc.
Under this model, publisher websites would not need to design and manage their pages specifically to incorporate advertising slots, and users would not have to see any advertising at all unless they are genuinely interested in further commercial information related to the page they're on.
As a side-effect this could reduce the usage of advertising in various grey areas (spam, disinformation, and even the rare-but-feasible harassment of individuals by using targeted advertising).
It does actually cost money to operate a good search engine.
“ Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.”
I know someone working on DOJ’s case vs G search, yet I haven’t heard any decent proposals to solve the problem. This is one. Simple and could spark a lot of innovation. (Probably has drawbacks that I haven’t considered yet.)
The harder problem is what you do with the result of the crawl once you have it. You need to index it. This is one of Google's deepest moats. Being able to serve any of hundreds of billions of documents in milliseconds requires an enormous amount of infrastructure and hundreds of careers worth of difficult software engineering.
I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking. Generally a new ranking technique requires some new information to be associated with each document in the index, e.g. some precomputed scores that describe the document's quality or fitness for different kinds of queries. At query time, you're often just weighting and comparing these scores across documents.
If you had Google's index, you'd be a long way towards being able to replicate Google's results, but I don't think that would lead to the kind of innovation you're hoping for.
You're quoting Britain there as someone to look to, and at the same time mentioning genocide...
The primary driver of innovation is a competitive market in which individuals innovate through the pursuit of self-interest. The 20th century was a large experiment finalizing this hypothesis, including China through Deng Xiaoping's reforms.
The incendiary thought to both "sides" is that they're both suppressing such innovation: China through explicit communist philosophy and Western countries through some sort of devolution into Crapitalism due to varied causes.
In other words, are China and Western countries qualitatively different? In my opinion, not by a magnitude, and that's the scary thing.
However, barring idiotic wars by country leaders, humans are likely to continue to innovate _despite_ the chiefs, priests, and thieves, as we have done for the last few hundred years (see Pinker, Goklany, etc.).
China has shown the world what it considers to be acceptable norms of governance: unrepentant, ongoing genocide against the Uigers, snuffing out liberal democracy in Hong Kong, and denying the sovereignty of a liberal neighbor in Taiwan.
I'm fully expecting plenty of whataboutism and false equivalencies in response to this comment and others making a similar point.
Believe me, I'm disappointed in the US and the rest of the West's recent slide away from liberal values, and I hope we can start doing better soon, but I encourage onlookers to ask themselves: do you really believe the there's no meaningful difference between China's vision for the future and the West's? No difference between the future each will create for you?
Instead of google I am aggregating multiple search engines and joining the results eliminating all that are not on most of them. I am losing anything special (like there is something "special" today) but at least I dont get bunch of stuff on google that just wastes my time.
Nextgrid: yes, exactly that. I want old results, I want old content, I want content that matches with my search words 100% instead of getting what google crappy algorithms think that I want. I dont want hipster crap that propagates next silver bullet (that is just a copy what we already had packed into SaaS).
People on Hacker News seem to think Google's results have gotten worse over time. Maybe they have for the narrow set of interests and requirements of this crowd, but I'm very confident they've gotten better for the vast majority of other users (users who I bet are less likely to use an ad blocker too).
> That they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads from my results and serve me relevant content.
This is an extremely difficult engineering problem. Google doesn't make a conscious decision to include low/middling quality SEO'd content. That content is optimized to appear relevant and high quality. Google does a better job than say Bing at telling the difference, but it's still obviously an unsolved problem.