| > Search is essential infrastructure for the internet Agree 100% > and should not be monopolized There's an argument to be made that search is a case of natural monopoly. Today, google's success doesn't stem from PageRank. It's stems from Learning to Rank algorithms. Every time you click a hit, Google learns something. If you started distributing search traffic amongst a competitive market, no one provider would get the same training data Google gets today. The more competitive the market, the thinner each competitor's training data is - and consequently, the worse their product will be. To illustrate, think about how much better google is than DDG/Bing, and then how much better DDG/Bing is than whatever is third. (Apparently the third best is sufficiently bad that neither you nor I know what it is.) Since Google is A) pretty far ahead of everyone else in this space and B) extremely secretive about search, it's really difficult to discern how much of their success comes from "more data" and how much comes from "better algos." > The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really. My understanding is that a lot of DDG's value comes from using Bing. It's not a pure re-skin, but it aggregates results from multiple search engines and Bing is the biggest. (I'm not a DDG expert so please correct me if I'm getting it wrong here.) The problem is that Bing is good for the same reasons as Google: they are the second biggest in a winner-takes-most market. They get lots of data (though not enough to be as good as Google), and presumably do all the same things for which people dislike Google. So in short, maybe regulation is a more realistic goal than competition? I don't actually know where I stand here. I'm sure their are people here who disagree fiercely with everything I'm suggesting. I'd be grateful to hear their counterarguments. |