The world needs more search engines

https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-01/the-world-needs-cliqz-the-world-needs-more-search-engines.html

by kkm • 7 years ago

795 500 7 years ago

gfawke5• 7 years ago

“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.

shadowgovt10• 7 years ago

They were definitely involved in several precedent setting legal decisions, such as the settlement that allowed for scanning of printed works.

pythux8• 7 years ago

Absolutely love this quote from the article:

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!

shadowgovt10• 7 years ago

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? ;)

purple_ducks2• 7 years ago

Clearly the author does realise this as is evident by the rest of the sentence, which was included in the quote.

1024core• 7 years ago

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!

ma2rten• 7 years ago

I have spent a few billion dollars and they were not successful.

saagarjha7• 7 years ago

Bing is not a core part of Microsoft’s business.

dikei• 7 years ago

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.

wasdfff• 7 years 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.

CDSlice2• 7 years ago

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.

biasedOpinion2• 7 years ago

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.

dewey2• 7 years ago

Absolutely love this quote from the article

Maybe you should've disclosed that you work at this company?

JadeNB• 7 years ago

I think people generally do not understand well enough the far-fetched consequences of a monopoly in the search business.

'far-fetched' (meaning implausible) should be 'far-reaching', right?

saalweachter• 7 years ago

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".

Hackbraten2• 7 years ago

Thanks but no thanks.

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?

pythux8• 7 years ago

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

streetcat14• 7 years ago

So how does cliqz makes money?

markosaric3• 7 years ago

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.

sildur• 7 years ago

I don’t trust a browser nor a search engine if an ad imperium paid for it and gives it away for free.

Yeah, that’s why I don’t trust chrome or google search.

Hackbraten2• 7 years ago

Good point!

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?

LaGrange• 7 years ago

Thanks but no thanks.

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.

meerita• 7 years ago

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.

netfl0• 7 years ago

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.

buzzerbetrayed• 7 years ago

I’ve tried switching to ddg a number of times in the past. Every time the same thing happens:

“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.

heisenhuegel2• 7 years ago

Bangs are nice in DDG. In Cliqz, there is also limited support, but you have to put it at the end ("test !g"): https://beta.cliqz.com/

s_dev• 7 years ago

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.

markosaric3• 7 years ago

There's the !sp on DDG which gives you Google results without all the profiling using StartPage.com

mtVessel• 7 years ago

Isn't DDG just white labeling search results from Bing?

__ka8• 7 years ago

They largely are. Here's an interesting thread, which I and people from DDG partcipated in a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21653476

neltnerb2• 7 years ago

This new search engine doesn't even function without javascript enabled, unlike DDG which works just fine.

__ka8• 7 years ago

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.

lamkhanhsong2• 7 years ago

We have just released a new version which allows you to use the SERP with Javascript disabled. Enjoy!

JaRail2• 7 years ago

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.

streetcat14• 7 years ago

So let's say that google fall and you become the new king. Will you allow another competitor in?

TKWasRight• 7 years ago

Yes.

streetcat14• 7 years ago

why?

Don't you have fiduciary duty for the owners of the company to maximize profits? Why do you want competition?

solso5• 7 years ago

[[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.

tclover• 7 years ago

I'm already degoogling myself, transferring all my emails to tutanota and using firefox with duckduckgo now.

throwingtt• 7 years ago

I've been doing this too, but every time I check my open connections in my router there are a ton of open connections to 1e100.net

tanilama2• 7 years ago

Nah, two or more search engines all being the product of US big techs won't solve the problem.

EU should have its own search engine. They should subsidize this effort and have Google pay for it.

shadowgovt10• 7 years ago

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.

tpmx4• 7 years ago

That's not really a comparison that makes sense. Mexico has very little leverage on the US. EU has loads of leverage on Google.

soup102• 7 years ago

making a search engine is not that hard or expensive, getting users to switch to it after decades of relying on and trusting google is

tanilama2• 7 years ago

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

softwaredoug2• 7 years ago

The EU already puts a lot of money into search R&D exactly because of this.

pythux8• 7 years ago

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).

sojmq2• 7 years ago

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.

purple_ducks2• 7 years ago

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").

pytester• 7 years ago

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.

markosaric3• 7 years ago

There's https://www.qwant.com/ from France. They crawl the web on their own but it's a big job so they currently supplement with data from Bing.

summerlight6• 7 years ago

https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/18/technology/google-eu-fine-a...

Google already payed a bit, now EU can begin :D

tasubotadas3• 7 years ago

And empires must fall

Why?

mylons• 7 years ago

because they’re often brittle and create closed systems

tasubotadas3• 7 years ago

You have to see yourself that it is a pretty week argument.

shadowgovt10• 7 years ago

This feels like tautological reasoning.

Brittle empires fall.

The Chinese empire has a history (including mutations to its government) spanning thousands of years.

isoskeles• 7 years ago

An empire crumbling under its own weight is different from deliberately destroying one because we dislike it.

__ka8• 7 years ago

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".

Disclosure: I work at Cliqz.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

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.

cdumler• 7 years ago

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.

dmix2• 7 years ago

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).

slowenough3• 7 years ago

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).

Aeolun4• 7 years ago

I guess they don’t necessarily have to fall, but from a historical perspective I think it’s safe to say that empires will fall.

atoav• 7 years ago

Because they only serve their own systemic survival and we have other systems of power and governance that can do more on top of this.

lawrenceyan3• 7 years ago

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.

jefftk15• 7 years ago

It seems more like an advertisement/justification/explanation for their search engine?

lawrenceyan3• 7 years ago

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.

freediver2• 7 years ago

If anything it is likely that it will be the other way around in the near future.

tasubotadas3• 7 years ago

93% of a search engine market. Ok.

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.

shadowgovt10• 7 years ago

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.

nchase• 7 years ago

Is there an english-language version? The website is in German for me

__ka8• 7 years ago

There is - click the settings icon on the top-right corner. Then click on Sucheinstellungen, and under Sprache choose English.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

Might make sense to make that more easily discoverable for international users, but I guess you're working on it.

softwaredoug2• 7 years ago

What would a different search engine do to differentiate it from Google?

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?

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

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?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-mon...

rolph• 7 years ago

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.

seanwilson• 7 years ago

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.

tschakkaMarc7• 7 years ago

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 ...

techslave2• 7 years ago

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” ...

adamnemecek• 7 years ago

If someone wants to build a better search engine, start with a better code search and then expand to other areas. Github search is so bad.

shadowgovt10• 7 years ago

Improved online code search and indexing feels like a very untapped market.

DeonPenny• 7 years ago

No it does not. Google is one of the few things that need only need one of.

pcmaffey• 7 years ago

I want to see niche search engines:

- 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.

choward• 7 years ago

a search engine for shopping

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.

skyfaller• 7 years ago

Anyone remember Technorati when it had a blog search engine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati I recently noticed one of my old blog posts had Technorati tags in it, and that was a blast from the past. http://consumingexperience.com/2005/02/technorati-tags-intro...

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.

buboard6• 7 years ago

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.

aliakhtar• 7 years ago

Tweets do show up in search though

sojmq2• 7 years ago

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:

https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

clorine64• 7 years ago

hvae been using the CLITZ browser for some time and really enjoy it.

mikl5• 7 years ago

CLITZ browser

Rather unfortunate typo, that.

amelius• 7 years ago

What happens to our data when this empire falls?

SlowRobotAhead2• 7 years ago

Ready for the subprime data to be bundled with AAA rated data causing a data industry micro-economic collapse? Because I am!

chinesempire7• 7 years ago

the same thing that happen to everything else

most it's saved, some is lost forever

bcrosby95• 7 years ago

It's sold off to the highest bidder. Because it isn't technically our data.

tziki• 7 years ago

How did such blatant advertisement make it to the top of HN? The article quality here has really been going downhill.

Ericson2314• 7 years ago

Cause people like the headline and talk about that? :D

monstapatty• 7 years ago

Google bad.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

Feel free to go use Bing. It's been an option for 10 years.

freediver2• 7 years ago

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.

nileshtrivedi• 7 years ago

The article says:

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.

zarkov992• 7 years ago

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.

dev_tty01• 7 years ago

The product is us.

helpPeople2• 7 years ago

The search results have gotten noticably worse in the last year.

When a Wikipedia/encyclopedia article is what I'm looking for, why is Google showing articles?

Wikipedia used to be the top result.

LMYahooTFY• 7 years ago

SEO is my first guess?

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.

techslave2• 7 years ago

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

ApolloFortyNine• 7 years ago

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.

dmix2• 7 years ago

Direct link for the lazy: https://cliqz.com/en/

Tenoke• 7 years ago

Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product.

One of the reasons for breaking up monopolies is that they make it harder for newcomers to build something better.

tiborsaas3• 7 years ago

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.

bagacrap4• 7 years ago

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.

runarberg• 7 years ago

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.

vivekd• 7 years ago

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

gopher2• 7 years ago

I'd like a better (paid) way to search for medical advice/information

mbowcutt• 7 years ago

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.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

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.

keepper• 7 years ago

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric.

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

SlowRobotAhead2• 7 years ago

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.

sophacles• 7 years ago

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.

mikl5• 7 years ago

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.

candiodari• 7 years ago

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 !

KirinDave3• 7 years ago

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.

kuschku• 7 years ago

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.

antepodius• 7 years ago

The US is far less restricted than europe for freedom of speech, the major principle that matters when you're talking about information technology.

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.

icotyl4• 7 years ago

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?

cmsonger• 7 years ago

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric.

The title may be, but the article was not. Was a reasoned statement for why those folks bothered to build another search engine.

paul7986• 7 years ago

As Google has gotten bigger it seems to forgotten its motto of "Do No Evil," and done the total opposite for the sake of profits!

It was an inspirational company and story that many rooted for due to its culture and mission.

thsowers• 7 years ago

IIRC, they actually removed the "Don't be Evil" motto in may of 2018

axaxs• 7 years ago

If Google were still as well behaved after success, I don't think posts like this would exist.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

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.

zozbot2342• 7 years ago

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.

rdiddly2• 7 years ago

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.

tracer42012• 7 years ago

What behavior here is breaking anti trust laws? And please be specific. Amazing that you compare Google and genocidal dictators.

beatgammit2• 7 years ago

Are billionaires awesome? Nope

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.

bagacrap4• 7 years ago

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).

OrgNet• 7 years ago

Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything

generalizations are false a lot of the times

ddingus• 7 years 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.

jdjdjjsjs• 7 years ago

It's funny because Google had a very different perspective when MS was the Monopoly we were worried about.

chinesempire7• 7 years ago

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.

clairity• 7 years ago

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.

helpPeople2• 7 years ago

Google is getting bad, but I want a decent competitor to Windows/Android.

Apple is not competition. They serve a lax customer base.

bko2• 7 years ago

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for.

For instance:

"the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman"

ddg:

Tom Holland (side bar)

Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb)

Tom Holland (wiki)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (imdb)

google:

Jonathan Kimble Simmons (splash, link to wiki)

J. Jonah Jameson (wiki)

J. K. Simmons (wiki)

The google result is exactly what I want. And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user.

At the end of the day, most people care about the product. I'm only willing to sacrifice so much to satisfy the ideal that there should be less concentration. Make a better search engine but trying to pull at the heart-strings of users about how Google is an empire and too powerful just won't work and it undermines your product and mission.

xfitm3• 7 years ago

It is really good when you search for vague terms, but it seems to come at the cost of ruining precision technical search.

Google also censors some results in controversial categories, where Bing/Yahoo return what I am looking for. I don't trust a search engine that censors entire categories of results.

I am not an adwords user but anecdotes in another HN thread seems to affirm that Google is due to be disrupted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484

9588• 7 years ago

to give a fun example for those who didnt run into this silly agenda.

"free energy" use to produce countless results that now require extra keywords.

Under "free energy suppression" you find professionally crafted hatemongering. The actual list of claimants is huge, non of it is here. https://peswiki.com/directory:suppression#Wiki_2796702

"free energy device" also produces really crappy results compared to what it was.

It only seems like things argued not to exist may or must be scrubbed from seach results. Astrology wasn't scrubed nor was any religion. Everything has its history too!

theamk3• 7 years ago

What kind of technical queries are you running? I just searched for "HLCD0438 datasheet" on Google and DDG. I think it is a great example of very precise, and very techinical query.

DDG's first page was only fake sites and wrong answers.

Google gave me the right answer right away (in the positions 2 and 3)

(for those who don't know legacy electronics: I was looking for the box with labeled pins, like on first page of https://www.turus.com.tr/class/INNOVAEditor/assets/PDF/MM584... )

DyslexicAtheist• 7 years ago

And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user.

that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with ads that fit your profile.

jefftk15• 7 years ago

Why do you think Google Search still knows who you are when you search in Incognito mode? (Or, in Firefox, if you open a private browsing window.) How would it know?

There are advertising companies that use fingerprinting for ad targeting, but Google doesn't.

(Disclosure: I work at Google on ads, speaking only for myself)

Mikeb85• 7 years ago

Do you have any evidence of what you claim?

Anyhow, based on what I've seen, when you go into incognito mode it definitely doesn't use your profile when you go to Google services. Search results, suggestions, etc... are different. In fact, one of the use cases for incognito is using a different Google profile on a someone else's or a public computer. Keeping contextual search results from the 'main' profile logged into the browser would be counterproductive...

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

This comment and everything downstream from it are a distraction from their point: Run their query from your machine or from Tor and you'll see the same results in Google and lack of results in DDG.

Another example is a query for "elm dict". DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.

Akababa• 7 years ago

I get the same results with a VPN, so regardless of how you slice it they win on relevance.

BurningFrog• 7 years ago

For this query, Google was better at understanding the question. Knowing the user had nothing to do with it.

lucb1e6• 7 years ago

To be fair, that example query is more of a personal assistant kind of question. If I want to know who played in that movie, either I know which site has that information (IMDB) and go there directly, or I search for something like "actors spiderman movie <year>".

If you want DDG to understand natural language queries, I think their privacy policy may need to be adjusted so that our queries can actually be used to develop that, and then they need a boatload of funding to catch up with Google's semi-ethical money-generating practices.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

Indeed. I'm happy to forego Google and then (in cases like this) click once more to figure it out myself.

input_sh• 7 years ago

I type "name of the movie !imdb", which takes me straight to IMDB's search results for that name.

!bangs are the main reason why it's always going to be difficult for me to switch from DDG to anything else.

lolinder2• 7 years ago

Like it or not, NL queries are exactly what most internet users want. Without them, any search engine is doomed to remain a niche product used exclusively by the very privacy-conscious.

noncoml• 7 years ago

Don’t use incognito mode, use the tor browser.

beatgammit2• 7 years ago

Have you considered using !sp (StartPage) instead? It essentially does "incognito mode" for you.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

Can use the !s bang in DuckDuckGo.

troubler• 7 years ago

Also, lot of links are hidden in Google by DMCA requests. PR firms use it a lot to hide "bad" information about their clients. Some countries (e.g. Russia, China) bans everything that doesn't fit their propaganda. Google is useless now for many kind of politic-sensitive searches or for investigations.

chinesempire7• 7 years ago

You're helping google by tagging its searches, so many people ask for this kind of things that they can prioritise results that gets the most clicks (people rank searches for google everytime they click).

By contrast, the new privacy friendly search engine from the article, with a lot less money and users, can answer a simple question like "news guy actor in spiderman" with

Cliqz:

- And the new actor playing Spider-Man is... this guy (www.foxnews.com)

- J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) | Spider-Man Films Wiki (spiderman-films.fandom.com)

Not bad for a small German company uh...

And even if it didn't, when I know it's Jonah Jameson, I can search for the actor that played Jonah Jameson. Search engines are not about having "the answer to life the universe and everything" but helping users refine their searches until they find what they were looking for.

lolinder2• 7 years ago

That may have been what search engines were for, but Google changed that. Very few people have the patience any more to try multiple queries to get an answer. When DDG fails, as it inevitably does, I don't spend time refining my query: I repeat the search on Google and get my answer.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search.

Yeah, and due to economies of scale and network effects it will stay that way, unless some people are willing to suffer the minor inconvenience of using a slightly inferior competitor.

behnamoh• 7 years ago

Why would they tho?

goatinaboat• 7 years ago

Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search.

But is it? I find myself often having to fight it to search for what I entered into the box, rather than what it thinks I really meant. If you know what you want just not where it is, DDG and Bing are both superior.

johnpowell• 7 years ago

I tried using DDG and found myself using !G a lot for simple things. Then I switched to Bing about six months ago and have only had to use google a few times.

I know, Bing.. But I have used Windows for about 30 minutes in the last year and that was just to help my mom fix her printer. I don't think I have ever had a Microsoft related account since Hotmail. I know they track me but I don't use MicrosoftDrive or WintowsTube so I can live with it.

3xblah5• 7 years ago

"... so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user."

The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance.

If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are looking for "9 times out of 10".

If all people submitting queries on the web are somehow convinced to visit only one website and submit a majority, (hypothetically let's say 93%) of their queries there, then it should be no surprise when that website "magically" starts becoming more "predictive" than other websites in returning "exactly" what searchers are looking for and becomes "by far the best at search".[1]

The question raised by the blog post is whether enabling such "magic" is worth the trade-off of also creating a "panopticon" in that single website. Giving this level of visitation and query traffic to a single website makes any competing website (working off less than 7% of people's queries) seem irrelevant, maybe even pathetic.

Without the enormous traffic, I would surmise the glory of the "empire" (to use the author's chosen term), and its appeal to "followers" (e.g., those who marvel at its "magic"), might dissipate rather quickly.

1. Especially the part of "search" that involves dealing with repeated, similar queries for popular information.

mantap2• 7 years ago

Knowing what the most common questions are doesn't help you find the corresponding answers. At best you can find the result that users click on most frequently, but if all of the results in the result page suck then that's not going to help.

Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.

bko2• 7 years ago

Just because google has seen my search before, how does that translate to being able to give me good search results? Search is an incredibly hard and nuanced problem. I doubt ddg's main disadvantage is training set of search queries.

Plus, you're underestimating the percentage of queries that google has never seen before. Google processes trillions of searches every year, and still, 15% of those queries have never been seen by Google before. [0]

[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

nojvek• 7 years ago

There’s some truth to that but Google also has a massive knowledge graph. For imdb and freebase like queries they can give very accurate answers as cards. Other humans don’t need to teach every single fact. They just need to teach how to extract and organize facts from a site.

When you see google giving you a one/two word answer as a card, that’s very likely coming from it’s knowledge graph.

What we need is more of this open knowledge graphs. Google and Wolfram Alpha are both closed sources but have deep understanding in niche domains.

solso5• 7 years ago

The claim:

"Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search."

is, and I'm sorry to say, a make-believe

Google's quality is better than anyone else, that is a fact. Let's go to the point. [[I work on Cliqz, and in search]]

Do you know how much Google pays apple to be the default search engine?

According to you, nothing, because people will go to Google because it's the best.

Well, it turns out that last year was more than 9 Billion (with a B). Quite a lot of money poorly spend, someone should really get fired :-)

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

This is business. Apple and Google bring something to the table and they meet in the middle. For zero dollars Apple could just let the user choose from a randomised list which is arguable better and more impartial.

theamk3• 7 years ago

This logic is only valid if you assume Apple cares a lot about their users getting the best search results. I don't think this is the case.

Instead, Apple has a thing to sell -- "position of default search engine" -- and it is selling it to highest bidder.

I bet if Bing would offer 10 Billion, they'd make Bing default instead. Hey, if DDG could offer them 10 Billion, I am sure they would set it as default, easily ignoring the fact that many people say they do not like its results.

anigbrowl• 7 years ago

The google result is exactly what I want.

Yes, when what you want happens to be the lowest common denominator - in this case, the most recent Spiderman movie. When the next movie in the franchise comes out in a few years and you don't like it so much because the news guy is now played by someone else, you'll be complaining that your preferences have stayed the same but Google no longer handles them as well.

joshuamorton• 7 years ago

This implies that the results won't change.

mrweasel• 7 years ago

When DDG doesn't yield the results I'm looking for, I will frequently try Google, but more and more I find that if DuckDuckGo can't find the results that I want, then neither can Google. What Google can do however, is annoy me with results that it knows to be wrong, because it is excluded the most specific part of my query. Google will remove the bit that absolutely had to be in the query, to get more hits on the majority of the remaining words.

In the end, I think most people could use either Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo and be happy with the results. It's just that we're stuck on "Google is the best search engine", and while that may be true in some technical sense, many of the other search engines are just as good for most of us.

weberc2• 7 years ago

I’ve found the opposite. For the last year, I have to resort to Google more and more often. DDG was on par with Google when I started using it a couple years ago, but it has managed to get worse and worse over time. Note that I’m specifically claiming DDG’s performance has degraded; not just that it has remained the same while Google’s has improved.

Laakeri• 7 years ago

For the "most of us" point, keep in mind that Google has a superior international infrastructure. At least in Finland, DuckDuckGo's loading time for search results is about 2 seconds compared to Google's <0.5s. This makes using ddg surprisingly annoying.

jacobsenscott• 7 years ago

In my experience DDG's results are mostly 10+ year old "yahoo answers" posts, while google searches tend to be up to date and relevant.

ummonk4• 7 years ago

I don’t think it played a role here but note that incognito mode doesn’t mask your IP so the results will still be somewhat personalized.

ljm• 7 years ago

Same here, more or less. DDG is 'good enough' in a lot of instances but I think it's more that Google has taught some 'bad' searching habits. When I type a random Google search I'm basically expecting it to read my mind (and essentially it does through all of the tracking and analytics); DDG has none of that so the method of searching has to be more specific.

That said, it does't prevent the situation where searching for certain gifs or images gives you a page full of softcore porn, even with the moderate safe search enabled.

mikorym• 7 years ago

I used to do that, but it's not necessary anymore.

You can almost always, by phrasing more carefully, get exactly what you need with DDG.

I also think that it's better to learn to search properly than finding the best search engine.

ace_of_spades• 7 years ago

Not to sound presumptuous but what are you working as that this is a query that’s representative of your search engine use habits? I am using ddg for a few years now, I don’t revert to google (except google scholar) and I don’t feel like my life has gotten worse due to lesser quality search results.

Maybe it’s denial or weirdness on my side... after all I am also a vegan because I don’t want to hurt animals or other people just for a little bit of taste and convenience and most people seem to think that’s stupid on my side.

maremp• 7 years ago

In my experience, this was true maybe a year ago or before. But nowadays ddg is quite good at providing what I was looking for. If it can't, google isn't much better either, but makes it look like it is, making me spend more time sifting through the information all over the place. The "People also ask" is a huge distraction, why is that immediately after the first result? It can be maybe at 5+ place, but not at the top.

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

Can I please pay someone to let me customize search? I know what results I don't want, but there's no way for me to bundle a custom filter to exclude them.

ummonk4• 7 years ago

Best of luck to these guys. Is there a way that Cliqz (or any other search engine) will manage to break through when even Bing is unable to get significant traction despite Microsoft throwing its weight and its default Edge installations behind it?

Hopefully there will be even more stringent antitrust enforcement to prevent Google from buying favorable search placement everywhere, but Google has such a big edge both in consumer awareness and people adapting their searches to Google that I'm not sure how it can be dethroned.

neltnerb2• 7 years ago

Wow. You can't even do a search without enabling javascript. Surely no tracking implications there.

Yeah, I'm going to stick with DDG. Questionable ownership aside they at least have a functional website without running javascript.

dageshi• 7 years ago

The world doesn't want more search engines though. Like the world doesn't want another streaming service to pay for, it just wants everything in one place which costs $15 a month or preferably free.

weinzierl4• 7 years ago

I looked into the Cliqz browser a few years a ago. Back then they claimed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome. What I found back then is that they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers. They outright lied about that in their terms.

For me their mission is pretty clear: Google ate Burda's ad cookies and now they are trying to get their hands into the cookie jar again. Given that today we have widespread TLS adoption the war about the endpoint has begun. Cliqz, alias Burda Media, is just another combatant - the one who controls the browser controls the ads.

Previous thread with more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626790

tpllaha• 7 years ago

They have an autosuggest feature in the browser which shows search results as you type. Goes without saying that this requires a request per keystroke. If each request contained a unique user id, that would be concerning, but that is not the case. that the search query itself goes to their servers is just common sense, but those requests are anonymized. (Disclaimer: I'm a former employee)

hu3• 7 years ago

Keystrokes + IP = NSA knows exactly what I'm typing.

This "feature" should be off by default on any software that claims to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome.

weinzierl4• 7 years ago

Oh, the requests contained much more than the keystrokes and I looked into the anonymization claims as well. I'd have to dig out my Wireshark traces to tell you exactly what was transmitted, but I'm pretty sure it was enough to id the user. And by the way Cliqz never claimed that the anonymization happens at the endpoint, from what I remember they were very proud of their proprietary anonymization technology in the backend.

And just one more thing: In Google Chrome at least I can turn off auto-suggest. This was not possible in the version of the Cliqz browser I tested.

unnouinceput3• 7 years ago

" they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers"

Well, that's how you implement an autocomplete feature in the 1st place. If they'd sent every keystroke you typed outside their URL bar, now that's something to be aware off. So, did they?

__ka8• 7 years ago

Sorry you feel that way. In the Cliqz browser you search as you type. To search and serve results we need to know the query. We will have an article on exactly this product in a week or so.

We will also be sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blog posts scheduled in the next 3 days. Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core

Lastly, privacy policies are legally binding documents, and we take the law very seriously. We are located in Germany, where privacy laws are as tough as they get (e.g. GDPR was loosely just a re-wording of the existing data protection directive in Germany).

jonathankoren2• 7 years ago

I looked into the Cliqz browser a few years a ago. Back then they claimed to be a privacy respecting alternative to Chrome. What I found back then is that they sent every keystroke I type in the URL bar to their own servers. They outright lied about that in their terms.

That's called typeahead search, and that's how it has always worked since the invention asynchronous HTTP requests.

If you know of someone that sends a trie down to the client containing every possible completion a priori, I'd like know about it.

baxtr• 7 years ago

This reminds me of an old quote by Wayne Gretzky.

“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

Google will not be replaced by another search engine. It will be something else. Something we can’t imagine yet.

LyalinDotCom• 7 years ago

Just Bing it :-)

bbulkow• 7 years ago

A competitive market with high barrier to entry seems to stabilize at 3 entrants.

Others that might seem to be in market are niche players.

Scale is good for consumers, benefit of scale is a thing, so 'trust busting' should happen if there are fewer than three.

In the us search market, we have google, ddg, and Bing.

Wanting more choice is very American, but it's hard to take seriously.

simplicio• 7 years ago

I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry. Certainly not compared to things I usually associate the term with like, say, airplane manufacture or deep sea oil extraction. Duck Duck Go only had three employees when they passed a million visitors, so I can't imagine they required huge amounts of capital.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry.

Others disagree, including Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, who said (in 2008)[1]:

“Scale is pretty critical [because] search technology exhibits increasing returns to scale.”

Or Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing: “So more users more information, more information more users, more advertisers more users, more users more advertisers, it’s a beautiful thing."

Or Eric Schmidt: “Scale is key. We just have so much scale in terms of the data we can bring to bear.” “We are a company that operates at scale . . . trust me it is a scale company.” “We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for [Microsoft] to copy that.”

It seems obvious to me that internet search has both economies of scale and network effects, both classic barriers to entry.

[1] http://fairsearch.org/fact-checking-google-scale-is-a-barrie...

zulgan• 7 years ago

It is already too late for Google to fall. Even if it falls something worse will take its place.

What are our options? Government? How will it be even remotely close? Data will be needed, How will the government get data? They will probably make it mandatory in schools of course. Why not? its for the good of the children.

Interesting times indeed.

“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.”

― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

abbadadda• 7 years ago

There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model.

Does this mean the article is insinuating that DuckDuckGo is dependent on another search engine? Is this true? Or are DDG results organic?

hollerith• 7 years ago

DDG depends very heavily on Bing.

kinkrtyavimoodh4• 7 years ago

There are prolly only 3 global English language indexes. Google, Bing, Yandex. DDG uses vague language to make themselves look like they are actual search engines, which would make you think they actually index the web.

The truth is they rely largely on Bing and Google results and mostly just rerank them. That's why it's hard to take their PR seriously.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

DDG's main selling point is that they respect your privacy. I could not care less where they get their results from. As such, I continue to take their "PR" seriously.

mobjack• 7 years ago

DDG primarily relies on Bing for its search ads.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is the primary source of their search results either.

Developing a new search engine from scratch that can compete with Google is almost impossible unless you are at the scale of Microsoft.

It is much easier to white label an existing search engine so you can have good search results on day one.

slowenough3• 7 years ago

This is cool. But some criticism. UI seems a bit janky. Results are good but visually presented in a way it's hard to tell each result card from the next. Cliqz is a bad name, even tho you may want the world to be a cyberpunk dystopia where renegade hackers control the outposts of civilization, Google has not fallen yet, pick a name the 99% can relate to. And get Machiavellian ... if you're really gonna beat Google, you're not gonna do it with hippy tactics, no love flowers light or manifestos. You have to get evil and more evil than Google. You have to out evil the big evil.

Realistically if I were trying to beat Google I wouldn't be building a search engine. What can you offer that they can't? And if you even begin to compete with them there, what steps can they take that you can't recover from?

Instead, I would focus on beating them first, building search later (if search is what you actually care about). What's Google's weakness? Figure out "the cord that makes them run" (to paraphrase Meredith Vickers in Prometheus) and relentlessly attack that (legally, of course, this is business not cartel turf war). I have no idea what that might be, but Rome fell, IBM fell (well, stumbled, I guess?), so Google must have its Visigoths or Bill Gateses or whatever.

You built something cool, that replicates the functionality (80%). Cool. Good for you. You proved you can do it. Now decide if you really are serious about "beating Google", and figure out an effective way to do that. Search engine is not the way.

Anyway, Google built the (past of) search. If you really wanna do search, build the (future of) search. I dunno, like AR/VR search? Search for FBs AR platform? I have no idea but text search on WebPages is the past. Google already won. Get over it and move on. Build the future, or go build a better steam engine, you know, for like fun and stuff. Because it's cool, but it won't ever beat Google. Sorryz Cliqz

solso5• 7 years ago

[disclaimer I work at Cliqz]

We are all ears on ideas on how to beat Google :-)

But on a serious note; i do not think that the aim is to beat Google because of Google but because on the monopoly they have on the access to the information. And that's why we are building a potential alternative there.

Attacking from a different domain, might beat Google on that area, or let's go wild here, perhaps even on revenue, but would not fix the problem we wanted to fix to the begin with.

"Replicating" 99% of the functionality with a quality to be good enough is a very valid option IMHO. Otherwise if one decides to leave Google, where do they go? If they do not want to advertise on Google, where do they go? There are too few alternatives, there are many names, but most of them are aggregators (full or partial). That said, if besides Bing, there would be 4 or 5 like them (or better), then yes, I concede that Cliqz as is, would make no sense.

slowenough3• 7 years ago

well I like your crazy idea. why not offer me a job?

jefftk15• 7 years ago

I played with the search engine some, and I'm surprised how behind their crawl is for my blog and some blogs I follow. For example, it looks like it last indexed www.jefftk.com in August 2017, compared to Bing and Google which crawled it this month. www.benkuhn.net looks like Summer 2017. pedestrianobservations.com looks like April 2019. apenwarr.ca looks like January 2019. No preview for danluu.com or sideways-view.com.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, not on search)

q4Zar• 7 years ago

use brave and switch you search engine to duckduckgo

arrosenberg5• 7 years ago

How do you design regulation that holds the giants accountable, doesn't impair smaller companies' ability to enter/innovate in the space, and isn't quickly corruptible by the (well-resourced) companies you are trying to control?

We're better served by breaking them up and enforcing and strengthening the pro-competition laws on the books. The government has a pretty mixed record with regulating industry, and a far more impressive record of investigation, enforcement, and prosecution - corporate break-ups are far more in the wheelhouse. Regulation requires constant vigilance, whereas a breakup is self-executing once the case is won.

It's not anti-success rhetoric, so much as an acknowledgement that tech has become increasingly concentrated and anti-democratic. The Sherman Act was passed in 1890 - these aren't "knee jerk" solutions - they've worked effectively in the past to curb corporate abuses.

xixixao• 7 years ago

My biggest problem is: How do you break up a software system? I understand how you break up a company that mines ore, produces steel, builds railways, runs transportation - those are all separable ventures that can negotiate contracts almost as easily as when they had a single owner.

But the tech giants run a single system: Amazon in the delivery, FB in the social graph (DB), Google in the knowledge graph. Those would be incredibly hard technically to break up. The less technically complicated split would mean that one new company has all the revenue and the other has all the costs.

I haven’t heard any credible proposal on how this “breakup” would actually physically work. If anyone has links to good sources I’d be interested.

zajd2• 7 years ago

Easy, stop letting them dump other services for free on the backs of their other businesses. Search can stay ad-supported. Youtube, Gmail, Drive, Cloud, Stadia, Android, News? Should all be broken out into their own businesses and forced to be profitable on their own. As it is, nobody can enter those spaces without being willing to lose hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars.

mikl5• 7 years ago

Split the search from Adsense. Allow the search company to only sell ads on its own properties so they can’t reestablish ad-hegemony. For good measure, ban them from making their own browser.

david-gpu• 7 years ago

Say Alphabet and its myriad of ad-supported services, such as Youtube. Instead of serving first-party ads, they would need to serve third-party ads, or charge their users, or a combination of the two (e.g. freemium model).

The facebook conglomerate could similarly be broken into Instagram, Facebook, etc. Each would get a portion of their current ad business unit.

In terms of software, each baby Facebook could get a flexible royalty-free license to all the software currently owned by Facebook, and they would be free to derive from it to differentiate over time.

If there is a will, there is a way.

booleandilemma• 7 years ago

Just to continue picking on Google:

Google has:

- Android OS

- Nest

- Search

- Advertising

- Chromebooks

- Pixel

- YouTube

- Google Cloud

There are clear lines where they could be broken up.

I’m not saying they should be broken up.

arrosenberg5• 7 years ago

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

Fair point - there are certain cases where software platforms are too valuable and complex to break up, and should be regulated like utilities with rules for fair play. Amazon shouldn't be able to use it's marketplace data to monopolize entire categories, Google Search needs to be a public platform, with regulated rates for API access (which Google itself will have to abide by).

You don't have to break up many software systems to prevent the worst abuses. Facebook can keep the knowledge graph, but they can't keep WhatsApp or Instagram. Amazon can keep their store, but they can't own a FedEx competitor or AWS - those need to be broken off. Google can keep Search, but Ads, Doubleclick, Analytics, Waze, GCP, Google Home - all of that needs to be broken up.

Some of the resulting businesses may have to update their model or may not remain profitable, but historically break-ups have resulted in an increase in value for the new businesses.

zozbot2342• 7 years ago

How do you break up a software system?

Turn the relevant parts of it (the ones which are affected by network effects, or other barriers to entry) into an open platform that can be accessed on an equal basis. That's quite a bit easier than breaking up a mining company. For example, Android is already "broken up" from this POV, since the likes of Amazon can use AOSP to create their own Google-free platform, and applications written to run on AOSP will work on either version.

wczekalski• 7 years ago

As many people point out, breaking up is a reductive measure. The whole legal and technical process of breaking Google up would be 10 years? Maybe longer? I heard some tech journalists give those numbers; don't quote me on that.

If you really want to change the landscape and make it actually feasible, force companies to expose APIs or impose standards on them. Both of these are very hard things to do in practice but at least they give a hope of a better future - increasing competition.

Breaking up big tech, depending on the specifics, will cause either worse productivity or (in the best case) change nothing.

rhizome• 7 years ago

Amazon is a deliverer, FB is a social graph, Google is a knowledge graph. Don't think of the companies nor their roles (such as they are) as immutable. Look at GM in the 50-60s, or Paramount Studios in the 40s.

My biggest problem is: How do you break up a software system?

There are people who have created entire careers about exactly that: antitrust remedies. I defer to experts where I can.

We entrepreneurial wannabes on HN are only going to provide unrealistic answers that become battles of will for the rest of this Sunday before all is forgotten overnight.

neonate• 7 years ago

Could you fork it instead? Make a copy of the whole thing and then let the two compete over time.

Counterargument: you can't copy the people who know how it works.

icotyl4• 7 years ago

What is the corporate abuse here that necessitates a breakup?

arrosenberg5• 7 years ago

Google/Facebook/Amazon have been acting anti-competitively for quite a while. Vertical integration, concentrating industry through M&A, shady data practices.

A democratic country has an interest in ensuring that our labor and goods markets also remain open, competitive, and democratic in nature. We've made this choice as a country repeatedly throughout our history, and it's time to do it again.

gummydog71• 7 years ago

If regulation can affectively demonetize consumer data it would be a huge move in the right direction.

dang• 7 years ago

This comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676505.

buboard6• 7 years ago

breaking them up and enforcing and strengthening the pro-competition laws on the books.

So, suppose Google Search is broken away from alphabet. What changed?

I can understand that argument about Youtube (which is losing money and would probably fail), but google search will keep being dominant and their ad revenue won't change significantly.

ro-_-b• 7 years ago

Tried it out in German. Works definitely better for German language queries than Duckduckgo. Kudos to whomever is behind this & best of luck. The world needs alternatives to Google.

hnuser77• 7 years ago

Cliqz plans to make money by, in the future, "deliver[ing] sponsored offers to users based on their interests and browsing history...processed locally based on a remote repository of offers, with no personally identifiable data sent to remote servers"

This is the reason they're pushing their browser and their extension. Privacy wise, this method sounds OK if they really don't send the data (or what ads you see personally) out. I don't mind seeing ads if they are somewhat relevant, non-obtrusive, and not stalking me across the internet.

My first impression about Cliqz search is that it is somewhat viable, but the index is pretty shallow. There are actually a few other search engines with their own index not mentioned by the article (Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu):

* Mojeek. Sometimes really good for obscure sites when you want to "grep the internet" but seems very vulnerable to blogspam and other SEO. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to query this one yet.

* Yippy. Pretty decent index. Cool feature: categorizes search results with a tree on the side, so if you search for "cobbler" you can just remove the pie or shoe results depending on what you're looking for.

* Gigablast / private.sh: private.sh is the new Gigablast proxy run by PIA. Shallow index as well, haven't used it as much.

The search engine market will be up for grabs if Google keeps getting worse at the same pace.

h0h0h0h0111• 7 years ago

One piece of feedback - currently your site governs language by region, rather than by browser language.

mlinksva• 7 years ago

There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model. Or they are so localized and small that they do not offer a credible alternative. Nevertheless, we at Cliqz are also trying to build one: over the last five years, with around 100 people, we have built our own search engine beta.cliqz.com from scratch. It’s completely independent, it does not use anyone’s technology nor anyone’s business model. It’s built end-to-end from collecting, crawling, and analyzing data up to actually showing results all this with privacy by design. We’re quite proud of it. And each day until this Christmas, we will explain one core piece.

I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

I see no mention of their technology being open source, which makes it a lot less interesting as an alternative, to me.

Their search UI seems OK, once I turned off all of the noisy widgets, including the terrible pretty background image. I wish this trend would go away, but I'm glad they provided an option to turn it off.

RileyJames• 7 years ago

I’m not sure I agree that we need a new google, or to break up google.

But we shouldn’t trust google, what trust existed has been repeatedly damaged by their desire to grow and profit.

In my opinion we need transparency. Why is a result / snippet number 1, 2, 3, etc for a query?

“The algorithm did it” is not an answer.

Any new search engine should be accountable for the results they provide, and there should be a mechanism to dispute the results.

dewey2• 7 years ago

Was looking at that Cliqz company out of curiosity and while browsing their job page (https://cliqz.com/en/about/careers/campaign-manager) saw this:

"MyOffrz is opening a brand new marketing discipline: Browser Based Performance Marketing. This innovative technology makes it possible to show users discounts, special offers and valuable information with true added value within the browser. As a 100% subsidiary of Cliqz GmbH..."

"These include independent search engine, browser and privacy technologies as well as new techniques for responsible advertising and statistical data collection for the benefit of all users."

Seems a bit odd for a company that brands itself as a privacy search engine.

rbinv2• 7 years ago

Seems a bit odd for a company that brands itself as a privacy search engine.

Cliqz is nothing but a parasite disguised as a pro-privacy product, funded by Hubert Burda Media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media).

Their strategy to move into the couponing/voucher market comes as no surprise, since injecting ads (which this basically is) is a very lucrative business - and they have the customer base to do so. The line between malware and "legitimate" browser (extension) becomes increasingly blurred.

detaro2• 7 years ago

Their entire premise is that they can do an ad-financed product with less invasive tracking. Obviously, that involves advertising people.

rbinv2• 7 years ago

Tracking and targeting are just two possible reasons why people dislike ads. Invasiveness is another one - think popups, popunders, layers, interstitials, pre-/postrolls etc.

So even if they don't do "tracking", injecting ads surely isn't something the average user "signed up for" when downloading the browser.

pythux8• 7 years ago

Hey, I work at Cliqz. We have an advertising model, but it does not rely on any personal data. We have also experimented with paid products and we would love for it to be a viable option. Unfortunately, experience suggests that very few people are willing to pay. So we are exploring many options; what they all have in common though is privacy by design. We do not, and do not want to collect personal data.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Do we need search ? It made sense when the web was wild. But now that it's very structured ... I'm wondering.

Kinda like road signs vs gps

radmarshallb• 7 years ago

The road system seems pretty structured and we still have road signs.

entangledqubit• 7 years ago

While I am curious about their search tech, it would be nice if they posted a blog post about their business model so we can understand their incentives up front.

While I'm wishing, it would be nice to hear about how they anonymize their logs. Their privacy notice only really mentions scrubbing associated IP addresses - which may not be sufficient.

blauditore• 7 years ago

Submission title doesn't match article. Was it changed in the article or is this clickbait?

hsaliak• 7 years ago

I want alternatives too - they are good for the consumer.

This article was negative to the point of being unreadable. This is not how you disrupt.

pmontra2• 7 years ago

Some feedbacks about the product.

I made some typical searches I do in my job. They returned reasonable results. Impossible to know if they are better or worse than Google. I need some days of usage. I'll do my best to keep using it this week.

Maybe autodecting the language would help. It gave me a German page without any obvious way to change to English.

I went to the settings, changed the language and discovered that it wants to know my country. I left Germany because it looks like profiling and I don't want to help them at it.

Then I disabled every feature (news, weather, etc). I'm interested into a search engine, not into a portal from the 90s.

However I'm afraid that Cookies Autodelete and other privacy extensions will delete those settings and I'll have to do it again. I'll probably hide them with uBlock Origin. For the language a URL ending with something like ?lang=en would be great for bookmarks.

And finally, do we need more independent search engines? Yes, definitely.

__ka8• 7 years ago

Many thanks for the feedback. We'll add the language autodetection for the interface and results this week. There is no profiling taking place. The country is just to select what index you would like results from - we'll try to make the UI better.

This is still beta, so please keep on using it and we'd love to hear more feedback [beta@cliqz.com].

Aeolun4• 7 years ago

I second the need to do some form of detection for language. My browser tells webpages I want results in english (Accept-language header), and this can be safely used to detect what is most appropriate initially.

If not that, then at least IP, considering I’m sitting in the US.

pmontra2• 7 years ago

beta@cliqz.com bounces mail. It seems it's a closed list and accepts mail only from addresses already included in the list.

You should create a contact form for the search engines. Everything reachable from the Contacts link at the bottom of the page is about other products.

aorth2• 7 years ago

Hmm, cliqz.com is in the blocklists of several DNS servers I'm using, so are they the underdogs we need to cheer for against Google et al, or are they some shady spammers as determined by the community of adblock list maintainers?

kkm2• 7 years ago

Hi Aorth,

Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz.

We are aware of this and it's unfortunate, although the lists are not the main ones from community like Easylist, uBlock Origin etc. Cliqz does need to collect data to build it's search engine and other features. Even though we do with by privacy-by-design in mind and without collecting any PII (we will be sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blogposts scheduled for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday),still we do end up getting on such lists.

Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing. Additionally, also happy to help setup network debugging incase you want check what exactly goes out. - https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core

We are also willing to discuss with the maintainers of the list and explaining what and how data collection is done.

marban• 7 years ago

If you're looking for an alternative, dedicated tool to search US news give https://yetigogo.com a whirl. I'm indexing the top ~150 sites in real-time.

ReptileMan• 7 years ago

I don't want google to fall. I want it to become better. The google results have moved from good (2004) to great(2006-2009) to good (2010-2011) and are on a slope to completely useless from there on .. right now are in shitty.

tehabe• 7 years ago

the problem is, I might have no reason to trust Google but I trust software like Cliqz even less, even though they tell me, that I should trust them (maybe because of this).

Also Cliqz belongs to Hubert Burda Media, a company which I trust even less.

aorth2• 7 years ago

Right. I was really feeling the call to action in the blog post until I tried to visit beta.cliqz.com and realized it was blocked by the filters I'm using in uBlock Origin and by the DNS-level adblocking I have on my network. Hmmm.

tracer42012• 7 years ago

LOL @ several accounts of people who work at this company selectively responding positively but ONLY to those who are already on the “Google = bad” bandwagon.

I’m extremely disappointed in the HN discussion here. The blog post is by someone wanting to compete with Google. Great. The entirety of the post makes ZERO compelling arguments about what features, guarantees, or outcomes their product will provide. In the last couple paragraphs, they mention the word privacy - okay but how so? What’s the business model? Why should I trust you?

The blog post is nothing more than an attack on Google (and other tech companies, but that comes later in the article). That’s the only “substance”.

There’s no question that key regulation is missing in the space. But what exactly is Google even doing that is anti consumer and killing competition? What anti trust laws have they broken? Should we identify them or maybe determine what is missing in our legal framework? If the author wants to compete with Google, perhaps they can share that insight. That be productive.

Google is Cambridge Analytica on steroids.

That’s a pretty damning statement and unproductive. You want to make an emotional argument and have keyboard activists work for YOU instead of sticking to objective facts.

Disappointing this is #1 on the front page. We are turning HN into Reddit.

sigzero• 7 years ago

The world had more search engines. A lot more. Google beat them all and they all folded.

29athrowaway• 7 years ago

What do you think would happen if Google disappears? My bet is that Baidu would take over and then you would have even more problems.

golemotron• 7 years ago

You can't compete with search directly. It's entrenched. The best you can do is make it irrelevant by occluding it with something that provides better value.. voice-based assistants, for instance.

SllX• 7 years ago

I agree with this statement, my default reaction would be to say “build one” but you have.

I’ll give Cliqz the old college try, but I hope you make it a priority to get into the next release of MobileSafari as an option if you’re intent with taking on Google and taking them on seriously.

Here’s a data point of one: my default method of “searching the web” is to start with Search on iOS, what you get when you pull down on the home screen. When the results I want aren’t there, and I can usually anticipate when that will happen, I shift it over to Safari which uses whatever my default is, DuckDuckGo but mainly because I can change my search engine on the fly with them.

I also hope you incorporate the same syntax as DuckDuckGo (if you haven’t already) because to be blunt, every search engine I’ve used in the last few years is terrible. I can’t use just one, and I end up doing a lot of fancy site searches. Not even Google today is as good as Google from 2007-2008.

jjuhl• 7 years ago

Somewhat suspicious that www.cliqz.com is hosted by Google..

unnouinceput3• 7 years ago

Quote: "There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model"

Well, DuckDuckGo is pretty known and independent of Google. Not long time ago was an article here on HN about how DDG operates and they have their own web crawler, not relying on Google.

FabHK10• 7 years ago

As others have pointed out, DDG appears to use Bing for the majority of their results, as such is not a "truly independent search engine[]".

mjlee• 7 years ago

Perhaps the .dev tld isn't the best venue for this post.

For those who don't know, .dev is operated by Google.

michalu• 7 years ago

Not a fan of Google at all, but I'll pick them over "privacy focused search engine" owned by German publisher of Playboy any time of the day.

These guys call for banishment of "search monopoly" yet are in it for the money and business share. Privacy is just a currently sound competitive angle.

cocktailpeanuts• 7 years ago

is it just me or the site can't be reached?

d_burfoot• 7 years ago

I think it's strange that companies like France (and Germany, UK, Japan, etc) don't pass a law saying "Only French companies may service web search requests originating in France". Web search is basically going to be a monopoly, so they might as well try to ensure that the vast economic rents created by the monopoly go to one of their one companies.

There is a very strong national security argument here: you don't want your citizens' web searches to be controlled by a foreign company, even if you're nominally allied with the country, because of the immense political power that control of web search entails.

This kind of policy would unite the populists on both the left and the right. The left would like the idea of redistributing money away from big American technobillionaires to local businesses, while the right would appreciate putting the interests of the nation first.

tim333• 7 years ago

We'd get annoyed by being unable to use Google or Bing as there are not many such local services. The governments might be able to extract some more of the rents by taxing Google et al more.

kbyatnal3• 7 years ago

There needs to be a new search engine focused on the niche of people who hate the current ad spam/SEO results that Google currently returns. A query like "best headphones" returns results like "The Best Headphones for 2019 | PCMag.com".

They've clearly optimized for the mass user base, since the average person is probably fine with a result like that. But I'm willing to bet no one on HN would ever click a link like that, just because of how "spammy" it feels.

When I search for something like "best headphones", my ideal results would be forum/discussion posts (eg. like "Ask HN") where I can read what other programmers/hackers are using, their experience with it, etc. And that's the problem with trying to make a one-size-fits-all search engine - it isn't possible to make everyone happy.

I've actually been working on a product to solve this exact problem. The best comparison would be the old "discussions" filter that Google used to have until they removed it. I'd love to show more people and get feedback. If this is something you'd be interested in trying, drop your email here ( https://degoogle.typeform.com/to/QzVy7c ) and I'll send you the beta

sambull• 7 years ago

Just type reddit after every query and you've got the same function

teawrecks• 7 years ago

As long as you're ok with only searching reddit...

unlinked_dll2• 7 years ago

I don't even mind "best widget" searches coming up with blogspam and the odd forum post.

What bothers me is searching for a specific product and having Google promote a competing product to the top search result (or as a "featured" listing that looks like a normal search result).

ngold• 7 years ago

The discussions button would be 90% of my search if was available. Maybe a filter for popular boards like reddit or hn would be a game changer.

kbyatnal3• 7 years ago

Yep, same for me. Did you put your email in the link above? I'd love to chat more about this and show you what I've been working on

eino2• 7 years ago

I totally agree with the sentiment. However I'm afraid the day "Ask HN" comes as first results in Google, is the day HN will be flooded with spammers recommending their products (like in amazon reviews).

I feel the force of small sites like HN is precisely to be in the shadow and too small to interest spammers.

buboard6• 7 years ago

Google's business is advertising, not search. That's where their monopoly lies and that's where competition is needed. We probably don't need many other search engines. There is only so many improvements to be done in search. Over the years, information has been distilled. Google's main use is as a misspelling corrector, a wikipedia shortcut, a DNS shortcut, a keyword lookup for the news of the day and a product matcher in a few merchant sites. That's because most commercial sectors of the net are already in their post-competitive period, and only the winners in each category are still alive. Their number is not even enough to fit the first page of results. And the content that used to go in blogs, it's now behind twitter or facebook, unreachable to any search engine (except for corporate blogs which are used for SEO reasons). The recent changes in google search have infantilized it, burying anything but the most obvious sites.

SEO doesnt even count that much, instead it's curated "reputation" that matters.We might be at a point where DMOZ is probably viable, because there aren't now 1000 entries in each category, but 10. In fact a Dmoz would probably be a mightier competitor to their search.

But the key is , we need competition in advertising. After http referrer was removed from queries, we left all the information about the user's intent to google, and, unsurprisingly , they ate it all, and then some more, leaving a progressively diminishing piece of the advertising/intent processing pie to the rest of the internet. Is that ethical? Is it OK that a website doesn't know why the user visited it? After all, the user typed it in the browser's bar , not on google. Perhaps search queries should be initiated in the browser, and available to subsequent clicks for processing.

And as for tracking, is it OK that google is the only one who is tracking users? Shouldnt tracking be a user's decision, provided and mediated by the browser to any website who asks for it? Like it or not, advertising is not going away and it's healthier for the net if a large number of publishers share that (growing) pie rather than if google eats all of it. Tracking doesnt kill people, but anti-tracking hysteria causes many people to lose their jobs. Perhaps we should be pragmatic, because being irrationally anti-pragmatic is only serving Google's long-term interests

t0astbread• 7 years ago

I think I get what you're saying but I'm not sure this is the right approach. It's accepting diminished rights in exchange for a stable compromise versus fighting for an absolutist solution at the risk of breaking the whole system.

And personally I'd rather have no internet at all than an internet that's a weird murky tracking soup where a hundred different parties are creepily looking over my shoulder, knowing more about me than what I would tell even my closest friends and family.

utopcell• 7 years ago

Google's US market share is 62.4% with Bing at 25.3% and rising [1]. That doesn't seem like a monopoly to me.

[1] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings#tab_search_share/

throwawayy98121• 7 years ago

Sad that such a blatant ad makes it to front page of HN. Not sure how much I trust Google, but I trust these guys even less. The blog is an emotional rant. Not a single example of Google breaking anti trust laws. Translation - instead of competing by making a better product, we want our competitors to be taken out by government.

eino2• 7 years ago

That Google doesn't break any anti-trust law is missing the point. The post doesn't say Google is illegal. It says even though legal, there are many issues with one source controlling all access to information.

Every week we have posts about new products, often self-posted. If they're upvoted, it's that people find it interesting. Quite ironic writing the blog is an emotional rant (that I would disagree with, I find it quite argumented), while your whole comment is whining that people upvote things that you don't agree with.

Animats• 7 years ago

Perhaps what's needed is an antitrust breakup which forces Google to divest its ad business. They can then sell wholesale search to others, who can compete by monetizing it.

enitihas3• 7 years ago

I don't get the point. Doesn't the world already have search engines. Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo. If the argument is these are not popular, then that is surely not Google's fault. If the argument is Google's brand is more entrenched in the minds of consumers, then it applies to all sorts of companies and everything should be broken up, like Coke, since the world needs more sugar water. Search engines, unlike social networks, have much less network effects. Even if your family is using Google, you can use duck duck go. That's not the case if they use iMessage or Facebook. If you aren't using the same platform you might be cut off.

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

I agree mostly, but there's a little more to it.

Google Search is pretty well embedded into Android. You can use Baidu or Yandex or Bing / DuckDuckGo on an Android phone, but there's substantially more friction. Considering mobile is now more than 50% of search traffic and Android is 80% of devices, that's close to 40% of all searches basically going to Google for free.

Combine that with the fact that Google is embedded into Chrome -- which is used by ~67% of web traffic -- and there's SOME friction to using a different search engine:

You have to set your default to a different search engine, or go directly to that page, rather than just type into your URL bar -- like most people do.

It's not hard to see that Google has a huge advantage.

surajrmal• 7 years ago

The 80% assume China, but almost no phone in China has integrations with Google search. I don't mean to invalidate you're overall point though.

enitihas3• 7 years ago

Why do you think Google is embedded into Chrome? I use ddg easily with chrome, and as far as I remember, chrome allows you to change your search engine to anything, even a nobody site, as oppposed to Safari, which only allows selection from a fixed list of 4 on my Mac, so I can't use Yandex as my default.

Desktop is dominated by windows, where bing search is embedded in the start menu, from where it is non trivial to remove it, and changing it to something else is not even possible.

How is there more friction on using another search engine on Android. What other platform has an even lower friction in switching search engines?

phendrenad22• 7 years ago

Search engines are really a relic from back when everyone had their own webpage. Now everyone posts their content on a handful* of sites - Medium, Reddit, StackOverflow. I think what we need is an inversion of the search engine model... instead of a web crawler scouring the web for new pages, these handful of companies (Medium, Reddit, thousands more) should register with the search engines and push sitemaps regularly. This is the only way to level the playing field with Google, since the internet is so vast now that only Google/Microsoft/Yandex can afford the server/bandwidth fees to crawl it.

*- and by "handful" I mean tens of thousands of sites, which is relatively small.

saagarjha7• 7 years ago

Now everyone posts their content on a handful of sites - Medium, Reddit, StackOverflow.

They do not and it would be a sad day if they did. Please don’t help push us towards that any further.

buboard6• 7 years ago

They do though. Old content will just gradually disappear into webarchive. Let's not pretend it didnt happen. (oh and btw we will probably change that again, but the content won't go into webpages-hosted-somewhere but probably will be served directly from the user's phne)

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

Search engines are really a relic from back when everyone had their own webpage. Now everyone posts their content on a handful of sites

but:

since the internet is so vast now that only Google/Microsoft/Yandex can afford the server/bandwidth fees to crawl it.

Is it a vast space that search engines need to crawl, or are there only a handful of sites that matter?

phendrenad22• 7 years ago

There are a handful of vast sites that matter.

uglygoblin• 7 years ago

I'm all for more search engines but I'm not a fan of the brand name Cliqz. I instantly think of the bogus/low quality search results on a parked webpage.

Darth_Hobo2• 7 years ago

I think people should be responsible for their actions. If they only use google without even trying anything else then they are themselves to blame for whatever bias/lies google have fed them. And asking me to pay yet another tax for regulations so that dumb people are protected from the consequences of their actions is... it's like they are trying to build a kindergarten for adults. And I am not a fan of socialism.

MamaJumba• 7 years ago

Even if the consequences of the dumb people's actions indirectly (or directly) affect your life?

Darth_Hobo2• 7 years ago

Yes. If I put myself in the position where I am heavily dependent on what they do then I have only myself to blame. And if it is a minor dependency then I probably won't even care. And if you are talking about them doing violence then bullets are cheap.

cj• 7 years ago

Side note:

In the TV world, this would be the equivalent of 100 different channels, but they all show Fox News 24 hours a day and just replace the logo. This clearly cannot be good.

Unfortunately that's already happening, just look at Sinclair [0]. They operate 193 different TV news stations covering 40% of US households and syndicate very similar content between stations (with the same political biases, just different logos).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group

toast02• 7 years ago

How much of that is syndication (using the same news stories in different local markets) vs whatever you would call having two channels in the same market with the same content, but trying to market themselves as different?

JMTQp8lwXL• 7 years ago

I don't think it's possible to convince people that viable alternatives exist. I've been aware of them for years, and never considered using them once. They have the stigma of just being not as good. Having more search engines does nothing if nobody will use them-- Google's hegemony remains if there's n or 100n other search engines, if none of them can provide quality results reliably.

ben_jones• 7 years ago

Did that stigma not exist for IBM? Microsoft? Oracle? If the crux of Google is an outdated reputation they'll have to invest more and more to maintain it until it consumes them and somebody else steps up.

anon1m0us• 7 years ago

How do I make this my default search engine as for when I type something into my address bar like I can with Google, Bing, or DDG?

brentis• 7 years ago

Google does everything it can to either have the first click or second click result in a paid event. Videos and related searches are clear examples of the abuse.

True content is buried or listed in a row or two out of 10 plus results.

Mobile is even more flagrant. Inswitch engines, just to get a less mainstream and digested view of my queries.

kwhitefoot3• 7 years ago

Cliqz gives me two choices for UI language, neither of which I speak, though I can read a little. It gives me three choices of search area: USA, Germany, France.

I would prefer the UI in English and I want hits from wherever they may be found not restricted to some small area.

Good try, but some way to go.

mac_was• 7 years ago

Why is duckduckgo not mentioned at all?

ChuckMcM2• 7 years ago

Because you can inject your ad network (https://myoffrz.com/en/fuer-nutzer/) more easily if you have your own search engine, people like Google don't let you use your own ads on their results generally.

I don't disagree with the premise, after all I was part of a team that tried to do the same thing (well, without the ad network) and discovered that the adtech business has become so corrupt (not that it is all corrupt just that enough of it is) that the only way to cover the costs of running the thousand or so machines you need to hold a decent index and cache is hard to achieve.

Karrot_Kream• 7 years ago

Curious what you mean by "corrupt" here. I'm genuinely curious as I've never worked at a company in ad-tech before, so it's always fascinating got me to hear from insiders.

ChuckMcM2• 7 years ago

Ad networks that push adware or malware that facilitate click fraud. I would guess that anywhere from 2 to 3 billion dollars spent on Internet advertising each year is ending up in the hands of corrupt ad tech vendors.

dana321• 7 years ago

I've built a few different types of search engines over the years.

The first attempt was in 1999, i built a meta search engine using coldfusion.. I didn't have any server to run it on so it was on my dialup running locally. Worked pretty well, i was a big fan of metacrawler at the time.

The next time was back in around 2003.. I had a server running on my adsl connection at the time. I wrote a crawler of sorts that indexed word positions to search by proximity. At the time, Google didn't do this, it was a feature i was looking for. Eventually, the project died. If i had a 200k startup fund like google had, it could have probably turned into something.

I did build it on mysql and perl but it needed more servers.. Something i didn't really understand back then with only about 4 years web experience.

Then, i built another a meta search engine, ran it on a hosted server, gained some limited traction around 2011. Died as the sources for the api dried up or became too costly. It did make some money from advertising at the time, which is a pretty big deal. The coolest thing was the fact that i kept the searches open, each search had an rss feed that you could use to keep track of certain keyword sets.

Something i need to say about Google is this: it seems simple, but there is a lot going on in the background. Its doing a lot of things like checking for malware, spam, link farms, etc. but also its running the page in a real browser. Its pulling in data from google analytics and clickthrough/bounce rates, its always split-testing result sets, showing results based upon geographic location, language recognition, date recognition, etc. They use machine learning with real humans training those models, that's not to mention their internal systems for managing servers.

I think you shouldn't try and copy what they are doing, in the end it doesn't matter if you do.. Look at bing, its kind of like a joke compared to Google.

Facebook did the right thing, that was to bring the community and data onto the site itself. Identity is the future. Reddit is pretty good as well, you can talk about any link on the internet.

User-moderated content is the future, as AI/ML can always fool another AI/ML but not a human.

You only have to look at this site hacker news to tell that.

garaetjjte3• 7 years ago

It's hard to take their "privacy by design" seriously. It is the same Cliqz that partnered before with Mozilla to run "experiment" exfiltrating browsing history (!) of 1% of new installs in Germany: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

I thought Mozilla would loss all their credibility after this, but somehow they still market as privacy-focused..

tschakkaMarc7• 7 years ago

Hi, Marc from Cliqz. This one haunts us (in HN and also in my dreams). Let's first get one thing clear: It was a terrible blog post. Second: The 1% who had Cliqz installed were actually safer than the ones without. Why? If you use a (most) browsers every keystroke in the URL bar gets send to Google. This is how autosuggest works. This was and is the case with Firefox also. Cliqz in the functionally implemented in Firefox was not that different. Except - it comes with privacy by design: We actually proxied those requests to not get the IP, we take special measures to not collect private data in the first place. And all this was tested and scrutinized a lot before and after the test. And if you don't trust it or believe it, it also happened to be open source. In the end, you were better off with Cliqz than without. Third (and maybe most importantly): If you don't support anyone who "collects" data, even if they do it in the most transparent way, without collecting any private information, in fact going a long way to delete all PII, open-source and with privacy by design, someone who has no business model built on collecting profiles, then you only criticize Google, but will never have an alternative or only alternatives that white label those that do collect all data. Because building a search without data is impossible. We were hoping that together with Firefox we would build a better solution. For some reasons this didn't work out, but lack of privacy was never one of them (lack of a business model more so, because sending every key press to some is more profitable than others, regardless of how private each is). In fact, our way of doing things is much more private than most people out there who claim to be private. This includes most browsers and search engines. And all of this is open source, so verifiable. And while we speak about it: In our blog https://0x65.dev we will over the next 24 days publish pieces on what we do and why we do it and why it is important, data collection and anonymization will be a big part of this. Last not least: All this is clearly not your fault, so my rant might be inappropriate, but as I said, this thing haunts us for the wrong reasons. (Me and the team are happy to answer any questions).

garaetjjte3• 7 years ago

Obviously using search engine sends search queries to it.. okay. But that experiment was sending most of browsing history, without explicit opt-in. Collecting browsing history from users of popular browser without asking them is just evil. (and it seems you still defend that decision)

ravenstine• 7 years ago

There already are other search engines, but most people view Google as god and infallible in it's results. Even tin foil hat wearing people I know who hate Google the company refuse to not use Google.

ghjyui• 7 years ago

You guys are polishing the steam engine, while we need some real progress. Typing a search query isn't much better than typing a SQL query. This should be the last resort thing.

We need a service that would organize the information for us. Instead of us telling the service what we want to see, the service should tell us what's worth attention. Some people care about NFL, so they would be given the most valuable news about NFL. Others care about superconductors, so the service presents them a daily summary of most important advances there.

Kaiyou3• 7 years ago

As far as I remember there's Google, there's Bing, something that only works with Chinese, something that only works with Russian, search engines that barely work at all and a bunch of meta search engines, that use Google or Bing or both at the same time under the hood, like DDG, Searx, Startpage, etc.

So yeah, I'm down for more search engines. If there wasn't only one dominant one, SEO wouldn't be such a problem, either, I imagine.

mThumbnail• 7 years ago

Search engines are not just about quality of results. A reason to use Google is that it's what everyone else uses, so by using it you also get for free a picture of what kind of results everyone else is getting

seektable2• 7 years ago

We don't need more search engines like google, we need a new kind of engines that will supersede google/bing/etc and break the following axioms:

* search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine

* search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)

* search creates information bubble (that user cannot control) because it tires to satisfy user's expectations

Most likely this new 'google-killer' will be:

* open source, because user should trust the code

* self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS. Our search preferences have ultimate value, no one should have an access to it

* more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine (something like WolframAlpha)

* background reasoning - this engine can work continuously and utilize your own computational resources on notebook/PC and bring you brand new search insights that google never will be able to deliver (because they cannot dedicate a lot of computational resources for each google user).

Sounds good, isn't it?.. Maybe this kind of software already exists, could someone point me out?

biasedOpinion2• 7 years ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google so I'm 100% biased. All opinions are my own. Edit: formatting

search engine is a cloud service, which is not controlled by user of that engine

So is hacker news.

search gives final results in milliseconds (why? because google cannot spend many seconds/minutes for you, that's why)

Do you want latency to be larger??

open source, because user should trust the code

That would make it easier for SEOs to game the system. Or perhaps it would put everyone on a level playing field. I'm not sure.

self-hosted (easily deployed in a click), not a cloud SaaS.

Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves?

more useful than google because of accumulated data about you that are processed by computational knowledge engine

First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse...

seektable2• 7 years ago

Do you want latency to be larger??

Instant results are good for sure, however very often few more seconds - in addition to instant results! - is not a problem if late, more carefully processed results can save minutes of my time - for now I spend it for opening the links and scanning the content with my eyes.

The same is about not very often but important searches that may be described as 'research about something', in this case I'm ready to make complex, well detailed query and wait even hours - then back and get well organized and intelligent results.

Do you mean users should keep their own index of the whole web by themselves?

oh no! Users should keep only their personal data - in wide meaning, this includes all history of searches, search results, refinements, anything that ML currently uses to bring personal search experience. In addition to that, relatively small index of important content may be saved. For internet search this 'personal search' will use API of anything that can be used manually for now - google, bing, consume direct API of Twitter/FB/Medium/WolframAlpha and hundreds of connectors to other cloud services. It is important to say, that this 'delegated search calls' may be anonymized.

It will be important that search results are not limited only by what google decided to be 'top results for this user'. At this moment I can do all this manually - open N tabs, query many services, compare results, open most 'relevant' (from my human point of view, not google) links and scan them for most interesting information. I believe that all this can be automated.

First I think you greatly overestimate how useful information about you can be. Second if that worked then it would make they problem you mentioned before (information bubble) worse...

As for now, all this just thoughts. I'm a programmer with almost 20YOE; I have understanding about how google works in general, how lucene works, how WolframAlpha works, modern approaches to NLP and search-driven queries processing, and I think - without a MVP that works, this is more belief, of course - that value of this 'personal computation engine' combined with modern ML approaches might be ultimate. Challenge, but nothing impossible!

21xhipster• 7 years ago

Proposed design is flawed. The same as Google. Check our proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21678527

CivBase• 7 years ago

I love DDG. In my experience, Google still usually does a better job but DDG is good enough 90% of the time and bang searches make it trivial to handle that remaining 10%.

I recognize that there is still room to improve DDG's search quality. However, I wonder if DDG or any competitor can ever get as good as Google without collecting user data and using that to contextualize searches.

rotrux• 7 years ago

The world needs more ways to navigate the internet is what it needs. An intuitive tool that helps me stay on track and/or helps me remember what the hell I did would be preferable.

The mystery-box-that-reads-my-mind-then-poops-out-links model feels increasingly clumsy as the years go by.

Uptrenda• 7 years ago

Wow, they managed to build a Google competitor that doesn't suck. This is actually pretty crazy. I never thought there would be new innovation in the search space. I'll be using this from now on.

LuNan• 7 years ago

You complain about Google because you haven't use Baidu in China. If you have used baidu, you will know that Google is much better!

jstein93• 7 years ago

The unbundling of google is happening. There needs to be better document search.

edisonjoao• 7 years ago

lot of facts

The world needs more search engines

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