Hacker News Reader

Comment by fairpx | Hacker News Reader

It would be great if all these new regulations only applied to companies of X size. Scrappy startups with no access to good lawyers and understanding of these regulations are more likely to suffer vs the big guys who were the cause of all of these changes in the first place.

View on HN

I'm an advisor to several startup European search engines which are likely to be annihilated by the combination of these changes and the GDPR.

Who would start a new search engine in this day and age? You'd need some really unique features which Google can't duplicate, and the only one which seems to have made it is DDG with their privacy promise.

That doesn't make it alright for the EU to kill new entrants through regulation...

Just as a side note: not every search engine is a direct competitor to Google. You can have vertical search engines serving a specific purpose. These can do very well by executing on a narrow use case. Something the Googles can’t do.

So that the access to information is more democratic? What stops Google from suppressing certain information at the request of bureaucrats or corporations? When you have a choice you are more likely to see information from different sides. Of course most people won't bother, but suppressing choice can only end up sad.

What stops Google from suppressing certain information at the request of bureaucrats or corporations?

Or at the request of certain well meaning but ultimately flawed and over reaching laws?

Google's advantage is also its Achilles heel: it is incredibly general purpose and searches the entire web.

Now how much of the web is all that useful? If a search results page on Google is just Google's opinion of what they think you want, what happens if you use a similar-enough algorithm but narrow the scope of the web you index to something more likely to contain information you can actually use?

Google today isn't even as useful to me as Google was 10 years ago. It has noticeably gotten worse. There has to be a fairly large niche there that several more specialized search engines could find a home.

As someone has suggested, not a generalist search engines. In Europe I can remember at least a couple of "price comparators" that are way better than Goggle at finding local small online shops (i.e. shops smaller than the behemoth called Amazon).

Or for example the code search engine, but I don't think it's from an European startup.

There's one at the bottom of this page, Angolia.

There's a small space for niche search engines, for sites, wikis, blogs.

Yelp apparently has a billion dollars of search ad revenue, so maybe it's not small.

Now that you mention it, how are Google themselves deemed to be compliant with the GDPR? If I put up a blog containing my name and email address, and that ends up in a Google search result for my name, have I consented to this use of my personal data just because my blog is on the public web?

The infamous "right to be forgotten" (and the robots.txt standard) gives me an ability to opt-out of some uses of the data on my blog, but I thought that the GDPR is more stringent about requiring opt-in rather than opt-out.

> have I consented to this use of my personal data just because my blog is on the public web?

Yes, there's a difference between sharing information and publishing it.

Can you go into more detail about the GDPR effect? How will they be annihilated by that? Are they collecting more user data than users are aware of, and anticipate that if they told users explicitly what they're doing the business would be annihilated?

No no no, bad idea. Because then those big companies will just 'hire' small companies to do their dirty job.

I think the problem here is some of the rules in GDPR is too overkill. Those rules need to be weakened/simplified a little to allowing companies in EU and actually everywhere to flourish without worrying too much about whether or not they will accidentally violates it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com