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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

OK, so I watched it all happen.

Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew because its stuff worked better than the competition's.

Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search algorithms are so bloody complicated. And because SEO warfare is so intense. Google can just claim that any discrimination is just collateral damage.

> Google is the gatekeeper for-- for the World Wide Web, for the internet as we know it.'

Sad but true. So other than DDG, are there any good privacy-friendly search services? Startpage seems to just repackage Google. Also, are there any search services that are less censored than Google?

> [Google] denied it was a monopoly in search or search advertising, citing many competitors including Amazon and Facebook.

That's a joke, right?

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This goes to Peter Thiel's point (like him or not for other reasons): all businesses claim to not be monopolies when talking to regulators or critics while they claim to be monopolies when talking to investors.

It's easy. Want to be a monopoly for investors? Just describe whatever is arbitrarily unique and claim that your market is specific to to that. Want to be a non-monopoly? Just claim that your scope is broad enough to encompass many other businesses.

> > [Google] denied it was a monopoly in search or search advertising, citing many competitors including Amazon and Facebook.

> That's a joke, right?

I don't think they're joking. There are a lot of people, whole countries of them, for whom Facebook is literally the whole of the Internet.

OK, so I don't use Facebook.

But can one search the Internet via Facebook?

Or wait, are you saying that they don't realize that there's anything except Facebook? And yes, I can vaguely remember when all I knew was CompuServe and Econet. And AOL, which only idiots used ;)

He's likely referring to this: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/

I can't remember if this was discontinued or not, but there's been varying levels of outcry about it.

(Disclosure: I work at Google)

> Or wait, are you saying that they don't realize that there's anything except Facebook?

Something like that. Maybe they realise but they don't care. Want to read the news? You check out CNN's Facebook page for latest posts. Want to sell something? Use the marketplace.

For whatever website most of them would like to visit for information there is a Facebook page available.

> For whatever website most of them would like to visit for information there is a Facebook page available.

So does Google have a Facebook page? ;)

Did media and corporations have a presence on AOL?

I use (and love) Searx. It has two features:

- many search engines are used at once - searches are proxied through a third-party provider

For example, if you type "ipv6" into searx.me you'll get results from Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and dozens of other sites. It's not perfect privacy, but I generally get better results than using only one search engine and there's a small boost to privacy.

The only thing you have to look out for is the "images" tab. It's usually fine, but unless you turn on the adult content filter there's almost always and least one pornographic image somewhere in the results. I'm not sure which search engine is responsible for those results, but I should probably just disable that search engine for my queries.

Cool!

And that reminds me. I had forgotten MetaCrawler. As I recall, that was my favorite between AltaVista and Google.

Thank you, stranger! This is awesome. I was in need of something like this for a while now.

See https://finder.cool/ . I am the creator (trying to do my part?). It is more a "site finder" than search engine, but it's a good start. Growing every day. Unique: no site prioritization over another. So there is no "SEO". I hope that shakes things up a bit some day. And top level domains are first level citizens. Today it is at around 400000 sites indexed (note these are unique sites, not pages within) and is built to scale and take in all N-billion sites in the world ... which will happen if it gets traction. At the current 400K sites or so, seems to have actually entered the realm of starting to become useful.

Not a joke. Google don't define search as web search but rather "search of any kind of data source you can imagine". Thus Amazon is a search competitor because people often go straight to Amazon and type in what they want rather than go to Google first and maybe see shopping results.

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