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Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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

We shall see. It has thus far been in Google's best financial interests to make nice in the European markets because of the size of the user base that they would leave on the table if they responded to EU pressure by shutting down services.

I'm unsure if that continues to be true if the EU siphons money off of them to build a direct competitor.

The EU represents close to 50% of potential/projected revenue to Google in the next 10 years, is my guess. That's what I meant when I wrote "loads of leverage".

It's not that simple. In a scenario where google was shut out of the EU you'd have a lot of pissed off citizens, and google knows this.

I don't think it's in the basic values of the European Union to suddenly block Google. We're talking increasing taxation, over a 5-20 year period, that kind of thing. We're not North Korea or the PRC.

Or in some other other gradual way. Anyway: it's not a binary over-night thing based on a whim of some dictator.

Either way, I fully trust the competency of the people running these things; they have proven themselves in the past. I'm writing that as a Swedish citizen who is a little bit skeptic about whole the EU thing. This part though - I trust these EU bureaucrats. My impression is that there's a team of very sharp people working on this.

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

I would actually argue that making a good search engine with quality and responsiveness worldwide rivaling Google web search turns out to be an architecturally hard problem.

A basic web crawler is not. A semantic web crawler and associated search engine capable of mapping real human input to useful information and dealing with the heterogeneous structure of data on the web, with low millisecond latency?

Bing has been working on that problem for years now, how come they haven't caught up more with Google?

I agree. Bing seems to have mostly solved the crawling problem by now, but not the query relevancy problem.

But then again, there are also a lot of other problems Microsoft haven't been able to solve...

It's a much more well understood problem now than it was when google was founded and the tools and platforms available to assist are light-years beyond what was available then. Many failed search startups have shown again and again that marginally better results are not the deciding factor in using a search engine, it's what's the installed default and how trusted the brand is.

Making a search engine was not hard 20 years ago. But now the internet is filled with so much more crap that it actually is.

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

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.

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

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

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).

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

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.

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").

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