Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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It's been going on a long time, Google's been killing off aggregators by cannibalising their market for almost a decade now.

I do wonder how sustainable it is, previously these aggregators did lots of things at Google's request, cleaning the noise out and laying everything out in nice data-annotations. More fool them, it turns out.

Google cross-references them all, builds their 'own' data and drives them all out of business.

It's pretty scary how much of the digital high streets Google has ruthlessly stolen from us all, and imposing a huge tax for doing pretty much sod all.

I occasionally wonder if anyone would every have the balls to nationalise the search engine, it should be a public utility, not infested with ads covering 90% of the first page as it's become. I'm even semi-serious :)

At the very least I wouldn't mind a nice ruling that Google are now deceptively calling themselves a search engine, and that they can now only show one ad per 10 real results per page.

Amazon (and most successful middlemen) employ this strategy too, so aggressively. Get all the data flowing through you, use that data to screw those who you can profit from replacing. Like the people who made sites with public holidays, clocks, converters, calculators that Google has stolen all traffic from for years. Gradually it expands to larger prey, and it feels like a good experience for consumers so it works.

Amazon uses marketplace to access markets without risk or their own suppliers (making them a one stop shop in the process), then once they have the data, they start selling the stuff directly.

I worked in a music instrument retailer, when Amazon was aggressively trying to capture that industry, and they did start selling through Amazon, and if course Amazon now sells most stuff themselves now.

The problem as I see it is that these gradual monopolies pose huge risks to freedom and choice, as they lobby for themselves, and own bigger chunks of the world. Incentives change once you own entire markets, and it's naïve to think what started as a better experience for users will stay that way with less competition.

Not sure what can be done though. Antitrust stuff is really the last resort, and it's not a guarantee that it will even happen. In the EU it probably will I guess. USA not do sure.

> Not sure what can be done though. Antitrust stuff is really the last resort, and it's not a guarantee that it will even happen. In the EU it probably will I guess. USA not do sure.

Most regulations seemingly aimed at taming monopolies only end up reinforcing them, because megacorps have the means to circumvent/malleate regulations, while small firms do not.

The common-sense implicit mental model of the commercial playing field is a flat market with relatively fixed rules, with an enforcer of market rules (the state). Such a playing field would naturally disfavor unfair monopolies (i.e. those that aren't based on network effects, economies of scale, or superior talent).

Obviously, reality is very different: the market rules can be rewritten, and the entity in charge of rewriting them is itself a monopoly. So to prevent unfair monopolies, we would have to make that common-sense mental model a reality, which entails reworking national governance itself.

People need to stop putting the bar for anti-competitiveness at monopoly. It just creates an artificial ceiling Microsoft saved apple. AMD and Intel. Etc You get selfmaintained duopolies instead. And to grow they just go into other markets. Sure google doesn't have a search or add monopoly. Can't grow much anymore in those fields because of the rules? Use your dominance to crack other fields, every field.

Microsoft was so close to being broken up for this long ago but now everyone does it...so why do we allow it?

"Nationalised search service" ... interesting thought. Legions of Librarians, finally compensated justly and lauded for their heroism. Wonder if they'd get uniforms and "be all you can be" recruiting campaigns too.

Something like DuckDuckGo operated like Let's Encrypt. If it can be done for key management, why not search corpus? What's the annual cost, $10MM? Maybe a bit more, but not crazy expensive. Someone with search experience (ChuckMcM or greglindahl) would be able to say with more certainty.

If you want to do something like DDG, proxying some other search engines results, a point of reference could be Ecosia, which publishes financial reports. It looks like they operate on somewhere in the range of 12M/year.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia https://de.blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-finanzberichte-baumplanzbe... (in German)

You've got a space force with their own wacky uniforms, so anything is possible.

Fun fact: civilians and the Air Force competed for the money used in United States' initial bout in space. But NASA won.

The Space Force uniform was a Kobayashi Maru.

If money was not spent and they used an existing uniform to keep costs low, critics would complain that the uniform does not match the environment.

If money was spent to design a new uniform that matched the environment, critics would complain that money was wasted on uniforms and they would probably acknowledge the comicality of thinking that a uniformed soldier in space would care about camouflage instead of things like breathing and wondering why they're in uniform in the vacuum of space.

Either way, critics will complain and Space Force personnel will continue to exist in desks for the conceivable future, so uniforms should clearly have been optimized for comfort.

Not to get too off topic, but it's clearly a self inflicted problem, where nobody would complain about spending money on space force uniforms if space force's existence made any sense.

Why does militarization of space not make sense? It makes a lot of sense unless you're a pacifist.

The question is whether the people in the Air Force who send stuff into space should have their own unit, or if the creation of the space force was just a rebranding stunt. The creation wasn't without cost; it gave talking points to other countries seeking to increase their militarization in space. It also increases bureaucratic overhead and might --- if they eventually become more independent --- cause integration issues.

Few dispute the military should have some people who do space stuff, many dispute that they should be on equal footing administratively to the rest of the military.

> For now, the 16,000 active-duty airmen and civilians who work at Air Force Space Command will be assigned to the Space Force, but nothing else will change. Uniforms, a rank structure, training and education are all to be determined, and for the foreseeable future, Space Force will continue to be manned by airmen...

> Meanwhile, U.S Space Command, which stood up in August, will continue to exist as a combatant command, similar to Cyber Command, Special Operations Command and others.

> Barrett will be the Space Force’s service secretary, as the service will be nestled within the Air Force Department, the same way the Marine Corps is part of the Navy Department.

> Eventually, she said, those services’ space commands will be rolled into Space Force, and those personnel will transfer branches. In the more immediate future, officials said, soldiers and sailors could be detailed to Space Force.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-military/2019/12/21/...

We had a bunch of international treaties to prevent war in space, which would be disastrous for humanity in a way similar to nuclear war. Our leaders now seem to have decided it's okay because they could probably win.

It's because as soon as people militarize space nobody can get anything done in space.

In space you are so much more vulnerable than in any conceivable environment on earth. Survival depends on others not having layers of other agendas, several of which may be to find ways to kill you.

Imagine how much space exploration will cost if not only do you need to get to space, but you need to bring defensive and offensive weapons as well.

the comicality of thinking that a uniformed soldier in space would care about camouflage

Consider that air forces throughout the world wear blue uniforms, yet no individual in uniform is ever going to attempt to camouflage themselves against the sky...

It would probably be a civil service so more like the IRS or something.

At the minimum, a nationalized web index would be fantastic (modulo the normal concerns above government censorship that already apply). It would reduce so much duplicated effort if there were a standard government crawler that indexed the web and made that data available to anyone who wanted to use it.

Similar to the way weather data is collected by the government, and multiple private companies use it to produce their own sites and forecasts, you could have different search engines doing different interesting things with the data: compete on UX, or focus on particular niches of search.

As it stands today, we have a Bing-Google duopoly because indexing the whole web is such a massive undertaking.

Nationalized or public index, would be something I would get behind. And then other people an companies could build search around it.

Cannibalising publishers is a separate issue from showing too many ads, and I don't follow which of these you think nationalizing a search engine will solve.

This makes me think about how Google has begun to demand recipe sites include Calorie counts.

Are we a few years away from Google Recipe Search?

One of the sites I maintain has a collection of recipes. It was only when Google started sending me email because they lacked calorie counts that I realized what a terrible idea microdata is for everyone but Google.

I have since taken all of the microdata out of the HTML. If google wants it, it can pay for it.

> everyone but Google

... and the users of Google. Being able to see things like calorie counts directly in search results is awesome. Seriously, if you Google "banana bread" you get recipe ratings, cooking time, and calories right in the list of results. The UX is exceptional.

Why would you need or care about the calorie-count of a recipe?Either you want that food or not. Your guts will tell you.

Is having a natural approach to food no longer normal?

It makes it easy to compare how healthy a recipe is. I often do many searches looking for the differences in recipes with lower sugar levels. Then also how this changes preparation.

It's awesome, but it is also just a click away and that data isn't google's. That 'exceptional UX' is at the expense of someone else's work with google reaping the profits.

It also allows things like Google Assistant to work.

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