Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch court order | Hacker News Reader

Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch court order

torrentfreak.com

493 pointsXiS316 comments

Regardless of your opinion on piracy, I think Google (and ISPs) should not moderate search results.

Basically, search engines are used to find things publicly available on the internet, policing should be done on the actual hosts of the content.

Same goes for ISPs, they are here to provide access to publicly available computers, without interfering with the content or accessibility.

In principle I agree but in this case I think Google is trying to protect itself from lawsuits. Which seems like a reasonable thing to do from their perspective. Any search engine that gets big enough will eventually have a target on its back for DMCA trolls

> I think Google is trying to protect itself from lawsuits

That is unlikely. Google breaks many privacy-related laws across the globe and deals with billions of euros of fines regularly. They have an unlimited wallet and couldn't care less about spending a few billions to extend their dominance over the Internet.

That's a logical fallacy - just because Google lost money in the past doesn't mean they want to lose money in the future. We don't know what Google's utility function was in the past, and certainly can't extrapolate to this case.

I'll concede that we can't know for sure. But given their vast legal spendings and huge profit margins, i'd argue that whatever their strategy is, legal threats from BREIN is a drop in the ocean for them.

Google search prints a ridiculous amount of money. I think the lawsuit costs do pale in comparison to keeping their dominance. If Google is doing this voluntarily, they must see an upside that helps maintain that dominance.

Why wouldn’t this result in absolutely horrible search results? Any sort of algorithmic tweak to prevent confusing, misleading or low quality results could be counted as moderation.

So maybe hide them behind "show more results" or something. That's still better than removing them outright. But of course, copyright holders wouldn't be happy with that.

But Google moderates search results by definition. As in, it's not like there's an objective external measure of what the results for a given search term should look like - it's all Google that determines what to show you in what order.

There is a difference between having a set of rules and doing ad hoc moderation.

The set of rules includes "results that are illegal to divulge in a jurisdiction will not be shown."

Since Google is doing this voluntarily, many of the blocked results were legal to divulge but Google is choosing not to, which does make it ad hoc.

This just becomes a question of pragmatism at that point - Google lacks the capacity to determine which of the blocked results are legal versus are not without incurring cost, so the most realistic approach is to recognize that a majority of results from that domain are illegal and block the domain. This is just the simplest way to enforce a particular rule in a particular case that can't otherwise be cheaply codified programatically.

Yet Google doesn't generally block most content that is illegal in one jurisdiction in all others where it is not illegal. If Google is deciding to do that just with TPB, then that is indeed an adhoc decision.

So writing a rule "don't show results from domains on list X" makes it ad hoc ad not a rule?

I don't think there's sombody manually removing each result from search queries by hand. That wouldnt meet latency constraints

First, there’s a difference between moderation by prioritization vs blacklisting.

Second, if I search for “the Pirate Bay website” I’m pretty sure there’s an objective result that should be there at the top.

I don't see a difference between not listing something and listing it below an infinite number of null results.

1 / ∞ = 0

There's barely a difference between delisting and listing as the eleventh result...

Is this not a false dichotomy? Unless you are purposely using deprioritization as a substitute for blacklisting it would stand to reason that results 'moderated' to the bottom of the a priority list ended up there because they actually aren't considered useful/relevant to the query. So unless you are moderating in bad faith blacklisting is clearly different because it removes the users ability to find the content at all and it wholly ignores the intent of their search.

How is it not the true dichotomy? Delisting is the same as prioritizing noise over good hits.

if "the pirate bay website" is written in lots of documents discussing the legality of the website, but the actual website is called "https://www.piratebay.org" and doesn't contain the words "the pirate bay website" at all, then by any objective measure that site should be way down the list of any search results for "the pirate bay website".

You honestly think that it's the wrong answer to show that website when somebody searches for that term?

The title tag of the site is as follows: "Download music, movies, games, software! The Pirate Bay - The galaxy's most resilient BitTorrent site"

And it's the number one search result for that phrase on DDG. Because search engines are actually programmed well enough to figure out that's the right answer. I'm not sure why you think it's the wrong answer to show that site as the first result, but I'm pretty sure everybody else in the world disagrees with you, and would prefer that they see the website they are searching for, instead of news articles about the site they are searching for.

This is 2021. Search engines are aiming for semantic matches.

We should apply this logic to something else to have some fun. You go to the shop and look for spaghetti and instead of finding it, you find all the other things you can use together with spaghetti to make a nice meal.

Now, if only you could find some spaghetti to go with all the other stuff...

I don't think anyone actually thinks in these absolutist terms. I mean, it's an oft-cited whataboutism, but what about CP? Terrorist propaganda? Insert your own list of abhorrent content here.

I mean, zero moderation is some kind of internet libertarian ideal, but there's plenty of examples out there what that looks like - 4chan, 'old' reddit, parler & co (which ironically censor a lot of stuff), all of the dark web, etc.

You state "policing should be done on the actual hosts of the content", but what if the host says "lol no"? That's what's happening here; BREIN demanded (and has done so for at least the past 10 years, probably longer) that since the hosts are untouchable and not legally required to comply (these things get complicated once you go abroad), they went for the ISP's and search engines instead.

If something is deemed illegal, and the source is untouchable, you have to go for whatever passes it on. I mean hard drugs are illegal, they are shipped across the world, and only when they arrive at a port is there something that can be done to stop it.

I absolutely agree with you - we don't live in a black and white world, and black and white measures rarely work in practice.

Should Google de-list Pirate Bay? In my opinion no.

Should Google de-list some things? No doubt yes. That is how society works - your rights end where somebody else's start.

As the down-voting of parent shows, HN gets defensive when this is pointed out.

>we don't live in a black and white world

you say that and then I see this:

>Should Google de-list Pirate Bay? In my opinion no.

Looks like pretty black in white about Pirate Bay here.

Also doesn't look like you are too much against censorship. You do not even discuss whether it should be or not. I sense it is pretty white there for you too.

It reminds me how russia controlled media spread idea that not everything is black and white but when they decided to attack Ukraine using military and took Crimea and parts of other two regions with force it suddenly became black and white for the moment of attack and then again coming back to 'oh it's not black and white we didn't took anything'

I personally love how "everything is not black and white" concept is used to justify censorship and promote everything that serves totalitarian dreams.

I think a possible solution is to at least list The Private Bay just as a site but not the content within its site. So if you want to search something within The Private Bay, PB can do it within their own site.

The "content" of TPB is just hashes. Are they illegal already?

Not really, the solution is just something to offer balance between both sides.

You were on the right track with the ironic parler comment, however, 4chan and old reddit, old school forums both always had and currently have moderation. The moderation rules are just different than on other sites, but they had hundreds of humans moderating. Even the newer, arguably worse web forums out there are still policed internally, as you note.

It's a myth that there was zero moderation. What the libertarian ideal was privacy and anonymity. Where a user could say something like sharing a link to the pirate bay and not worry about it too much when it got moderated. Websites would respect a users privacy. Moderation was about cleaning the site, not sharing a users personal data with authorities. It wasn't about free speech so much as a kind of place for users on the internet with no real world consequences for sharing, for example, a link to the pirate bay.

They all moderated.

> I mean, it's an oft-cited whataboutism, but what about CP? Terrorist propaganda?

I like the Freenet's author take on this. He says that porn, terrorists, drug dealers and all kinds of "abhorrent" content are a price you pay for the lives of whistleblowers and people fleeing from their dictatorship states, sects, and terrorists; and for preservation of valuable, but controversial, content.

Well, it makes sense in case of Freenet, which offers full anonymity and resilient storage (you can upload content, and as long as there are people viewing it, it will propagate itself along the node connections path, and it's impossible to take the content down). Torrents, Reddit, and 4chan are different, so maybe here the trade-off will be different too.

> I mean, zero moderation is some kind of internet libertarian ideal, there's plenty of examples out there what that looks like - 4chan

4chan has rules that are enforced, especially since the split between 4chan and 4channel. What might give the impression that it's "some kind of internet libertarian ideal" is that people often not report posts. But when they do, the janitors usually do their jobs. These days even troll posts are deleted!

>>I mean, zero moderation is some kind of internet libertarian ideal, but there's plenty of examples out there what that looks like - 4chan, 'old' reddit, parler & co (which ironically censor a lot of stuff), all of the dark web, etc.

There is a couple of problem with this, first I see no problems at all with 4chan, old reddit, or parler. So using them as an example of something bad that should be banned is ridiculous, parler in peculiar was gaslite into a false narrative around 1/6 protests when in reality most of the communication, as stated by the FBI, where done via Facebook and other larger platforms not parler. Parler was the scape goat. Parler should fail for any number of reasons but not because of censorship, it is a terrible platform technoligically, it is terrible security posture, and various other usablity issue.

Then there is the unintended blowback this type of censorships leads to. Such as increased levels of echo chambers and extremism. Take for example the fall out from Backpage removal. Did it end trafficking, and prostitution. No, not by a long shot, it just make the criminals harder to catch, the victims harder to find, and made things more dangerous for legal age sex workers.. Good Job Government.

> Insert your own list of abhorrent content here.

There are clear laws and court decisions which Google must obey. The title says "voluntarily", which is the actual problem in this case.

I guess the question is, is it actually voluntary? The ESRB rating system was established voluntarily, but that was to avoid legislation and legal action that would have happened if they didn't. Could be a similar situation here.

The basic problem with the argument against moderation is that the Internet started without moderation.

You could post whatever you wanted to Usenet. You could email whatever you wanted to anyone, and they would see it in their inbox. Heck you could “finger” to see who was online in remote networks, and “talk” to open a live chat with anyone, totally unmediated by any commercial product. You could log in to open FTPs and trade files.

We’ve been to that particular heaven, and most people didn’t like it.

Why? While trafficking in CSM was an important and awful consequence, the negative that dominated most people’s experience was spam. That’s why web forums beat Usenet; that’s why centralized webmail beat a forest of naked email servers. Etc.

People don’t actually want unmoderated search; it would be choked with spam.

What people actually want is whatever they want, as easily and cheaply as they can get it. The Pirate Bay and other file sharing services are popular not because they represent some sort of libertarian ideal, but simply because they shovel a lot of great content to people for free.

Of course they’re popular! A person handing out $10 bills on the street corner will be popular too. But it kind of matters where he or she got those $10 bills. There are societal side effects we might want to manage.

>We’ve been to that particular heaven, and most people didn’t like it.

Many of us prefer that heaven to the hell of centralized control, censorship and commercialism that we have now!

China gives the proper answer - a national firewall.

If a host doesnt comply, they get denied by the firewall.

I would like to see Google highlight legally removed search results.

For example, leave a gap in the search results where the missing one would have been, perhaps with some details of the result which do not fall under the removal request (for example, the title of the page, even if the URL must be removed).

Add this to the long list of things that Google won't do for the exact reason that you want them to do it. They're not on your side any more and haven't been for a decade now.

If you take ranking/filtering criteria away from Google and social networks they lose a lot of power but we gain a lot of freedom. They should be forced to open the filtering part of the stack, allow more competition and user input in that space.

> search engines are used to find things publicly available on the internet

This used to be the case. As the internet grew in size search providers felt it was in best interest in general user to cull these results and present their definition of best at the top. They wanted to solve the needle in the hay-stack problem by taking all the noise out and funneling the best result to the top.

Best is a subjective term and I don't think I agree with it. However, your definition is not the same as Googles. Search providers can define what their search engine does the same way a restaurant gets to decide what's on its menu even though all restaurants serve food.

Alternative take: SEO became a thing, and the initial search algorithms were not designed for an adversarial game

Is not indexing certain things the same as moderating search results?

Is default but optional moderation a bad thing?

(full disclosure, I work for Google)

I think it's easy to take an absolutist approach when it's somebody else who faces the consequences. In some ways it's a rehash of the arguments when the Navalny app was delisted.

In a vacuum, "should someone follow politically motivated requests to take down content?" is an easy question to answer. But when you have to worry about consequences like giving up your freedom, I can't say that I'd have the courage to follow through. The Dutch prisons might be nicer than Russia's, but asking someone else to give up their freedom for ideals is still a tall order.

It seems to me that the right (if unrealistic) way to address this is to make searching P2P so there is no small number of people to arrest for this. Governments can't arrest double digit percentages of their citizens... that looks really bad.

Who should, I your opinion, be responsible for applying the moderation?

the user

Google already acts upon DMCA requests, delisting sites if requested. They add a small note to the end of their results to inform you if the page should normally have had more search hits.

So this raises so many questions. Has _no party_ requested to delist TPB under DMCA?!

That sounds incredible if true. But the only explanation I have for Google feeling like they need to go this far, delisting on their own initiative! It's like a scenario that should never have to happen, and something they should never do either.

So what's going on here?

Update: Ugh, editorialization... Apparently court has been involved here and while Google may not be individually targetted and forced YET, so "voluntary", it's easy to see how Google see the writing on the wall and choose to comply. No point in fighting this with such a clear cut DMCA violation. But in this case I'm still surprised it took this long!

When delisting for DMCA requests they don't delist the whole site, only results pointing to specified infringing torrents.

Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome.

Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results, with both Google Search and YouTube. Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. They artificially promote "authoritative sources" which are anything but, since they may be second-hand coverage of original videos that get buried in search results.

Google's results are not only manipulated by clever SEO people[0], but by employees[1], in direct contradiction to Sundar Pichai's sworn testimony. Some of that is very defendable. But there's zero transparency. Given their search monopoly, and that most people aren't aware that search results are manipulated, Google Search is the web. Websites that get delisted are presumed to have ceased to exist. Focusing on browsers (Firefox) is good, but no longer enough.

That's why Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more.

[0]: how many times have you tried looking for a machine's user manual, mistyped the model number, and somehow "found" a webpage with the manual for a product that didn't exist? and then modified the model number further and found more results from the same website, with relevant keywords and yet another incorrect model number? My understanding of SEO isn't good enough to know how they do that. I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries.

[1]: https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-interventions-...

Isn't it an unavoidable social phenomenon ? as soon as any system / company starts to have weight in the group, they will face requests of accountability and responsability. They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work often.

Simple, if company works only as a messenger they will be left alone. They just present user content, and leave users to find their content.

As soon as they introduce their own bias(curating content, recommendations, emergence of so called "walled gardens") it opens the floodgates.

Untrue.

The history of communications and information is rife with channels and sources of all description being controlled.

If anything, "neutral" sources are all the more subject to influence as they simply abrogate the role of censor / amplifier to others. All the more so if they're heavily used and relied upon, as this means that there is an influenceable audience present.

As my friend Woozle puts it:

Because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...

It is avoidable through traditions and institutionalized processes that engender neutrality.

Google is an extension of American soft power. They're about as neutral as Huawei.

There are degrees of control/alignment. It's not anywhere as absolute as you imply.

> They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work often.

it should work - it's up to society to make this work by passing laws to that effect.

Is there any way to find things transparently on the 'open web' without using Google? Is there a real alternative?

If you have a feeling something exists but doesn't show up you can try yandex, kagi or even search.marginalia.nu (the last one is a bit hit and miss but also fun/delightful, eye-opening and it seems a lot more resistant to black hat SEO due to their algorithms.)

Please stop recommending yandex or any other service from Russia.

Russia spreads lies propaganda and misinformation by all channels possible including RT yandex and anything under their control. If you unaware what russia does you should educate yourself.

If you try to get any information from russia controlled channels not only you'll be heavily mislead and manipulated you'll also support that aggressive regime that actively attacks any light of democracy and freedom in the world. Russia already have used not only propaganda but also military to attack any attempts to build free society respecting democracy especially in neighboring countries.

For instance in Ukraine yandex is simply completely blocked as result of a war that Russia started against Ukraine and it is done for a reason. Do not be less wise then Ukraine and just do not go there.

While you're not wrong about Russia, similar things can be said about the US and its allies (of which my own country is one).

True, the US typically attacks countries that are farther away, but their devastation of Irak and Afghanistan is much worse than Ukraine or Georgia (another victim of Russian aggression) have suffered in the last 20 years at least. And while Iraq and Afghanistan were by no means democratic regimes, we can see plenty of democratic governments toppled by American power and their allies - In Yemen in 2014 (mostly Saudi led, but with US arms and support), Haiti in 2004, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the late 1970s, Iran in 1953. There are also many other despotic regimes that the US successfully helped against revolutions that may have toppled them (most memorably, in South Vietnam, but also at various times in Iraq and much of South America).

Empires are always evil, and they are always seeking to spread their propaganda. The only way of getting a slightly clearer picture is to use sources from multiple such empires and try to build a more accurate picture than any one of them wants you to.

So yes, please use both Yandex and Google for search, read RT as well as the New York Times, Al Jazeera, AFP, etc.

What a borked view of the world. Yes, the US invades places. Yet the damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, is caused far more by their own people, killing and slaughtering each other over religious grounds.

> Yet the damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, is caused far more by their own people, killing and slaughtering each other over religious grounds.

We, the USA and its allies, have directly killed thousands to tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and many more "enemy combatants" (it's important to remember that under the rules of the "War on Terror", any adult male is counted as an enemy combatant by default, unless explicitly proven otherwise). The Russians killed as many or more during the Soviet invasion.

The opposition forces are also responsible for a great many civilian deaths (many more than the US led forces, at least in Iraq, according to official numbers). But this is what happens when you invade a country, especially one already divided along sectarian lines: the people who rise up against you start seeing enemies and collaborators everywhere and killing their own as well.

Were there sectarian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan before the war? Absolutely, but a mere fraction of what happened during the war.

>While you're not wrong about Russia, similar things can be said about the US and its allies (of which my own country is one).

There is nothing comparable between Russia and US and it's allies because Russia is not democratic country and as such values and intentions are completely different.

>So yes, please use both Yandex and Google for search, read RT as well as the New York Times, Al Jazeera, AFP, etc.

I am sorry but you cannot recommend deliberate lies machines as the source of information. I mean you can but the value of RT as source of information is zero if one has brain and knows how RT works.

For the source of information one should check the source and how it is reliable. If it's not then it is not the source of information.

Plese stop pretending that western countries and megacorporations do not also spread lies and propaganda.

The suggestion was to use Yandex as an additional source when American search engines are not providing the expected results, not to rely on it exclusively without questioning the information provided.

>Plese stop pretending that western countries and megacorporations do not also spread lies and propaganda.

No one pretending that some one is perfect but degree of imperfectness for intentional killer of democracy as the main value is very different from the imperfectness of democratic state relaying on functioning democracy to exist.

One of the russian propaganda trends is to present to naive listener that "everybody do lie". Of course to solve that manipulation one should recall about degree and intentions. Russia used military to attack Ukraine and lied about it usage and still does. Russia does it x100 in comparison to democratic world and the intentions are not to have some profits but to kill on a massive scale to destroy democracy with any way possible.

With all respect the level of lies coming from russia is not comparable to democratic countries with all their imperfectness.

>The suggestion was to use Yandex as an additional source when American search engines are not providing the expected results, not to rely on it exclusively without questioning the information provided.

Questioning information is one thing and looking for information in the source of deliberate lies ill-designed to question the truth with intention to destroy the truth and any trust is another. Suggestion to use yandex and RT was wrong.

DDG removes quite a few "dangerous" pages too. You need to use Yandex these days to get stuff the "ministry of truth" deems to sensitive.

I'm sure the irony is lost on the Freedom-Democracy-landers.

DDG pretty much just whitelabels Bing.

You can't find many things that Russian government deems inappropriate in Yandex. Yandex, Google and Bing(DDG is basically Bing proxy) just have different sets of biases.

It is time to go back to meta search engines I guess

What about startpage?

Startpage is a Google proxy. The Pirate Bay is filtered out there as well.

Owned by an Ad company these days. But yes they do promise "We'll never do evil". They belong in the grey area. But at least they haven't been caught with their hands in the cookie-jar multiple times like Brave so they got that going for them. I'd stay clear.

I don't think meta has a search engine yet, though.

slow clap

I don't see how this is something to be applauded. The company is successfully worming it's way into common vernacular. Meta, Apple, Block, etc. Pretty soon you won't be able to speak a sentence without invoking 6 different brands' free advertising.

They are applauding the pun, not the company the pun refers to.

Nah, Yahoo style pages with links

My monitor's pretty hi-res and big.

How about a 3-column search that's Google, DDG (so, Bing), and Yandex, with a single search field for all three? Bonus points for syncing it up so if I click, say, the "Images" tab on one of them, it switches the others over, too.

Kinda like how Allsides functions for news/political bias.

https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

Would be great to have a search frontend that aggregates results from both then.

Brave have their own search engine that uses an independent built-from-scratch index. [0]

[0] https://search.brave.com/

> You can't find many things that Russian government deems inappropriate in Yandex

What are those things that Yandex can't find? It seems to me it shows pretty relevant results for "putin's golden toilet" [1], "putin's blasting houses" with US State Department / Soros funded web-site as one of the top results [2]. A query with "navalny's statement" shows both his twitter and his web-site on the first page.

When comparing to google, "gab" in yandex shows the web-site's link as the first result. Google doesn't show it at all, there is only CNN, wikipedia, some woke dictionaries all telling you gab is not something you should search.

So, who's got totalitarian system with censorship after all?

[1]: https://yandex.com/search/?text=%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%...

[2]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B...

[3]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%B2%D0%B...

I googled gab and it was the first result. Did your machine get pwned?

Where are you from? I checked from American IP and it's indeed the first result. Not the case with Asian IP.

Gab.com is first from Asian IP, but locale should be hl=en.

When I search for Gab on Google, it comes up as the first result.

What does "us election fraud" shows, any web-sites that are not in line with "the correct" narrative? For me google shows one side, yandex both of them.

Now, "голосование на пеньках" (voting on stomps) is a mockery of Putin's constitution referendum by opposition. When searching this phrase in Google the front page is again Putin controlled media: tass, rbc, kommersant, rg.

Yandex apart from the aforementioned web-sites has US State Department / Soros funded meduza and svoboda.org, liberal (in American sense) tjournal, Deutsche Welle.

It seems Yandex gives preference to the most relevant sites when Google decides what's good ("credible") for you.

[1]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%8...

> when Google decides what's good ("credible") for you.

One of the problems is that black hat SEOs (among other people) have huge economic incentives to spread misinformation, including about the election. This is of course, an eternal cat and mouse game. This is not new, I remember when gmail started filtering chain letter scams more than a decade ago.

Good for them. The thing is I want a search engine, not a catalogue of web-sites approved by the ministry of truth.

I'm just checking a claim I thought was implausible and also easily verifiable.

It'd be weird for Google to bury bad think only for non-American IP addresses but allow it for Americans if it was on some woke crusade for the benefit of the US government. Now, I'm not sure why it's removed from your results, but my point is that what you cited as a piece of evidence for malign intent on Google's part isn't actually supporting evidence.

> my point is that what you cited as a piece of evidence for malign intent on Google's part isn't actually supporting evidence

It's worth noticing that it's pointless to censor requests like "gab.com" anyway (though that happened in my case). A person typing them already knows what they want. Now, try "right wing social media", "free speech media", "social media without censorship", etc. For me it doesn't show anything relevant but the links to the "correct" think tanks. Does this fact prove the malign intent of Google? No, but it's still there and you know it (except they consider this a virtue).

They are mandated to remove everything that Roskomnadzor blocks from search results. That happened to Smart Voting in September, for example. And it's extremely easy for them to block any website they want.

Thanks God neither Google nor Apple complied because "it's extremely [difficult] for them to" do so. Oh, wait, they did comply, too. Different jurisdiction, no HQs in Russia and yet both succumbed to the authoritarian regime. Not a good argument in the context of comparing the two search engines.

At least it's a different set of biases from the usual ones in the us. It's more obvious what's missing.

I noticed that with DDG recently. Tried searching for fmovies (pirate streaming stie), DDG yields nothing now when it previously had the results I wanted. Same results searching for iteroni.

I compared it with brave search and the latter remains unfiltered for the time being.

Are you expecting to see https://fmovies.kim ? That's what I get at the top of my results: https://imgur.com/yW893ld

Interesting. The past few days when I searched I got none of the hits, but yes along those lines.

Today I see this:

DDG: https://imgur.com/a/CfDXfoq Brave Search (for comparison): https://imgur.com/a/vvEfaMF

Honestly DuckDuckGo doesn't censor anything. It just uses the bing index with a few custom results. I have been unable to find an example for which DDG and bing would produce different results though.

And the fact that the our societies have been rushing towards totalitarianism doesn't make Putin Mr. Nice Guy all of a sudden. It is not that simple.

I would personally not use any information source which could potentially be under the control of either the Russian or Chinese government. Both governments are tightly controlled by strongmen who spread disinformation and propaganda (information warfare).

If Trump runs and is re-elected, the American companies like Google will be under the control of his government. He has a lot of anger about being deplatformed, and they will be brought to obey his bidding as a priority and fairly quickly, since this time around it's personal instead of being some boring piece of paperwork.

In that scenario, ironically, the Russians might end up being more free.

> Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more.

This feels important to me, and at this point it actually feels like we have more choice than we have had in 15 years and we have a chance to change history.

If you are one of the many who have noticed that Google has declined in recent years you can start by just changing to DDG, or even Bing as default. (Use Google as fallback if you want and see if you realize the same as me: their results are just as broken. If you don't, you can consider yourself lucky for now and go back to Google, but at least keep this in mind as they start heating your frog pot as well ;-).

Do experiment with alternative engines: Kagi seems close to production ready now and search.marginalia.nu is just a delightful tour de force as to what can be done by a determined person!

But why is there no methadon to slowly quit google? A search engine, that just appends to its results the first page of google results?

DDG is "close enough": Add "!g" to the search and you end up at Google. So I often use DDG first, and then fall back on Google afterwards. My search bar defaults to DDG. The many other shortcuts like that (e.g. !gi for google images, !b for bing, !gn for google news; and tons more) is a good incentive to stick to that default.

Google still gets lots of searches from me, but the better DDG does, the less it'll happen.

DDG is mainly Bing, so you can just stop having/using !b

They have very different interfaces, so there are times when !b is worthwhile. Not generally for the results, though.

I use DDG by default, but sadly it's quite noticeably worse than Google, so I end up having to override it frequently :(

I also use DDG by default. I only rarely go to google and more than half the time when I do, Google's results are no better. I find that usually adjusting my DDG query is more effective than trying Google.

I have a weird search FOMO thing where after I DDG something, I will often throw the !g into it to see the Google results for the same term, to make sure I got the "best" or most comprehensive result. And usually the DDG result was fine in comparison. But I'm finding it hard to trust it and stop the habit.

DDG has been my default for a few years, now, and on the very rare occasions I've been forced/mistakenly use Google, their results have been without exception worse. Much worse.

I've had bing as a default on mobile for a couple years now. And I have google, bing and ddg as defaults on different browsers (chrome, safari, ff, IIRC). Trying to mix it up decently, and bing for my mobile searches hasn't been bad at all.

FWIW, people still often react weirdly when I tell them to 'bing' something. "When was that movie released?" "I dunno, just bing it". Reactions are usually confusion, mild amusement, but sometimes I've had some weird aggressive/anger issues emerge when I've suggested someone use bing. Strange...

There is Neeva. No ads, private paid search. Been trying their beta and really loving it.

The Web is a threat to the Open Web.

Though that's in very large part an inevitable and widely-foreseen consequence of Google's other arm: advertising.

The monetisation of content is the root of great evil:

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship

100% agree on the advertising part. If we were to remove advertising from the Web (i.e. by law or if 90% of people would use adblockers) it would be a better place. When Instagram/Facebook/Linkedin suddenly charge 5$/Month for membership, you quickly check that you want your data to be portable and interoperable, as you probably will not be a lifetime member.

A better place for people who have money, perhaps.

There's a clearly obvious paygate for content access: Internet service providers, whether broadband or mobile.

These provide services to areas which themselves can be generally ranked in terms of wealth, leading to the opportunity for a progressive, unmetered, universal payment mechanism. In this system, various publishers (and notably local news and information sources) would be afforded compensation or revenue, and subscribers would have access to any available information.

Remote-but-locally-focused providers (e.g., the small-town paper across the state, or the country, or in another continent) would be compensated principally through their local service providers (with some balancing within states having widely-varying economic distributions, e.g., NYC / upstate New York, Chicago / downstate Illinois, coastal / inland California, etc.

National / general-interest content (national or international news, e.g.) might receive a share of local/regional revenues, say, for national TV and radio broadcast news organisations, nationally-distributed newspapers (WSJ, NYT, WaPo in the US as examples), and book and magazine publishers. (Other countries and regions could make similar allocations.)

Much of this would offset online advertising, which costs a typical household of four on the order of $1,800/year within North America and EU ($455 billion projected 2021 spend, ~1 billion population). This is what people *are already paying for "free" online content. Direct content spend is on the order of $100/person, or 1/4 the cost of advertising. Distributed across all households (pro-rated by wealth as noted), on an all-you-can-eat basis, would be a remarkable game-changer.

Earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27803591

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545446

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15683719

I don't get it? Most people here are working for companies that have products and services to sell. Sales works by advertising your goods and services.

This is why I believe in UBI.

All but certainly a large part of the solution, though there's something to be said for a profit motive. How much to be said, and how much profit ... leaves much to be said....

The majority of literature is written not for money but because people want to write. Most books do not even get bought by publishers. Most books that do make next to no money. Few books even recover the cost of publishing them, much less produce a meaningful income for theirs authors. Many because the books themselves are dreck, of course, but many also simply because it's easy to write. Anyone can write a novel. Not everyone can write a good novel, but enough people do that there isn't a big enough market for most writers to be motivated by money.

It is because people badly want to and enjoy writing that we have vast quantities of books. If people looked at writing as a commercial endeavour, most of us would never, ever consider writing a novel - it's a crazily oversaturated market, to the point that writing a novel to make money is much like playing the lottery: You invest far more time that you could have spent on other things, and the potential payout for the vast majority of authors is below minimum wage most places.

We might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of writers who earn well enough that their income might cause them to make more commercial choices in their writing instead of writing the best they could. Maybe. I'm not convinced.

That said, outside of writing novels, things are different. You can probably earn more writing for a sketchy content farm than most of us will ever earn from writing novels, so the point is not entirely invalid, but it is not a good fit for literature.

EDIT: Changed second to last paragraph for clarity, see response for mangled original.

> We might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of writers who earn well for more commercial choices from those authors.

I don't understand this sentence.

I don't either, and I wrote it; a bit to quickly.

I meant to write that we might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of writers who earn well enough that their income causes them to make more commercial choices in their writing instead of writing the best they could.

I'll edit the comment so it makes more sense.

Looking at the publishing industry through the lens of most written works rather than most revenue generation misses the point spectacularly.

Works, in Schopenhauer's time, and today, are commissioned, written, edited, and promoted for their commercial potential in ways that are directly addressed by Schopenhauer's rant.

The works which aren't (excepting those written or promoted for propagandistic value, itself a major share of promoted works) rather prove his point.

The essence of Schopenhauer's concern is that information and entertainment should be intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically motivated. Trying to please the public, or tap into the revenue stream (typically advertising), or feed the algorithm, etc., rapidly leads to corruption and devaluation of content, which is what I was addressing.

Even where good works are promoted this often happens without benefitting the original author or creator. Sometimes in literature (Mark Twain struggled financially his entire life, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby only entered the American canon during WWII, as a cheap paperback shipped overseas to soldiers, long after Fitzgerald's own pickled death). The music world (both classical and popular) and art world are similarly rife with examples of this as well.

Old Art was a very sour puss, but with good reason.

> Looking at the publishing industry through the lens of most written works rather than most revenue generation misses the point spectacularly.

Sorry, but I can't agree. He explicitly argues for fewer but better works, and laments that this can't be achieved as long as you can profit from writing, but the fact is *this can't be achieved*, as we can se from the fact that most writing is not profitable today, and never has been.

Thinking that if only the commercialisation stopped, literature would suddenly be in a better place is utter nonsense that is based on a fantasy world where writing well is far easier than it is.

It's not commercialisation of writing that is stopping us from getting better literature, but the difficulty.

While there certainly is a lot of commercial writing one can easily dismiss, the notion that a profit motive prevents writers from writing from extrinsic motivation ignores that most literature is written by people who can never in a lifetime hope to life of their writing.

There has never been more books written with extrinsic motivations.

As I pointed out, there may well be a point here in that some types of commercialised content often is pure dreck. But only a fraction of a percent of literature is "commissioned, written, edited and promoted for their commercial potential".

A lot of it for good reason, because a lot of that content is also pure dreck. But even fantastic authors often struggle to get published and only a fraction of them make a living of it.

This is more cogent, thank you.

The argument that Schopenhauer is espousing a fantasy probably does have merits, and we've the benefit of another century and a quarter of publishing (the novel really only emerged into mass culture during the 19th century). There's the challenge of recognising greatness as it first appears (it almost always takes at least some time for that awareness to dawn), and the sheer arbitraryness of assessments as well.

That said ...

We're still left with the fact that what financial compensation promotes is at the very least appeal to a minimum common standard. That lesson has emerged again and again in the history of mass-media, beginning with street carnivals and players, the penny press (both newspapers and "penny-dreadful" fiction), the mass media of radio and television (Murrow's "Wires and Lights in a Box" and Minow's "Vast Wasteland"), and the Web, mobile media, Reddit, and Facebook (once Literally Harvard, now ... not so much).

In the case of online content and services, it seems that true gems are virtually always underfunded. (The constant gripes aimed at Wikipedia's apparent mostly sufficient endowment are a rare exception.) Sites such as LWN eke out an existance, Linux Journal ultimately folded --- for all that adtech supposedly pays for the Internet, it certainly failed there.

Looking at collections of great books, what strikes me is how many of them predate not only recent history (say, the past 50 years), but all of modernity. How much of this is measurement bias and a varianty of the Lindy Effect, and how much is a well-placed assessment on whatever truth there may be in merits is of course very hard to say. But it's quite persistent.

As I read through works (fiction and non), what I'm struck by is how little of what is recent is truly novel. The refrain from Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun, isn't entirely accurate, but it's far more so than it has any right to be. I suspect it's a combination of pressures to publish and an ignorance (often cultivated through deliberate presentism and deprecation) of earlier literature that leads to this.

On your "difficulty* point: part of the cause is also the haste and rush to publish leading to just plain sloppy work. That's not entirely new, and the practice can even be an art form (Kerouak's On the Road). But far too many leading works --- bestsellers and the like --- are riddled with poor editing, rambling structure, typings and misspellings, and poorly-checked facts. There are of course exceptions, but again it seems that the pressure to publish and transact leads to poor results.

(Self-published works can of course exhibit this to a far greater extent, but they're also produced under profit pressures, and with far fewer available resources than traditionally-published works, for the most part.)

I suspect that underlying this discussion are two questions that haven't been asked yet, so I'll ask them:

1. What makes a work "great"?

2. What are the circumstances in which such works emerge?

If you could provide any examples of "recent" (I'll give you anything published since Schopenhauer wrote, so 1891, though more recent would be more compelling) books meeting both the "great" and "not commercially motivated" criteria, either fiction or not, I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with.

(Others can contribute as well.)

... I actually think that would be more interesting than continuing the debate above. I think your argument has some merits though I'm not fully convinced.

I don't have time to respond fully now, but as for a work: Kafka, "The Trial" immediately sprung to mind.

Though I'd argue almost no published novels other than possibly subsequent works by bestselling authors are generally commercially motivated.

As someone who have published two novels: If you write to get rich, you're an idiot. It can happen, but it's so fundamentally unlikely that it's grossly irrational to write with that as motivation unless you've already been signed to a publisher. Even then it's a dubious gamble.

Kafka's a good choice. Newberry Award picks in children's literature have been a personal favourite. I'd probably find a place for Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L'Engle, and Douglas Adams (very much in the spirit of Jonathan Swift IMO, and still underappreciated as such).

I've had the experience of trying to keep a friend well-stocked in audiobooks, and have made something of a practice of seeking out "best of" lists (best short-stories of the year, best books of the year, etc.), and ... find that there's not a whole lot that shows up in any decade that's especially good. Their own tastes tend to mid-century, relatively classical, and literary, and tends to discount themes increasingly prevalent in post-1960s literature (I feel the exposure would do good, but we're talking preferences here). Literary awards, "best books of" anthologies, etc., tend to improve the pickings but remain slim.

And again, financial motivation isn't helping, and by promoting far more low-quality literature, further clouds the field. For books --- big, solid, meaty, information-dense objects that take hours or days or weeks to assimilate, quality assessment itself is difficult. And financial motive, in authoring, publishing (cultivating authors, commissioning works, encouraging production, editing and rewriting assistance, packaging, marketing, and promotion) don't help the process.

Schopenhauer's argument isn't that most authors are financially motivated. It's that financial motivation leads to worse writing.

Again, you're focusing on anecdotes and "most authors" rather than the industry's own revenue focus. I find both uncompelling.

There are of course legions of writers (of books, of music) ... and other creators (art, photography, etc.) who do chase that dollar. Back in the day, Writers' Market was full of all the standard encouragement and secrets-of-the-trade for breaking through. That same advice is now much more scattered, but you'll find it online, much in the form of YouTube videos on storyboarding, either generally, or using writing tools (Scrivener seems popular) specifically oriented for that task. The objective is to quickly create cookie-cutter literature that fits a market's wants and needs, not creation of great literature.

Typical current advice (there are many video results):

Storyboarding generally: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JGeVXafMkwM

Scrivener: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AJyGox2ldHo

In the research world, it's grants-chasing.

The issue is that creative media (print, visual, video, music, etc.) follow power laws and tent-pole effects. There are a few big hits, there are an awful lot of also-rans. Ironically, the more global the market, the fewer winners (rather than numerous top-ten contents, there is only one --- any practice based on cardinality, that is, ranking, is inherently zero-sum. One of the better treatments of this I've found is in Charles Perrow's Complex Organizations (1972, 1979, 1986) (https://www.worldcat.org/title/complex-organizations-a-criti...), in the chapter addressing the music industry. Interestingly, its discussion of hit-making, labels, talent, backing performers, and corruption-dependent distribution systems (radio payola and the like) has eerily strong similarities with the tech sector's VC, founders, tech talent, and overly-credulous tech media (and lately, mobile-device app markets). There's a powerful lesson for HN's audience here.

From the PhD dissertation [0] by Page and Brin:

> we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

[0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

It would be helpful if search engines were honest an open about what they censor.

Google could plainly say we blackhole this and that content and ignore these keywords and don’t autocomplete on these others, etc. same for Bing and any other. Just be open and transparent about the purposeful bias then the user can find and use the one that most matches what they’re looking to use.

Yes, what they censor and what they deliberately distort.

Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for yourself. Google will show you that the majority of American inventors throughout history have been African-American. You may be skeptical of Google's claim (disguised as search results), but the next generation, working on their school reports, will see the world as Google wants them to see it. Now imagine how much of what we learn about the reality of current events is coming from the same source with the same agenda and policies regarding narrative vs. reality.

But in case you are thinking of contradicting Google's claims, remember: that's what their campaign against "misinformation" is intended to silence. They are indeed serious about misinformation.

A couple of years ago, when they were testifying to Congress that they did not deliberately distort search results. At the same time, someone else in the organization explained why they deliberately bias results. Oops. I can only guess that it was some underling who, in a sea of leftists back in the office (and probably a few non-leftists who know what would happen if they were outed) took for granted that biasing search results for political objectives was something to be proud of. They didn't realize what their execs knew, that if you're going to distort the truth for a higher objective, you don't admit doing so.

On a Google web page that I can no longer find, they publicly explained (it was public, not an internal page) that search results that improved society were sometimes more important than simply reporting the facts. That must have sounded good to an internal audience, but apparently it had to be reworked into externally calling it a fight against misinformation.

I'm not sure we're seeing the same results -- when I (in the US) search for American inventors the majority of the people they show arek not obviously African American. It seems like "the leftists" haven't got to my results yet.

Just tried it in an incognito window out of curiosity. I didn't expect it to be true (if only because results are so variable) but sure enough, the parent accurately described the top carousel of results with photos (a feature I'm not sure I've ever actually seen before—I guess I don't tend to search things that trigger that page element to appear). 5/12 white, 7/12 black (zero any other group) of the set that appears on the front page without side-scrolling.

(I make no claims about why this is—I haven't a clue—and don't, personally, really care that it's the case, but am just confirming that I do indeed see the described behavior)

“ Google will show you that the overwhelming majority of American inventors throughout history have been African-American.”

It could just be that there is a lot of activity on the web around African-American inventors which Google is reflecting. Google isn’t an encyclopedia.

Their campaign against misinformation is purportedly intended to reduce the spread of lies and propaganda. There might be some collateral damage where sources of lies and propaganda get generally downgraded (even when telling the truth), but is that really a problem? Most of us do that in our interpersonal relationships. If you are a liar, I’ll tend not to believe you, even if when you tell me something true. (I’ll assume there is some agenda or some part which may be false.)

I don’t feel like you have presented sufficient evidence to support your (apparently politically motivated) case.

Such as Google's censoring of the never debunked lab leak theory? Oops. Or how about the now verified Hunter Biden laptop stories? Double oops.

It turns out the line between "politically inconvienent" and "misinformation" can be very fuzzy, even for high profile / important topics.

There is plenty of evidence if you look for it (and I am pretty sure I fall on the opposite side of the political divide from the commentor you are responding to.)

Edit: Google's biases don't just hurt the political right. Google's quick bar for the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was happy list Hillary with all her pledged votes in addition to those she'd actually won, in violation of journalistic standards and Google's previous practices.

There might be some collateral damage where sources of lies and propaganda get generally downgraded (even when telling the truth), but is that really a problem?

Of course it is if Google is one of the sources of propaganda rather than an objective source of truth. In that case "misinformation" is not a neutral question of factual correctness.

When the judge and prosecutor are the same person, the judge considers most of the prosecutor's arguments to be true and the defense to be an unreliable "source of lies" that needs to be kept in line.

> Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for yourself. Google will show you that the overwhelming majority of American inventors throughout history have been African-American.

I'm not sure that is the best example. For one, this only applies to image results, regular search seem normal. For another, Bing (and the search engines that use Bing) does the same thing.

Given that, I think that there may be some sort of guerilla SEO campaign to distort these results. That campaign could be leftists trying to change perceptions of race or it could be rightists trying to change perceptions of Google/search.

I think it's purely that most kids writing school reports are more likely to be asked to write about "African-American inventors" than "America inventors" or "Chinese inventors" or any particular country, and SEO-optimized blogspam has adapted to that. I don't think it's political.

Bing Search, which has an independent web index from Google/Bing, has the same issue. It's interesting how search results can be biased without any malevolence or even any intervention by search engines.

> I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries.

One way to do it is to have some path through the site that lists relevant data, but also includes links at the bottom to typoed versions of the data. The web crawler will chase those links, and if each page that you retrieve generates more such typo links, you can feed the crawler an infinite stream of typos.

Google will consume quite a large chunk of an infinite stream before it trips any kind of "circuit breaker" to cut off how much crawling they'll do on one site. They have a lot of storage.

Fascinating. Thanks

DDG should change their name though. Seriously. Who wants to use such a ridiculous sounding search engine? AltaVista sounded good and had a meaning (seeing from above). Yahoo fine. Bing also ok. But duckduckgo seems like the most ridiculous name someone came up on a brainstorm meeting for search engine names. But then they did went with it.

100% agree. It is so obviously a huge impediment.

Weird names can be overcome (see "google"), but weird + clunky + needs to disrupt massive established players... what are they thinking?

At least lose the "Go".. DuckDuck we can work with.

They already own duck.com

Well that has terrible SEO.

Nah HotBot and AskJeeves didn't have a problem back in the day. Google sounded just as ridiculous when it came out.

Dogpile

Lycos.

Bing.

Excite.

AltaVista.

Veronica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)

With the blink of an 'y', Hotbot was one letter away from something completely different. Although the term NSFW was yet to be invented back then.

One of my first exposures to "typo squatting" was when I accidentally typed in "hotbat" in the early 2000's. It led to some generic porn site with a girl in a tight tshirt holding a baseball bat as a splash image. No other real connection to the name as far as I could tell. Just a run of the mill (for the time) paid porn site.

In another universe, search is run by Hotboy.com, with its hotmale.com email system

I'd argue that HotBot is a lot more catchy since 1) it rhymes, 2) it's shorter in length.

AskJeeves would also be abbreviated in conversation to just "Jeeves", which is definitely as the original creators intended. "DuckDuckGo" doesn't have these features going for it.

They own duck.com and it redirects to their site. They should just adopt "duck.com" as their main brand, which will inevitably get shortened to "Duck" in everyday conversation.

Then we can turn it into a verb. "Go Duck <term>"

They could even capitalize on the famous autocorrect substitutions: "Need an answer? Duck it!"

Wow. I did not know this. They should absolutely do as you suggest. Duck is a far better name.

IIRC, Google actually owned duck.com until a few years back, when they voluntarily handed it over to DDG.

FWIW, because On2 aka Duck TrueMotion —> VP3-VP7

I once worked with an "interesting" guy who had a tshirt that read "If you can't duck it, fuck it" over an image of a roll of duct tape.

Unfortunately Apple's autocorrect has totally hijacked the meaning of "Go duck ___"

Are you telling me to go duck myself?

I agree, naming is very important. I once tried to have a conversation with a group of colleagues about Coq, and literally the conversation couldn’t move past the name. Now I just use TLA+ or Lean.

To me it seems search engines needs weird name.

Maybe I'm wrong and someone has a list of somewhat successful general search engine with a somewhat serious names besides Alta Vista (and I never thought about that before) and Fast?

It's a ridiculous name because it's a ridiculous company. "Private" search engine, hosted on US-based Microsoft Azure servers? Give me a break, what a complete joke.

Last night, driving home through a not great part of Detroit at nearly 10:00pm, I saw a box truck with DDG advertising on all sides. I was amused by the dedication to offline advertising.

Frankly that was my reaction when I first heard of "google".

At least to most normal people "google" would have sounded like a silly, made up word. Or like, the most association it might have had would be to something like googley eyes.

DuckDuckGo has the disadvantage of not only sounding silly, but also being composed of silly-sounding real words. And not having a secret geeky meaning that people find out about and then feel like they're part of an elite club.

This comment is so unrelatable to me, every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

It was, simply put, the biggest named number anyone knew and was frequently used as such in arguments... e.g. I watched that movie 1000 times! Oh ya? Well I watched it a google times.

>>>every kid over the age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.

Same here, as someone who was in high school in the late 90s and switched from AskJeeves/Yahoo/Altavista to Google around ~2000, part of the appeal was "Somebody named a search engine after the biggest number meme we know? AND it's fast? AND it gives good results? Lemme check this out..."

googol = 10^100

// did that get auto-corrected? if so, ironic, as it’s said "Google" was an accidental misspelling of "googol" by Sean Anderson back in ‘97…

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

the problem with DuckduckGo and Qwant (i don't know about Brave's search) is they're all so heavily reliant on Bing results, and they're not really new engines but privacy respecting engines hitting the Bing API and then supplementing with "answers" from other sources like weather services, wolfram alpha, etc..

There no real alternative to the big players. It's google or bing, basically.

Or Yandex, which doesn't get mentioned very often. At least it's someone else's government that has access to the queries.

yandex is my go to now.

Just be aware that just like mainstream media (and alternative media) it probably has a pretty huge bias.

The reason I mention this is that just like with mainstream media and unlike alternative medias and newsletters it seems easier to forget the bias of search engines.

> Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results

Indeed, they co-opt every search now. Anything related to local businesses or directions, flights and hotels, etc. And everything I try to find about pop culture or new tech or video games seems to be a page full of YouTube links. I want to grab the appropriate people at Google by the ear, and scream, "I DO NOT WANT TO SIT THROUGH A VIDEO ABOUT THIS." I guess I'm just old or something, but video seems like SUCH an inefficient way to impart information that could just be typed out, and then read. It's not even like it would be more work for these video producers. They're typing out the script to read over some generic video loops. JUST PUT THE COPY ON A PAGE! GAH!

I hate the slow creep of video content everywhere. Especially in documentation. I can't ctrl-f a video looking for a keyword and never want to. Looking at you Hugging Face!

For reference: https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html

One of the first things I do when evaluating something for work is look at the documentation.

If it is video, I move on to the next contender. That's simply a hard no.

Agreed. Videos can be nice as a support item for things that are visually oriented, but they do not replace a proper manual.

Try clicking on the three dots and then "Open transcript".

Honestly, we need to rework what we consider to be an aggregator and what we consider to be a publisher.

I'd argue that Google these days fall in line more of a publisher than a search engine. More often than not I'm feeling that the search engine is trying to sell me something rather than do the work requested and I don't mean ads (which I think are good monetization balance).

Same goes for algorithm social networks.

"I guess I'm just old or something"

Fwiw, my teenage son prefers video content over written content. Even if you hate it, there are other people that love it.

But is that because the majority of the stuff being served to him by Google has been video for his experience on the internet, and that's what he's used to, or because it's better, or because he actually just prefers it. (And, to be fair, we're probably not talking about the same sort of information, but the question still applies generally.)

I think the videos exist because people think that's how they can get paid for their documentary work. If you add documentation to an open source project, they strip your name off and a bunch of randos edit your work to the point of unrecognizability. If you document something on your blog or website, you have to pay to host it. If you document something in the form of a YouTube video, the hosting is free, and you can click a button to have a penny deposited in your bank account every time someone clicks it. You can even do your own side deal and insert an ad wherever you want! That's why everything is a video these days, it's simple economics.

Certainly, there is still a lot of text in the world, but the reason things are moving towards videos is exactly because C-f doesn't work. You'll click a video hoping it will help, it won't, but the advertiser will still pay the content creator. If you visit a text-based website, search for what you're looking for, and don't find it, you'll be gone before the ads even load. And that was in a world where advertisers paid for text ads, which isn't the current world.

There are multiple free blog hosting sites.

Yesterday I wanted to grab an image of flowers. Any flowers. I searched on flowers in image search. Google returned a page that was inundated with ads. I had trouble finding an image that I could use because it wasn’t an ad.

creative commons image search for "flowers": <https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?imgl=cc;p=flow...>

Learn to search (hint: searchlores), it is an immensely useful skill in this age of information; you don't need to be irked by bad tools any more.

I've seen YouTube videos where the creator put the entire script in the video description so I can just pause the video and read the article. More people should do this.

Many videos now come with an auto-generated script, available by clicking on the three dots ("Open transcript"). Time stamps can be switched off if desired.

yeah seriously who needs all this video junk that takes 5 minutes to say the 1 useful thing they have to say

I remember searching for a movie trailer on YouTube. I searched for the exact title of the video, yet the original trailer published by Warner Bros was buried down below spam reposts and stupid reaction videos.

If you're looking for a Warner Bros movie trailer then why would you search on YouTube instead of visiting the Warner home page?

Who thinks, “I want to look up a video trailer, so I’ll go to the Warner Brothers home page, whatever that is.”? No, the layman searches for it on the world’s second most-visited website.

What an absurd thing to suggest.

Should everyone in your opinion know the production companies of all upcoming films so they can look up their website to view trailers?

I wonder how many people don't use DDG (like me) because of the stupid (in my opinion) name. It's so impossible to remember and pronounce.

Whatever cool/hilarious/human reason they have for it (I don't care), I wish they also added another alias that is easy to remember and type.

It’s a riff on the children’s game “duck duck goose”.

The biggest problem is that it's the American (UK as well?) name for a children's game - not the sort of thing most English speakers would ever learn, unless they are really connected to US/UK culture.

The game is probably more or less universal, but the name is unrecognizable.

I feel like it’s such an oddball name that it sticks in my head.

Oddly, in some regions of the US, the same game is called "duck, duck, grey duck".

I never type it because DDG is my default.

I think Google was a harder name to remember for non-nerds who weren't familiar with the rather obscure word.

There is a short alias: As someone else mentioned, duck.com redirects to duckduckgo.com

duck.com

ddg.gg or duck.com are both easy to type. And I suppose duck.com is reasonably easy to remember.

Film trailers on youtube are particularly bad, especially as you not only get other companies simply rereleasing them with a logo over the top, but you get fake trailers polluting the results

> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web

I don't believe that. I came from a time when Yahoo and Altavista were used. Google took over that market very fast (personal experience, not data ;)). So I'm sure that also now, people could shift very fast when the results are better somewhere else.

Although I can agree on YouTube, because that's a different beast. They actually host almost all the web video content. So there is no 2nd party to easily switch to.

For now I'll grant them that they've removed the entirety of their old motto/claim - and not just the "Don't". I wonder how long that will last though, benefit of doubt is not an infinite resource.

> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome.

Google search seems to be something of a feedback loop at this point.

Which is fine as 1) it's good for searching Google properties and 2) it opens the door for web search engines that search the web.

DDG is still bad, though. I use it out of principle, but whenever I'm doing a deep dive into some technical topic, DDG fails me badly. I almost always have to just search a second time on Google. Google may corrupt the top results, but DDG often doesn't give any relevant results.

> Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget Chrome.

I understand Google's utter dominance in search, but Google is not "the open web".

> Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video.

I find this problem extremely frustrating. Does anyone have suggestions for how to easily find primary video sources, instead of the massive heap of commentary that a youtube search yields?

Around a year ago Google also delisted bluelight.org, which is a well-known site for recreational drug users - and it's focused on harm reduction

It will still show results if you explicitly use `site:bluelight.org`, otherwise it never appears in search results - prior to Google delisted it, it always ranked very highly (top 5).

I can't help but wonder about the harm that decision had made - people may well have literally died because of it.

Is there a list of the sites Google de-listed somewhere? I'm pretty sure (in fact I knew some, but I can't remember) it included some interesting and totally legal websites.

The Lumen Database collects DMCA requests Google receives, but the URLs are not always visible.

The easiest way is to look here at the transparency report [1].

Which makes it easy to find new Piracy websites [2].

It only mentions the TLD not the URL

https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview

https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/request/1280...

I went straight to 'rabbitmp3s' and pirated "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette. That site makes it really easy to download mp3s. Thanks google!

It's a free ride when you've already paid.

There also are websites Google delisted voluntarily which had nothing to do with copyright infringement or anything illegal. I'm also curious about these.

Now if they'd only do the same with actual spam sites, see also related-ish discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403947

Does anyone else remember actually believing that Google's mission was to "organize the world's information and make it accessible"?

That seems so naive now. It's become painfully obvious that Google's mission is to manipulate access to information for profit.

Supermarkets organise food and make them accessible [to paying customers], as does (not with food this time) a private library. Sure their way of wording it makes it possible to read it naively as being altruistic, but technically I don't think they're not organising the world's data and making it accessible. Just perhaps not always in the way the world would most appreciate.

Supermarkets and Google do not have comparable business models.

My point was that organising something and making it accessible to people doesn't have to mean "without doing so in the way that makes money".

Google has been on this crusade against piracy for awhile now. I first noticed when I tried to do this query a few months, years(?) ago:

site:[famous non western tracker].com [insert music here]

zero results.

Same query, on duckduckgo: Everything there.

Another query:

[famous ebook sharing sites] on google.

Non-related results

Same query on duckduckgo: First hit is the correct website.

This they delist, but all the garbage spam sites they do not delist "voluntarily"?

I think the standard that I want to see service providers is "force me to do it, or I'm not going to do it." Get a court order. Get a warrant. Kick down my door. Sue me. Subpoena me. Stop rolling over without even getting a treat for it; it's pathetic.

In fairness, there are gradations of response.

I'd like for search engines to be highly and independently responsive to CP, spam, SEO gaming, fraud, malware, cyberstalking, cyberbullying, revenge pr0n,and similar threats. Relying on court orders would simply be too slow.

I'd also like for search engines to be responsive to propaganda and disinformation. This calls for a much more nuanced response than the first category, and is inherently political rather than merely criminal.

In the case of general copyright claims, specific targeted removals if executed reasonably and fairly, which quite arguably YouTube's ContentID is not, as an example, should be possible with a fairly minimal degree of legal mechanism (e.g., DMCA 512 takedowns under US law). Though that process should be amended to reduce abusive exploitation of such measures.

Delisting entire domains for copyright infringement absent a specific legal action ... moves into much stickier waters. Ultimately, torrent sites will likely have to provide their own well-known search alternative which is resistant to such threats. I'd like to see that possibility further developed.

(I'm aware that many such sites already claim the legal shield of serving as directories to content, not as hosters of that content themselves, which would inlcude The Pirate Bay itself.)

Widespread global civil disobedience in the face of overwhelmingly asymmetric and self-serving copyright legislation and case law is among the very few avenues the average citizenry have of voicing opposition to such laws. And that fact alone should carry great weight.

I'd like for search engines to be strongly resistant to removals based on overly-broad copyright claims,

People will freak out about this, but I'm not worried. Search has this whack-a-mole find-the-pointer-to-the-pointer problem where unless you're going to up the state control at China levels it's essentially pointless.

If you can't find the torrent site, you Google enough to find a community that will link to it. If you can't, you ask on Twitter. Etc. Etc. It's never going to stop someone determined. Credible threats of jail-time may, but these minor changes by Google and others aren't going to change anything important.

The anti-piracy crowd is big on "speed bumps". They know they can't stop piracy, but they can make it a pain in the ass and hope you'll get frustrated and give up.

They're unlikely to succeed, though. They've been trying for decades and it's still easier to pirate most content than it is to buy or rent it.

Google itself is a torrent search engine. Just google

  <anything> filetype:torrent

So when is Google going to delist Google?

On a somewhat related note: are there good options in terms of P2P/distributed torrent search engines, which would make it so that websites like the Pirate Bay don't even need to exist? Instead, that distributed index of torrents could be searched directly from the torrent clients.

There are so many armchair activists here who say this company should do this and that and ignore a local law.

I wonder if they'd say the same if they were the ones who would be fined/prisoned for breaking those laws.

The fix is to change the law, not asking companies to break them

The headline is a bit misleading. Google's only removing Pirate Bay from Netherland results, not global results, due to a local court order. That makes a lot of sense - Google complies with local laws in many countries.

Is there any existing decentralized search engine? I do believe that Google should not interfere with the listing. Even if it's piracy, it should not take any people's freedom to discover different information catered for the people.

and it's not piracy in all countries. Not all countries are the USA.

> decentralized search engine

https://yacy.net

I can think of other terms that Google should de-list that are far more harmful to society than a hooky copy of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.

Google is a private company can do what they want, but this is still a pretty poor decision.

> Google is a private company can do what they want

Not when they are a monopoly.

That's up to any significantly large country, or the EU to stop. Until then, they really can do what they want. And are, as this story suggests.

To me the ideal alternative should be something that aggregates results from major search engines, like DDG already does with Bing and Startpage with Google, but applied to a lot more search engines, then takes the results returned from all of them and builds the results page uniq'ing them so that if link A appears in 3 search engines and link B in 1 and link C in 6, the result will be 3 different links anyway. That way, if one link is censored from one search engine, it could still be present in the list in a similar rank for being returned anyway by other search engines.

Sounds like the old metacrawler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler

The problem is that the indexes (google, bing, yandex) won't let you freely aggregate them anymore. DDG is a client of Microsoft just like startpage is a client of google.

Google de-listing websites reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror where everyone is wearing AR lenses and the person who just came out of prison or whatever is not visible to anyone else but is instead a red mosaic when seen through their lenses. He's effectively blacklisted in the physical world. Google (and other tech giants) have tremendous influence and power - as much or more than most governments. It is very dangerous that they act the way they act. We need to heavily regulate them or build public alternatives that are beholden to laws like the First Amendment.

Looking at my internet history, I hardly even use Google Search anymore compared to before.

Five years ago I would still google pretty much any error message or problem.

Nowadays I typically go to directly to the project's GitHub and search through issues there, go directly to their documentation, or just browse the code from my editor and figure stuff out myself. I have like 15 tabs just corresponding to the stuff I'm working on right now. It is pathetic Google managed to become so awful they managed to undo a decade of conditioning.

Crippling their search intentionally even more won't help.

Google is a media company. You can call it tech or adtech, it will never hide the fact that they want to get your eyeballs to look at the highest paying ad with the minimum effort. And they want to keep running this operation with the least amount of friction - the kind of comes when streaming companies are paying for search ads bidding with movie titles just to have their ads a few clicks away from an "unofficial" movie source.

yandex.com for the win. thank me l8r.

I was about to say the exact same thing in a more verbose way !

yandex.com is seriously awesome for infosec related searches and I guess (it's been a few years since I had to pirate something) that it's equally great for pirated content.

guess where I found the streams for all portlandia episodes which I happen to watch just now.

Also great for searching by image

Why was the headline on this article re-written in an obviously biased way? Wasn't the original, factual headline good enough?

That's totally going to have an impact.

I use DDG for normal searches, but when I actually need to find something i'll use google.

One example is i like chill hop radio. whenever i search on DDG might get results, but google will usually send me directly to their bandcamp page which the the ideal result

You could try https://private.sh which decouples the search allowing it to be end to end encrypted without anyone knowing both who you are and what you searched for.

This is why using alternatives is important.

Sounds more like back scratching

Oh noes! I'm going to have a hard time remembering thepiratebay10.org

Title is editorialized by submitter. Actual title: "Google Removes Pirate Bay Domains from Search Results Citing Dutch Court Order".

It is accurate though and it's an important detail. The headline makes it sound as if Google was ordered, which is not the case.

> The order targets ISPs and doesn't name Google but the company chose to voluntarily comply. does allow changing the title sometimes:

HN guidelines do allow changing the title on one condition:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

The original title is misleading, leading one to believe Google was ordered.

The legal department of Google is probably doing that to avoid a second court decision, targetting them directly.

Not really? The original title is careful to say "citing court order", not "per court order" etc.

If anything, I think your title is more editorialized, since Google is clearly doing this for legal reasons, not exactly "voluntarily".

"citing court order" to me as a non-legal person indicates that it is one they received. I hope you don't expect this non-legal forum's headlines to be parsed like legal text? How does "citing" indicate it is not an order Google received?

I merely gave my opinion as a non-legal casual news reader. To me at lest this new headline conveyed what happened more clearly before I delved into the article.

"citing a court order against ISPs" would be sufficient, I think.

As a non-native speaker, the difference between "citing" and "per" would have me confused. The HN title is much more explicit.

No idea what's going on there in the EU right now. But there has been an other case in Germany where certain adult sides are blocked unless they put "strict" measures in place to verify the age of users. Because porn causes severe damage to children and youth. Those sites, xhamster among them, are based on Zyprus in the EU. And a German court found that they have to adhere to German child protection laws.

SO we have the case against that DNS provider, one against adult sites and one from the Netherlands against Pirate Bay.

Two thoughts: What the fuck happened to the free internet? It seems that the EU is slowly, intentionally or not, building a Chinese wall around European internet. And secondly, apparently those courts didn't realize that VPNs are a thing. My son used VPNs on his phone before I even thought about it. And he didn't pick the worst ones. He is 13.

Ok, I'm from the EU and even I disagree many times with some of the more ridiculous laws that the EU tries to impose on the internet, but on your examples I'm not really sure what exactly is the big deal?

What alternatives do you propose except passing laws? Just allow corporations or individuals on the internet to exploit people and children for their own profit without any repercussions because they're on "the free internet"? To allow stealing and profiting out of copyrighted works without repercussions because they're on "the free internet"?

There was never such a thing as "the free internet" except in the ideological minds of some people. In reality, when you don't place laws and guards in place, things will always get abused and go downhill pretty fast.

For instance, children can't get into strip clubs or casinos in most countries. Those laws exist for a reason and there's no argument you can make that they shouldn't just because those venues are now on the internet, so if a company wants do do business in country X, then they have to abide by that country's laws. It's a perfectly logical and reasonable thing to do and being an "internet company" shouldn't exempt you from all the laws in all the countries, that's just a silly proposition.

The fact that VPNs and other workarounds exist also shouldn't preclude such laws from being put in place, otherwise there would be no legal ground on which to prosecute any offenders. There are workarounds for breaking and entering but you wouldn't argue that there shouldn't be such a law because "apparently those courts didn't realize that lockpicks are a thing".

So I'm not sure why you're getting so angry about on your specific examples? Laws being put in place that target certain internet behaviors that are already unlawful when not on the internet? Kids not being able to easily access porn websites? Being slightly harder to find pirated content online? It's a strange set of arguments to put your foot down on imho.

Also, the country's name is Cyprus.

Considering how often Google gets slapped with billion dollar fines in the EU, I'm not surprised they're voluntarily complying.

This is subjective to my non-native English skill, but I found the editorialized title much more misleading. "Voluntarily" to me meant with zero obligation or coercion, explicit or implied, from any authority, i.e. doing it out of their sense of duty or something like that.

Happy to compromise on that both titles are not ideal :)

I don't think the title implies that. If anything, it weakly implies the opposite - that's how I read the word 'citing'. If the court had ordered them to do it, the headline would have been something like 'Dutch court orders Google [etc.]' or whatever.

If there's a misleading aspect, it's that they only removed the search results in the Netherlands while the headline doesn't really make that clear. I think it's borderline though.

Fixed now. Thanks!

(Submitted title was "Google voluntarily de-lists The Pirate Bay")

in the Netherlands, following a court order

>The order targets ISPs and doesn't name Google but the company chose to voluntarily comply.

Just a coincidence that Google goes all out on following the law in the country it uses for tax evading

Unfortunately it's not tax evading, as it's legal.

It is legal, yet it is still tax evasion, even if one uses euphemisms like "tax optimization" and so on.

Talking about the distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance was when I really understood the power of controlling language, and why the ruling classes strive for getting their kids educated since the dawn of time.

There are two terms because they are different things: one is illegal and generally involves other illegal things such as fraud, while the other is legal 'gaming the system'. Gaming is not the same as cheating.

Go on, play games with your friends and abuse the tiniest rules and tell them "ah ah, it's not cheating". See how long you last.

Not respecting the spirit of the law is illegal in most of europe, and it's merely a matter of money being thrown around, preventing any legal action. But every time it happens, Google is found guilty. See their latest 5 billion fine, see what happened with Ireland.

It's "legal" because noone can spend the money to investigate them on their crimes.

The difference seems to be mostly the amounts of money involved.

Sorry, but you don't get to decide what words mean. "Tax evasion" is illegal by definition. "Tax avoidance" is legal.

According to Wikipedia, the term "tax noncompliance" (or "tax avoision"... bleargh) can be used as a general term to refer to both of those things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_noncompliance

Curiously, the interests which literally bankroll the making of laws and electing of legislators do get to define what words mean.

"U.S. Policies Favor The Wealthy, Interest Groups, Study Shows"

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,779 policy issues from 1981 to 2002 and compared changes to the preferences of median-income Americans, the top-earning 10 percent, and organized interest groups and industries.

"Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all," the researchers write in the article titled, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens."

Affluent Americans, however, "have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy," Gilens and Page write. Organized interest groups also "have a large, positive, highly significant impact upon public policy."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/government-wealthy-study_n_51...

Though this particular study is specific to the US, the relationship doubtless exists elsewhere.