I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs.
What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a sea of flotsam.
Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners.
The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.
But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.
And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
How many millions do you need to spend to decrease your own spending on AI for every query?
Kagi
Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.
"Are they actually planting these trees?" and "How would I possibly verify?"
"Does Microsoft actually pay them? All I'm doing is clicking? Is that worth enough?"
"How does anybody verify, and how is it not just an optimization for Ecosia to farm clicks for money? Chinese/Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian/MechTurk click farms don't cost that much. Seen the prices on MechTurk?"
The only earn money if people click ads, just like any other search engine. Microsoft isn't paying them to show them Bing results.
It uses google search behind the scenes. Among other search providers.
The links points however are a bit ridiculous, they're entitled to their opinion but may be surprised to find people, at the businesses they use, have opinions that differ to theirs, and these businesses aren't always well-oiled machines.
For a consumer facing business with no lock in, the tax thing makes absolutely no difference in your life using the product.
If it was really a concern you'd simply no longer have access and change search engine, until then it doesn't matter. You'd be surprised what tax issues even large billion dollar companies have.
I mean, if I reduce my plastic use because I stop buying product X then that's still better (in my eyes) than if I did nothing. Or if Company Y has some egregious political ties, I cut them off, but Company Z is a huge conglomerate so I can't cut them off. Still a better deal than doing nothing.
And compare Google and Kagi? Monopoly bad or Employee bad, which do you choose?
As I say unless its egregious. It's a nice idea but doesn't work in practice there's always trade offs.
It's purely tribal thinking i.e. this one is on my side so I can't go near that one.
No, not really. Some sides of the coin are just bad.
I get very frustrated at this "tribal thinking" notion that I hear a lot these days. It's not bad to have values and then at least try to stick to those values.
If someone doesn't like something they shouldn't be forced to endure it. I see this with so-called "cancel culture" too. It's not a cancel culture if you say something offensive and people stop listening. They're not trying to hurt you, that's not their intention. They just didn't like it so instead they go listen/watch something they DO like. That's predictable.
I mean, what's the end goal here? I use a product I don't even like just for the fun of it? Really? But I don't even like it...
After Chick-fil-a openly and vehemently opposed gay marriage in 2015 (and after!), I stopped eating there. And guess what? I don't miss it. I'm not worse off, at all. If anything, I'm better off, because the food is unhealthy anyway. Boom, it's that easy.
I'm saying there's some other dirt on something you currently using instead that makes the whole endeavor pointless.
It's hypocritical if you say I disagree with you and I'm boycotting and then go ahead and use another company who has said something you disagree with in the past anyway.
It's the equivalent of the village mob roaming house to house for whatever reason. And then targeting one house specifically as it has better sun than the rest.
After reading the founders thoughts, if they were any sort of sizable company they would immediately have a GDPR violation. "emails and any info you give to use voluntarily (search prefs) is not PII and as such you can't have your data back." :0
So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.
Can you give me an example of a search query which yields acceptable results on Google but does not on Bing?
I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.
I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.
For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.
And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results.
Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.
A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:
Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.
I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.
Putting a sticker on Bing and Yandex results doesn't make a Search company.
For example, if you are discussing manufacturing issues in China, talking about how good drop-shippers on Amazon are is irrelevant.
I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.
My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.
I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.
Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.
This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.
Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.
Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your search and eliminate terms.
Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).
Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in more than one way.
> I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.