> improving search relevance by x% is tremendously socially valuable, but probably makes Google's bottom line go up by a thousandth of x, and they have a very direct understanding of the connection.
I'm not sure this is correct. In a vacuum of real competition, the most profitable ought to be how it is right now, when search results are kind of ambiguously bad, so you need to click and skim through a few results to maybe find what you want, multiplying the number of ad impressions.
Google's priority with ads is to make sure ad buyers are happy with the results they are getting. This means making sure the people who click the ads go on to buy the product being advertised. That's what ad buyers measure.
We can talk about the Importance Of This until we die of old age. Google failed us, Google is Borg, Yandex is FSB, Bing is ... Bing, etc. However, the fact that there is a problem to be solved and It Is Important doesn't mean that the EU will solve it. If anything, it's just the set-up for another political play that will have damaging consequences to the internet as a whole, just like GDPR, EU's poster-child "internet project".
They made GDPR just strong enough legislatively to be annoying, but not strong enough to actually change anything. Companies can still store EU citizens' data anywhere they want and do whatever they want. There's no insight into this. It is an unenforceable law and the only artifact of it existing is that I have to have "I don't care about cookies" installed, so that Avast Antivirus can eventually decide to silently collect and sell on my data.
For all intents and purposes OpenWebSearch is most likely not meant to succeed at anything either, and is just going to be a political stepping stone towards legislature that will be awkward and make the internet worse for all users. EU has a long history of creating or hanging onto laws that betray a misunderstanding of how the digital age works, how the internet works, how data can be copied or moved around for free.
Here's an example. Every country in Europe has some sort of legal construct in place that will prevent you from secretly recording a conversation you're having and uploading it to the internet. So for example, take Austria. They accomplish it by preventing you from publishing it on the internet. However, they don't prevent you from recording it. There are laws against secretly recording a conversation you are not a part of, but there's no such law for the situation when you are part of the conversation. So you can record and upload, just not publish. However, you can get on a train and go to a different country which has laws that prevent you from recording, but has no laws against publishing. Then you're in the clear. Or you can just use a VPN so that it looks like you uploaded and published it from the other country. Or you can just upload to YouTube, which will not show where the thing was published from - and claim that you did so during your tourist visit to Vietnam or whatever. And if someone brings a civil lawsuit? Good luck trawling the Vietnamese legal system for clues about that specific issue. Hope you know this rare language with virtually no legal experts who at the same time speak Vietnamese and your particular local European language. The costs would be on the order of tens of thousands at least, which is out of reach for anyone but the wealthiest EU citizens.
Want more? Egregious copyright related laws are known by everyone.
So are dns blocks of shunned sites. Or the recent Austrian project to block cloudflare IPs which literally broke the internet.
The fact such laws are still in place from before the internet - or are even still being put out - and are effectively unenforceable while making the internet worse for everyone - makes it clear that the governments in place simply have a misunderstanding of how the internet works.
None of that will stop politicians from coming up with BS excuses breaking the world with fever-dream laws in order to push their latest political agenda. The real question is: if such clearly unfit legislature is being put in place for political folly in industries we understand - how much of that is happening in industries we don't understand? Health Care, Food, Agriculture, Civil Engineering, Patent Law, and so on. My guess? You can tell what my guess is.
As for Open Web Search, what everyone should really be asking themselves is: ok, so what's the scam that's going to be pulled here?
As I'm one of the people who is working within the Open Web Search project please allow me to feel strongly about your statement. I've been involved in campaigning for this project since around 2014. This project did not originate as a 4d-chess move of some political game. It exists because of the hard work of a group of people, some of which are researchers, some of which are working at smaller search engines and some of which are involved in civil rights organisations. Currently still sitting in the kick-off meeting I can tell you that we are actively discussing how to get this project to produce useful results for a european open web index. Getting the EU to draft problematic legislation is neither in our power nor in our interest.
That's a major fallacy you're opening with. If something is important to us (as a society), we will find ways to make it serve us well even when it's under attack. The rest of your post even makes a similar point: the social value of well-working search is greater than the economic value for even the biggest search monopolist on the planet. So why not socialize it?
Being idealistic about it won't change the outcome.
As far as I know, this hasn't really been tried, definitely not with the kinds of resources this project will have available.
PageRank was initially much less prone to SEO shenanigans because it relied on signals from other sites (incoming links) to decide how important a result was. Of course, as Google became more popular, people started sharing links on other pages and so on to cheat the PageRank algorithm. And Google have been caught in a fight with SEO ever since.
AFAIK, nobody has ever tried that because of the dangers of vote buying and coercion. Essentially, gaming the system.
(I don't think this proves anything! Simply wanted to suggest that comparing search to democracy doesn't significantly change the analysis wrt opacity.)
The correct strategy isn’t to hand this over to a giant bureaucracy, but to create an atmosphere where we can have a dozen alternatives to Google.
But at the end of the day the resulting dataset would be sold to third parties so they can rank the results appropriately. Which to me seems to be the only sane way forward. Only a government could run something the scale of the Google crawler and succeed at doing so. And then everyone can build search engines on top of that.
That bit troubles me. If the index is maintained by a government agency, and every search engine is using the same index, then that's a massive censorship avenue. I wonder how "open" Open Web Index is going to be.
The vast majority of the net is, after all, now indexed, so you can run your own indexer to cover whatever they didn't cover.
The only search product that comes close to this is Amazon search or booking.com (or maybe YouTube).
All multi billion dollar businesses. And when smaller ones emerge like the flight scanner one, google buys them.
I don’t see google going anywhere soon. They have a lot of faults but they’re still too good.
However, there's no way Geizhals will ever expand into general search. The reason why they are so much better than the competition is that they are focussing on a small, profitable niche and presumably use manual data entry to ensure they have the best data.
[1]: there's a UK version too "skinflint.co.uk"
I don't think I've seen a website that does that before and I think it's worth praising.
What is so great about those search examples?
My 3 going on 4 kid was watching a cartoon on Youtube: Curious George.
An ad popped up promoting some show, featuring foul language and sexual intercourse.
Yagoddabekidding.
How can otherwise smart people accept being treated like brainless idiots by similar services is beyond me. And how can they teach their kids that's fine too is something I'll never understand... but hey its your kids, everybody sees quality of their parenting first hand (and then complain how kids are unruly and eat junk these days... gee I wonder where they took inspiration and who built their character).
An interesting thing I noticed is than initially when I used the app)(with the same YouTube profile) I would get worse video suggestions. These days they are the same in YouTube app as well as smartyoutubetv.
Another interesting observation is that if the app breaks and I start watching YouTube in their app the frequency of their ads is quite reasonable in the beginning. Few times I even thought. Hey, if they show me an ad every couple of videos that's not that bad right, I might switch back to YouTube. Then as the amount of content watched increases the amount of ads increases to the point of making it unwatchable (4 ad breaks in a 20min video, sometimes even double 40s ads one can't skip). This makes me go back.
A) Youtube's terms of service clearly state "not for kids under 13"[1]
B) Youtube has produced a product for the younger age market [2]
C) folks in this thread are reasonably complaining that full youtube isn't appropriate for children.
Am I missing something here? (Like maybe your child was using youtubekids and still got the unacceptable content?)
[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/children-youtube/#:~:te.... "While we permit users between the ages of 13 and 17 to register for an account with parental permission, we do not allow children under the age of 13 to create an account"
I'm using it in Japanese. Using the on-screen keyboard in Japanese mode, you can enter hiragana only. It doesn't do any word recognition to turn into kanji or katakana, which results in the search results being poor.
Nobody uses onscreen keyboards on Android TV for anything beyond entering a Wi-Fi password; it's a nonstarter.
YouTube Kids for Android TV ... ironically, just a toy for now ... with a well-deserved, accurate 1.4 star rating in the Play Store.
Something like, perhaps, the same standards and sense as in traditional broadcasting.
> Everything else is just a funnel
A funnel promoting pick up trucks and financial services to toddlers? Do they count that as an "impression" in the statistics that they feed the client? It seems like borderline fraud.
"My /own/ children don't see inappropriate ads; therefore there isn't any problem."
> Before complaining about broadcasting standards, maybe first up your parenting standards.
"Before whining for ice cream, maybe first eat your dinner!"
Youtube Premium has no ads.
This is another Gaia-x, remember, the EU big tech cloud killer?
I think the fundamental problem here is that the people that are interested and in grants and are capable of writing grant proposals are different than the people that are interested in building things. There's very little overlap. So the money goes to the people capable of writing proposals, and the people doing the work do it for free in an obscure corner of the internet.
It's sad really, but I suspect it's a side effect of the huge bureaucratical machine that is the EU. One way to make this better would be to simplify the access to grants so that technical people can do it without needing a class in "EU funding speech".
Not sure about software, but all (well, Apple is getting there) phones now use the same connector to charge because of the EU.
It hasn't escaped the wider world that quality open-source search is desirable, and it's hard to think what this new EU project brings to the table that isn't already available if others want to contribute to existing efforts. I wish the EU project the best of luck of course!
I'm not suspicious of all government-funded projects (back in the day my own PhD was government-funded!) but I can't help be suspicious of claims such as:
"an open European infrastructure for internet search, based on European values and jurisdiction"
and
"The project will be contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty"
Q1: Who defines "European values"? Is that done by Qualified Majority voting or would - for instance - Hungary have a veto on any proposed definition?
Q2: Which treaties regulate "digital sovereignty"? Recalling that the 27 member states each "remain sovereign and independent"[0], is that digital sovereignty being handled in BRU, in the 27 states, or a mixture of both?
jurisdiction = GDPR will not be cheated.
European = We mistrust America, because they do crappy stuff that meant we had to pass GDPR.
>Europe’s digital sovereignty
Means - Europe will not be ruled by interests outside Europe, the interests inside Europe can fight it out via EU procedures.
Are there (m)any global search engines with European users who are "cheating" GDPR? Which ones?
> Europe will not be ruled by interests outside Europe
That's a very bold claim, especially considering the geopolitical situation right now.
> the interests inside Europe can fight it out via EU procedures
Would that be the interests of the estimated 25k-30k lobbyists who work in Brussels on behalf of their corporate paymasters?
>Would that be the interests of the estimated 25k-30k lobbyists who work in Brussels on behalf of their corporate paymasters?
probably, as well as the various governments that exist in the EU.
But we still mistrust our citizens that's why we introduce Chat-control 2.0, so we have a "better then China" control over private communication.
European values ;)
That's why People trust evil-company's more then stupid[1] Governments.
[1] never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Do we distinguish direct EU funding from funding by governments of EU countries? If not ASML would like a word, and I'm sure people from other member countries can come up with other examples.
Like the Internet, or the WWW?
Most of the negativity seems to come from the following points:
- EU-funded project cannot succeed in tech because previous EU-funded projects have failed in tech in the past (and generally government-funded project in tech are suspicious)
- Search is hard, and therefore it will fail
- The project is underfunded
Even if the points above can all be valid (though the obvious US-funded startup launched by a bunch of uni students seemed to have fared pretty well) it seems we are missing the point of this project.
The proposal is to contribute to the creation of open building blocks necessary to enable others (including private US companies) to make better search products.
Better search product are needed.
Shall we remember HN of some of the intense conversations that happened here about Google failing us:
- Google Search is Dying [1]
- Every Google result now looks like an ad [2]
- Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories [3]
So while, yes search is a hard topic, we should welcome initiatives aiming at improving the ground infrastructure needed to lower the barrier to entry on this subject and hope it will allow many companies to build better search products (or inspire other initiatives to contribute in similar and even more successful way)
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136