To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

Ex-Google-Search engineer here, having also done some projects since leaving that involve data-mining publicly-available web documents.

This proposal won’t do very much. Indexing is the (relatively) easy part of building a search engine. CommonCrawl already indexes the top 3B+ pages on the web and makes it freely available on AWS. It costs about $50 to grep over it, $800 or so to run a moderately complex Hadoop job.

(For comparison, when I was at Google nearly all research & new features were done on the top 4B pages, and the remaining 150B+ pages were only consulted if no results in the top 4B turned up. Difficulty of running a MapReduce over that corpus was actually a little harder than running a Hadoop job over CommonCrawl, because there’s less documentation available.)

The comments here that PageRank is Google’s secret sauce also aren’t really true – Google hasn’t used PageRank since 2006. The ones about the search & clickthrough data being important are closer, but I suspect that if you made those public you still wouldn’t have an effective Google competitor.

The real reason Google’s still on top is that consumer habits are hard to change, and once people have 20 years of practice solving a problem one way, most of them are not going to switch unless the alternative isn’t just better, it’s way, way better. Same reason I still buy Quilted Northern toilet paper despite knowing that it supports the Koch brothers and their abhorrent political views, or drink Coca-Cola despite knowing how unhealthy it is.

If you really want to open the search-engine space to competition, you’d have to break Google up and then forbid any of the baby-Googles from using the Google brand or google.com domain name. (Needless to say, you’d also need to get rid of Chrome & Toolbar integration.) Same with all the other monopolies that plague the American business landscape. Once you get to a certain age, the majority of the business value is in the brand, and so the only way to keep the monopoly from dominating its industry again is to take away the brand and distribute the productive capacity to successor companies on relatively even footing.

Ex-Google-Search engineer here, having also done some projects since leaving that involve data-mining publicly-available web documents.This proposal won’t do very much. Indexing is the (relatively) easy part of building a search engine. CommonCrawl already indexes the top 3B+ pages on the web and makes it freely available on AWS. It costs about $50 to grep over it, $800 or so to run a moderately complex Hadoop job.

(For comparison, when I was at Google nearly all research & new features were done on the top 4B pages, and the remaining 150B+ pages were only consulted if no results in the top 4B turned up. Difficulty of running a MapReduce over that corpus was actually a little harder than running a Hadoop job over CommonCrawl, because there’s less documentation available.)

The comments here that PageRank is Google’s secret sauce also aren’t really true – Google hasn’t used PageRank since 2006. The ones about the search & clickthrough data being important are closer, but I suspect that if you made those public you still wouldn’t have an effective Google competitor.

The real reason Google’s still on top is that consumer habits are hard to change, and once people have 20 years of practice solving a problem one way, most of them are not going to switch unless the alternative isn’t just better, it’s way, way better. Same reason I still buy Quilted Northern toilet paper despite knowing that it supports the Koch brothers and their abhorrent political views, or drink Coca-Cola despite knowing how unhealthy it is.

If you really want to open the search-engine space to competition, you’d have to break Google up and then forbid any of the baby-Googles from using the Google brand or google.com domain name. (Needless to say, you’d also need to get rid of Chrome & Toolbar integration.) Same with all the other monopolies that plague the American business landscape. Once you get to a certain age, the majority of the business value is in the brand, and so the only way to keep the monopoly from dominating its industry again is to take away the brand and distribute the productive capacity to successor companies on relatively even footing.

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Sure, it costs $50 to grep it, but how much does it cost to host an in-memory index with all the data?This is not a proposal to just share the crawl data, but the actual searchable index, presumably at arms length cost both internally & externally.

The same ideas could be extended to the Knowledge Graph, etc.

IMO the goal here should not be to kill Google, but to keep Google on their toes by removing barriers to competition.

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This ^ times a 1000.Google simply has the best search product. They invest in it like crazy.

I’ve tried bing multiple times. It’s slow, it spams msn ads in your face on the homepage. Microsoft just doesn’t get the value of a clean UX.

DuckDuckGo results are pretty irrelevant the last time I tried them. There is nothing that comes close to their usability. To make the switchover, it has to be much much better than Google. Chances are that if something is, Google will buy them.

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One thing to keep in mind when comparing DuckDuckGo to Google is that people do not use Google with an alternative backup in mind. When you DDG something and it fails, you can always switch to google.But what about when Google fails? Unlike DDG, there is no culture of switching between search engines when googling. Typically, you’ll just rewrite the query for google. And as rewriting the query is an entrenched part of googling, you are less likely to notice this as a failure. It is this training that’s the core advantage nostrademons points out.
Webspam is a really big problem, yes. It’s very unlikely that you’d be able to catch up or keep up in that regard without Google’s resources.Building the index itself is relatively easy. There are some subtleties that most people don’t think about (eg. dupe detection and redirects are surprisingly complicated, and CJK segmentation is a pre-req for tokenizing), but things like tokenizing, building posting lists, and finding backlinks are trivial – a competent programmer could get basic English-only implementations of all three running in a day.

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> 1) a record of searches and user clicks for the past 20 years

From what I can tell, Google cares a lot more about recency.

When I switch over to a new framework or language, search results are pretty bad for the first week, horrible actually as Google thinks I am still using /other language/. I have to keep appending the language / framework name to my queries.

After a week or so? The results are pure magic. I can search for something sort of describing what I want and Google returns the correct answer. If I search for ‘array length’ Google is going to tell me how to find the length of an array in whatever language I am currently immersed in!

As much as I try to use Duck Duck Go, Google is just too magic.

But I don’t think it is because they have my complete search history.

Also people forget that the creepy stuff Google does is super useful.

For example, whatever framework I am using, Google will start pushing news updates to my Google Now (or whatever it is called on my phone) about new releases to that framework. I get a constant stream of learning resources, valuable blog posts, and best practices delivered to me every morning!

It really is impressive.