this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation (www.theverge.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology
140 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.

The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.

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[–] paraphrand 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

What are the current contenders?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

What it looks like beyond Google and Bing

It would be much harder to know what exists beyond "GBY" (Google, Bing, Yandex) and how it all works without the work of Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar. For three years, Kumar has been updating a heavily annotated list of search engines with their own indexes. It is 7,000 words, but only a portion of it deals with engines offering general indexing, in the English language. You can read Kumar's evaluation methodology for a better understanding of how he compared and assessed sites.

What stands out? Mojeek ("it's not bad… I'd live") and Stract ("a useful supplement to more major engines") are two of Kumar's favorites. Right Dao has "very fast, good results," in part because its crawler starts off from Wikipedia. Yep reaches farther out, showing results that link to and back from sites related to your query and also promises to share ad revenue with creators. All of them show promise, but you get the sense that they're a second car, or a third bicycle, rather than a primary transport.

There are far smaller-scoped engines in other sections of Kumar's post. If you're wondering where that one other search engine you've heard about is, it's probably in the "Semi-independent indexes" section, because it uses a GBY index when its own results are not strong enough. Here, you'll find cryptocurrency-friendly, controversy-courting-founder-having Brave, a few engines that either "resell" GBY results or stuff affiliate links into them, and "the most interesting entry," according to Kumar, Kagi.

Kagi requires an account and uses its own index, Teclis, in combination with Google, Bing, Yandex, Mojeek, and others, including, notably, Brave. Kagi's founder has strong opinions on the AI-based future of search and responding to harmful searches in ways that are not "scalable." How much of that does or does not bother you will vary, but it's worth noting that Kagi also suffers when the GBY triumvirate is restricted.

Ars Technica this week: Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has

The referenced search engine comparison by Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

can't emphasise too much that this piece is a very necessary read for anyone who wants to know about search; not just because it says good things about us, but because of the depth of research which has been put in here. Most times you encounter an article about indexes they are just taking whatever a (meta)search engine says about themselves, not even looking at privacy policies for "relationships with microsoft" etc. or doing any comparative work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've been using Kagi and really like it so far. It's not good for local stuff, but afaik only Google and Bing have the resources and userbase for things like maps and reviews. It's designed to be an ad-free 'premium' search engine and only earns revenue from users paying for membership.

[–] neblem 4 points 6 months ago

OpenStreetMap's platform is the only real way to compete against Google and Apple and it's why Microsoft even though it has Bing Maps, has licenced to them resources like satellite imagery for mapping. It's awesome in bigger population areas but there's still a lot to map in rural places outside the EU.

Review is harder. Right now the leading open platform afaik is Open Reviews (aka Mangrove Reviews) which has tie-ins to OSM projects like MapComplete. OsmAnd and OrganicMaps have open tickets to hook into that ecosystem. You're right about the userbase problem though, I think it (or a successor) needs AP federation to really take off. That being said there's several active non-Google nonfree alternatives like Yelp and TripAdvisor as well as niche sites for things like camping, parks, and schools.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

the only one I know that isn't a proxy search is yacy

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I was looking at it the other day unfortunatly its got quite poor results

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

YaCy, Mwmbl, Alexandria, Stract, Marginalia to name a few.