
Google’s top search result is Google - danso
https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors
======
chimen
Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps
and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will
get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case.
Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business -
I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that
pisses me off is the AMP ordeal but, other than that, I extract value from
Google.

I am on Google to find results to my questions - I want the quickest exit and
that's what they provide. If they fail to do that they back down trust me,
these guys watch "the numbers" carefully.

~~~
Slartie
Actually, on text translations, DeepL nowadays outclasses Google Translate
IMHO. The only downside is that they don't appear to offer some kind of
transparent website translate feature ("put a URL in and it translates the
entire site, with layout kept intact"), at least not for free. But if I happen
to have a paragraph or so in some foreign language and want that translated to
some language I can understand, DeepL has become my first stop due to its
consistently higher result quality.

~~~
vinay427
I would be prepared to switch over completely for the languages they support
if DeepL didn't insert their advertisement at the bottom of some results (I've
had this accidentally included in an email before), and if they had a mobile
app with a text selection action on Android to highlight text and see a popup
with the translation. As it is, I use it most of the time but still rely on
Google Translate being more accessible. Obviously DeepL is newer, so these
limitations are understandable.

~~~
abdusco
> if they had a mobile app with a text selection action on Android to
> highlight text and see a popup with the translation

I've had the same frustration, so I've written a simple script/app with Tasker
(and AutoShare plugin) to select text and translate from DE -> EN. I use it
quite frequently to learn German.

------
fractionalhare
_> A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google
has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

\- Google’s dictionary definition.

\- A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without
leaving the search results page.

\- A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various
links.

\- And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches
for other diseases._

I don't know, I'm conflicted on examples like this. I see the point the
article is going for, but I think it's better exemplified by the fact that
there's a lot of advertising space taken up at the premium, top of the page on
search results.

This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the
features of the search engine itself. It's not emphasizing its own search
results over "organic" search results, it's deemphasizing search results
altogether in favor of quick, curated answers. Most of the time I can quickly
tell what the "organic" source of the direct answer is.

I like that. Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this
without deemphasizing search results? Is that something most people would
actually want? I feel a better point of contention is the number of ads, which
I care more about.

~~~
cowpig
You like it in the myopic sense of the word. In the way you like a big cake
that sits in front of you, even if eating that cake is going to be bad for
your health.

Google's monopolistic business practices are the same: they are convenient in
the short-term for you, but they are destroying healthy industries. Over time
the result won't be something you like.

~~~
JadeNB
> Google's monopolistic business practices are the same: they are convenient
> in the short-term for you, but they are destroying healthy industries. Over
> time the result won't be something you like.

Amazon—which genuinely used to be a great and reliable shopping experience,
and made a bunch of changes that _looked_ user focussed—is a great example of
this.

------
drusepth
Makes sense to me. Google Flights is amazing, Google Stocks is better than my
broker (and way easier/faster), Translate doesn't even have a decent
competitor, and Restaurants isn't perfect but just makes it easier to get to
Google Maps.

As a consumer, this is great.

As a small business owner, I'm not very concerned about Google usurping pieces
of my site into a widget. If the entirety of a business/site can be replaced
with a free single-action widget, it's probably better for the consumer to do
so.

If I were a big business (Expedia, Yelp, etc) affected by this, I would be
more concerned about improving my product than a competitor simply copying
functionality.

~~~
eggsnbacon1
Competitors have a hard time getting off the ground because the dominant
player is promoting its own products. Classic monopoly. Competition won't be
good if nobody uses them.

Google maps might be a good example, MapQuest and Terraserver used to be
better for navigation and satellite photos. Did they fail because of business
reasons or self promotion? Hard to know, but Google pulled the same shit as MS
got antitrust for. Bundling their own maps app pre-installed on their dominant
mobile OS

~~~
acituan
> ...promoting its own products. Classic monopoly

How is _promoting_ equivalent to _classic monopoly_? They are not removing
competitors from search results. They are ranking based on relevance and
apparently users are happy with their own widgets coming up on top.

~~~
eggsnbacon1
they're promoting their own products when they have over 80% of search
eyeballs

------
umaar
Generally, I like the 'rich snippets' feature, but I think they've gotten
worse.

For example here's a reddit post I made from 6 years ago showcasing a search
for 'mac shortcut screenshot'
[https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for...](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for_mac_screenshot_shortcut_displays_the/)

It's extremely clear, and results in minimal cognitive effort in parsing the
result.

Here's the result now:
[https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png](https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png)

There's so much more cruft:

\- 4x low resolution screenshots which I initially thought were related to ads

\- An extra URL

\- Multi-step instructions

\- Lots of extra words

\- Bold formatting has been applied inconsistently

Seeing the text: "Command + Shift + 3" in big bold letters was great, but it's
now changed into something else.

~~~
umaar
Turns out Google has been doing this for my own site on certain pages. If I
search for:

devtools capture element screenshot

It has listed the exact instructions on the search results page:
[https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png](https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png)

Can I get an outsider perspective, are those 4 list items shown in the rich
snippet too many? Is it too wordy? I'm wondering if a single item which said:

Search for screenshot in the Command Menu (Cmd + Shift + P)

Would be better?

~~~
alickz
I think it's fine. I'm not a webdev but I could follow your current
instructions easily. I would definitely consider your instructions a good
result if I was looking for the answer.

Although I prefer the second (wordier) example in OPs case anyway.

------
pen2l
Falls within the purview of their job of being an information-search tool I’d
say.

There are times when I want a specific piece of information as quickly as
possible and with as few clicks as possible, and other times I’m doing more
exploratory searches, it seems google lets me do both pretty well.

~~~
uniqueid
Google doesn't bother showing the user results for his/her actual search terms
anymore, and stuffs most of the page with AMP links and paid results... but
it's not _them_ , it's _you_.

But if Google AI were really as bad at replacing simple grep they wouldn't be
popular, etc etc.

~~~
rightbyte
Ye. It is really annoying that verbatim querries still are not quite verbatim.
I get a feeling Google search index is just really an aggregate of a couple of
1000s big sites.

------
lokar
I don't recall Google ever promising to be a "pure" web search engine, just
indexing all the pages.

Quite the opposite, they said the goal was to organize and present
information. The goal has always been the most relevant information given the
query. Early on, that pretty much always meant a web page. More and more, they
already know the answer and can present it with a better UX for the user.

Why should they be required to be a "pure" index of web pages?

~~~
gukov
Similarly to Amazon replacing popular products with their own, Google is doing
the same with search results.

~~~
lokar
I'm not sure it's really the same. Someone asks Google "how far is it from
Portland to Austin", and before they got 10 blue links, and now they get a
number. That's not the same as "amazon, send me some Coke" and them sending
Amazon brand cola drink.

------
jforman
When I worked at Bing almost 20 years ago, the #1 search term was "Google". So
maybe this is reasonable :)

(#2 was "Gogle")

~~~
wolco
Bing was launched in 2009. Where were you working in the year 2000?

~~~
jforman
I was at Microsoft, in MSN Search (which was later re-branded Bing). This was
2003.

~~~
cheez
The MSN brand had some good stuff. MSN messenger, the MSN browser (I loved
it). Great work by that team.

------
ss7pro
Sorry but google flights have no competition. There is no better or more
flexible and fast flight search than Google. No wonder why they won. Expedia
should invest more in their flight search if they want to win.

~~~
swagatkonchada
"no competition" i guess you meant this figuratively. But in fact there is a
ton of competition and the point of the article is that G is suppressing that
competition by unfairly giving themselves the space which needs the least
number of clicks to reach.

------
emptyparadise
I love that "How Far Down Are the Traditional Search Results?" graphic.

------
mrgreenfur
This reminds me of the recent news about Amazon, spying on partners products
and then offering them. This is the end game for all platforms that control
demand, slowly take more and more vertical integration to capture segments of
larger value. This includes 'pure information' that they steal from publishers
(and thus remove visits from the publisher) and normal verticals, like
travel/shopping/tools/etc.

I'm not sure that these marketplaces / demand owners should be able to as they
wield unfair power vs other vertical specific offerings.

------
ricardo81
My own personal observations

\- The "rich results" do indeed save people a click

\- Some of them are excerpts from sites crawled by Google (that will tend to
now be the 2nd result) that the user will no longer click on

\- Google's query disambiguation is the best in the business

\- They'd had a history of piggy backing on external resources and then
turning them into their own, e.g. DMOZ, now wikipedia. I'm sure their
knowledge ontology will soon render Wiki obsolete and push them down a result
also.

\- They've taken some verticals and halved the number of clicks competitors or
"price comparison" sites previously got, albeit it's their search engine, they
lay it out as they see fit.

It's changed a lot since the "10 blue links". Most of us probably used to
think of search engines as an agnostic finder of information on the web, with
ads on top. Now with "query intent" and monetisation - the temptation is too
much and it's not so much about finding information "out there", on the web.

Because of the position that Google is now in wrt their dominance in search
markets and to the extent they can monetise a query, no one else can match
their revenue per user or find alterative avenues of traffic that are
comparable to their portal (i.e. Google in the UK commands 95% of searches,
80% of ad spend is between them and Facebook). If Google decides they want to
enter a vertical, it's hugely detrimental to others in that market. Someone
who ranked #1 10 years ago would get 50% of clicks, IIRC it's closer to 20%
now, because of all the other media on the page.

But in the end, there are other choices. The problem is that due to the
monetisation Google is capable of (based on a lot of data acquisition about
their users), it's hard for anyone to carve out an alternative. Particularly
so when Google pay phone vendors and browsers for them to be the default
engine, it's a perpetuating cycle.

My personal ideal would be 5 or 6 independent search engines, with a number of
meta engines built on top of those independent data sources;algos. Purely for
the sake of getting alternative points of view and perhaps past any filters or
bias.

------
chdaniel
I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but...

1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine
for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) and playing an
important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know
is thanks to Google

2) Wouldn't you do the same? Keep in mind they're a public company and we know
how incentives are aligned when you're a public company

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The fact that it "makes sense" for companies to become evil monopolies when
they are capable of doing so is a problem. It's like a big hole in our
economic system where everything breaks down and grinds to a halt.

~~~
jjcon
> The fact that it "makes sense" for companies to become evil monopolies when
> they are capable of doing so is a problem

I’m no google fan but I don’t think evil is an appropriate word nor would I
call them a monopoly when it comes to search. There are plenty of other
options out there from all over the world, the fact that they aren’t that
great isn’t googles fault (and it would need to be for them to be considered a
monopoly).

~~~
tristan957
From the article: 9/10 searches in the US come from Google.

There are lots of great search engines. But when Google has the largest share
of web analytics and can literally track you around the internet, how can
other search engines who respect you as a user even have a chance? Give search
engines a level playing field. Google is the default search engine on the most
popular web browser. Google is the default search engine on the largest mobile
operating system. Please stop defending Google. They have a monopoly on
search, and its time for them to get the MS IE treatment.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
When ATT was a monopoly, your choice for a phone provider, across the U.S, was
ATT. There was no way to switch, and they used this power to raise prices
(hurting the consumer is generally a requirement for anti-trust cases in the
US).

It'll be very challenging to win a serious court case where the Google search
monopoly could be conquered by a user typing bing.com at the top of the
screen. Never before has a 'monopoly' been so easy to stop using.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Ah, but you don't understand where the monopoly is. It's on the other side:
Businesses must support Google Search and run Google Ads to stay in business.
It is effectively impossible to operate any business in the US without a
Google presence.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
>Ah, but you don't understand where the monopoly is. It's on the other side:
Businesses must support Google Search and run Google Ads to stay in business.
It is effectively impossible to operate any business in the US without a
Google presence.

Citation? For one, I don't think Facebook uses Google ads.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
That's an incredibly disingenuous response. I am sure you are perfectly
capable of understanding what I said and how true it is.

------
Havoc
Tricky. It does feel anti-competitive but at the same time their info is
usually also the best. So a strong argument can be made that it’s 1 based on
merit

~~~
vlkr
You don't know if it's the best because there is no competition to discover
better info. All other websites are presented with only 2 or 3 lines of text
(search results) and have no free access to presentation forms that googles
own content has.

------
baby-yoda
Google (as well as Facebook) are becoming AOL 2.0 - users only know the
service and not the mechanism or source. All info comes from G (or F).
Syndicated or outright copied from all over the web but appearing with the
“friendly, familiar and welcoming Logo our users know, love and trust” /s

------
pwinnski
Search engines seem like they're subject to quantum mechanics, in that they're
the observer that affects the state of the internet.

An internet without search engines was an internet without SEO, and without
vast fortunes being spent on manipulating content to sell garbage. Launching
"Backrub" in that environment must have seemed like an unalloyed good, but the
very act of launching it turned out to have a profoundly negative impact on
the web as a whole.

~~~
pwinnski
I guess I mean this as a semi-defense of Google, even though I don't like them
and use DDG personally.

When doing a search on travel, what are the odds you get not-garbage in your
results? Compare, say, 2000 to 2020. I can see a scenario in which Google was
committed to providing open results, but those open results slowly became
garbage, and they felt compelled to launch their own tool to ensure good
results.

And sure, it puts profit in their pocket too, of course.

------
auganov
I would gladly pay for a search engine that actually did some things better
than Google. Like say being better at finding [semi]exact phrases, especially
longer ones. Something that focused on the long tail of search queries. Also,
yes, I do feel like Google has gotten pretty bad for some normal queries. But
this might as well be a function of the Internet/Web changing overall.

But I find this focus on Google's supposed moral infractions ridiculous. And
then competitors popup that have a strictly worse products user-wise, but want
to win by claiming higher moral ground. They don't fix any of the issues. I
just don't see any of that taking off.

To date, I have not seen a single search engine that actually does something
significant better. Not only that, pretty much all of them fail _miserably_
for anything more specific. This tells me Google is still absolutely on top of
their game.

I like these widgets. Sometimes I even get annoyed when I WAS expecting it to
popup but it wouldn't.

~~~
tristan957
Privacy is a major feature. Morality is most definitely something a business
can be better at. You can't just hand wave it away like it doesn't matter.
DuckDuckGo might not give the best results, but I would trade that for privacy
10 times out of 10.

------
gundmc
> How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned
> “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is
> full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org

Weird example to use in a screenshot since everything they show is a link to
an external site.

------
rondennis
I feel Google has turned on its pledge of doing no evil. It is not shamelessly
stealing publishers content and displaying it in the featured snippets. So the
searcher has really no incentive of clicking on the search result anymore. He
is getting all the information on Google itself.

~~~
wasdfff
Usually the snippets are outright crap. But this is the end result of SEO
noise overwhelming signal.

------
tehabe
Maybe, Google should be forced to create a separate tab for the knowledge
graph and other tools. like they are doing it for images, the news, or videos.
when I want to search the web, I want to search the web.

Because I see the issues with this. I also think those information have a
value for users.

~~~
throw_m239339
Maybe Google's search business and ad business should be broken up...

------
t0ughcritic
Google is removing the concept of urls and domains. Apps do this but so does
not showing part of the URL in the URL bar and not showing the URL as it is in
the result pages without the breadcrumb type redesign. They also realized they
make more money when they show a favicon of websites to obfuscate the fact
that they have to legally label Ads as ads. The ads txt is directly
proportional to the size of the fav icon in serps. Google is evil.

Let’s not forget how google reader and blogger were killed. The greater idea
is to not remember anything and to go directly to google each time, making
them the sole source of content.

------
Yhippa
Because of the things cited in the article I spend less time in the Google
search results page. I typically find the answer I'm looking for and get on
with my day. Because I'm spending less time I actually use it more now.

Sometimes when I'm looking up stuff on how to do things physically like how to
install a part in a car or fix something in my house I'll get a YouTube widget
at the top which will take me to the exact moment in a video where what I'm
looking for is being performed. This is magic to me. However Google is
definitely promoting themselves in this case and I might not go anywhere past
the very top of the search results page. Is this a bad thing?

------
pradn
The problem here is that something that's useful for users (saving time with
knowledge panels, question/answer lists, and suggested searches) also takes
away clicks from other websites. Something can be both good for the user in
the short-term (quicker answers) and bad for the user in the long term (fewer
websites survive if clicks are diverted). We have the same issue with
"ecosystems". It's great for the user that the Google Assistant can ring the
Pixel phone if you don't know where it is. But it's one more feature that
locks our smaller/independent competitors.

------
markosaric
Great study and presentation!

And an impressive website for a publisher. The average publisher is full of
advertising, calls-to-action and several MBs weight of external scripts. This
one is so simple, fast to load and clean. Congrats!

------
lorec0re
Amazon top search results? Surprise, Amazon-made products!

~~~
JadeNB
Not defending Amazon, but that's far from the default experience in my
experience. Maybe I just search for a lot of specific thing Amazon doesn't
sell themselves.

------
moron4hire
If anything I am searching can even remotely be considered a product or paid
service, I get _an entire page, minus one link_ of links that have the [ad]
box on them. And they're all shady 3rd party retailers. And when I want to
find a product, to get the manufacturers website and product details, it's
nowhere to be found. Just page upon page of [ad] links.

------
musicale
This has been the case for a while and should not be surprising to anyone.

It's not terrible (Google's and Bing's promoted and internal modular results
"above the fold" are often useful and relevant) but it does make it harder to
use modern search portals to actually search the general web outside promoted
results.

------
personjerry
Some of the answers in this thread actually allude to the bias in this study:
People actively change their behaviors to accommodate Google's knowledge
panels, meaning some portion of the "15000 top search queries" they studied
are actually people seeking Google's results, not general search results.

------
slmjkdbtl
Good read! Also impressed by how the article page is designed/engineered. I
wonder for a site like this how much of the content is hard coded and how much
is made by tools / frameworks (the interactive scrolling box really looks like
a hard-coded component for this article specifically)

------
james305
Who cares? Are they a non-profit? People who are offended by this have never
run a business.

------
maxwellito
It even leads to funny situations sometimes :
[https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169](https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169)

~~~
kevingadd
To be fair, I think pagerank would naturally end up putting those results on
top, since gmaps is the mapping service lots of people are linking to -
especially if you're linking to a saved route or location, it's going to be a
url to the google maps service as a whole that probably boosts its pagerank.
It's definitely not a clear-cut "they decided to do this" scenario like the
infoboxes and such that the article is complaining about.

~~~
wolco
PageRank wasn't natural. Google properities started with a score of 10. Google
friends 5-9. Your site 0.

~~~
harshitaneja
Source?

~~~
wolco
Lived through it. Microsoft had a 9. Anything list on the dmoz had a 4.

Page Rank doesn't work if the seeded values are all set to 0. If everyone
started at 0 they pass on nothing. Google needed a way to seed. They assigned
the highest value to themselves scaling down to other giants, universities,
dmoz sites, etc.

Pagerank is a reputation calculator. You still need to define at least one
cool person. Much better with thousands to varying degrees.

------
topicseed
Google Search is an information-search tool — and results often come as
websites (the usual search result links), but also as widgets. Google can
absolutely be the curator and a provider of information.

------
aftbit
A bit OT: can anyone recommend a good web-based OpenStreetMaps viewer with
support for toggling multiple layers (e.g. topo, streets, satellite, political
boundaries) and decent measuring tools?

~~~
rmc
There's a few MapCompare instances for showing many different maps:
[https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/](https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/)

------
aidenn0
Anyone have a recommendation for replacing hipmunk? I haven't found anything
that shows as much information so visually and intuitively.

------
coronadisaster
I'm surprised Google doesnt get sued for copyright infringement for large
snippets that they include at the top of search results...

------
slantaclaus
I just want to say that the “Linux” search results now seem more relevant than
they were in the past. Internet.com? Lol

------
sjreese
Google continues to abuse its market power, and the industry has not
rebounded, despite the remedy.

------
dredmorbius
Separating search from content from services from advertising is starting to
sound very appealing.

------
t0ughcritic
Googles next five results? Surprise... Ads, pay to play

------
jb775
Probably because a lot of boomers open browsers and initially type "google"
into the top bar (which does a google search for "google") just to get to the
actual google website...then search for w/e they actually want to search for.

------
martinskou
Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be
monopolized.

It should be free, uncluttered, distributed and transparent.

The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

~~~
ZinniaZirconium
Duck is a front-end for Bing. Why not use Bing?

~~~
dredmorbius
That's both tired and inaccurate.

 _DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include
hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot
(our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer
indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results,
which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing
(and none from Google)._

[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/sources/v)

~~~
pb7
No, _this_ answer is tired and inaccurate. They successfully fool you into
thinking they are much more complex than they really are. They use Bing and
Bing alone for the SERP links (without this, you don’t have a search engine)
and their crawlers fill in the handful of “onebox” results for certain
queries. They keep changing this statement but it used to say “multiple
sources like Bing, Yahoo, Oath”... all of which are just Bing. It’s Bing with
a couple of add-ons. If Bing were to go away tomorrow, your beloved DDG would
be done.

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/du...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/duckduckbot/)

~~~
Kiro
Only used for Instant Answers and widgets, as confirmed by your quote. All the
actual search results are basically all Bing, again confirmed by the same
quote from DDG themselves.

------
ZinniaZirconium
Not really though. My top search result on most topics is usually Wikipedia.
Maybe if you're searching for Google you find Google.

~~~
danso
FTA

> _How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned
> “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is
> full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot /Archive.org_

2000 screenshot: [https://mrkp-static-
production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...](https://mrkp-static-
production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search-
before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2000.jpg)

2020 screenshot: [https://mrkp-static-
production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...](https://mrkp-static-
production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search-
before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2020.jpg)

~~~
ZinniaZirconium
I find Linux.org and Wikipedia. I must be in a helpful search bubble for
people who want actual information instead of ads and news.

------
JackPoach
That's what happens when you have a monopoly.

------
mrkramer
This is somewhat similar to the thread that I shared yesterday but nobody
looked at it. Here is the link
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461)

------
rydre
The problem is that website are commodities. The future for original high
quality websites is that they should not allow search engines to crawl their
content and slowly become a brand which people trust. Stop relying on search
for traffic. Be an app, websites for marketing only.

Alternative new search engines are needed that allow for
embedding/iframe/integration of global web search results in any 3rd party
website free of cost. Then the new search engine should share ad revenue with
the website that embeds their results+ads. Google does not allow that, but
there is a real opportunity here. Embeddable global search engine that
websites would like to integrate with.

A search engine that website would love to integrate. A search engine that
websites would advertise themselves because they win too. Unlike the current
scenario where only Google wins.

~~~
mrkramer
I never understood why websites are not personal property and why US gov.
decided that anybody can crawl and scrape them at will and free of charge.
That would be similar to someone crawling your house and making it fully
visible and searchable to the global public . I guess Google Maps already did
that.

My understanding is that .com (commerce) prevailed and people who have
websites want to be fully public, visible and searchable.

On the other hand deep web and dark web exist but most of the people who use
it and operate there do it because of shady business.

I don't entirely understand your search engine idea but if internet would
start all over again I think the right model for search engine would be to
have website owners submit their websites to the search engines along with
metadata so searching experience becomes rich.

Metadata would be similar to something like Resource Description Framework
[https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html](https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html)

~~~
rydre
> *I don't entirely understand your search engine idea

Does google allow for iframeing or customizing it's search results? No. A new
search engine that has a API/plugin for 3rd party websites so that websites
can integrate a global search engine into the website like google integrates
websites' content into its instant answers. There is room for innovation here
when 3rd party websites get creative in displaying global search results in
different ways simple or complicated ways. If there are Ads in results, the
website gets paid a % of the ad revenue that the search engine made due to the
website embedding it's results.

Search engine's are high margin business, so they should be able to share 50%
revenue with websites.

~~~
mrkramer
Ah ok I got it. I like your idea it is similar to my.

Currently what you can do as a website owner is to use Google Adsense
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AdSense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AdSense))
and then you are kind of sharing revenue with Google but only when someone
visits and clicks Google Ad on your website.

~~~
rydre
> _Currently what you can do as a website owner is to use Google Adsense_

Nooo! This is not what I meant. I mean that embedding a search engine to your
website without the user moving back to Google. So every website has a search
engine for the entire internet. Not just Google. I want search to be kind of
affiliate revenue to Amazon. So the developer embeds a search engine on the
search page of a news website they get commission off the ads in a search
result if the user decide to use search on the news paper's website. A search
engine like Google for global search not just site-limited search.

Like do what Google is doing to websites but in reverse. Commoditize search.
It'll require something more to get it right/product market fit but it's
possible if you be creative.

Google is not the end product, its a compliment to websites. Websites need to
commoditize Google instead of it being the other way around.

~~~
freediver
Imagine websites did this. Who would use it?

A search engine widget on website would probably look bad, would always be in
different position and present a host of UX challenges which would add
friction to adoption.

Every website is already able to search the internet via the URL bar of your
browser nowadays. Its always there when you need it.

