> For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster an order of magnitude larger than this. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.
You lost me here. Not building on OSS seems like setting yourself up or failure from the start, particularly when you are fighting a manpower war, which is where OSS is beating every proprietary entity. OSS already powers Google and Amazon and OSS db's will scale to billions of nodes, not a few thousand.
Disagree. The sanctions that Google applies indicate that it is unable to effectively index a free web and is instead relying on editorial control and favouritism.
As a user I care whether Google finds me the most relevant results from the biggest haystack or whether it editorialises those results - it's a big distinction. By that measure I'd say they definitely _shouldn't_ be penalising sites for finding loopholes in their algorithms but should simply close those holes up.
Whether a search engine presents "the most relevant results" is a subjective determination that can only be made with certainty on a per-user basis.
I'm confident in this assertion because people have, at various times, claimed that other search engines provide them more relevant results, yet for me, those search engines almost always failed to even match Google, and never exceeded it.
This was also the case pre-Google -- e.g. lots of people swore by AltaVista, but I almost never used it, because it never seemed to work well for me. I actually remained primarily a WebCrawler user for quite a while, right up until settling into Google in the 1999~2000 timeframe.
I don't want to be limited to search engines that provide what some bureaucrat has decided are the most relevant and/or neutral results. I want to be able to choose the search engine that provides the most relevant results for me, and I have seen no evidence that what's relevant for one person is necessarily relevant for everyone else.
Government bureaucrat. I don't care if Google, Microsoft, or whoever else has humans who directly modify search results. I'm free to choose among the competing search engines based on the value they provide me.
Any external notion of correctness imposed industry-wide will destroy that choice.
I wasn't talking about anyone outside google, just critiquing the game being rigged internally, but it's maybe interesting you brought that in.
On the one hand that could be criticised as an illusion of choice in the market (behind the curtain there is often ownership across entire industry sectors, regardless of 'competitors' within a sector). On the other, governments quite correctly get a say in any case (what do we representatively govern otherwise - the alternative is to cede governance to global corporations). Google is particularly sensitive to the latter as it has a huge de facto monopoly and has become part of our infrastructure - it is absolutely a huge target for regulation wherever it has traction.
Talking of competition, is there anything viable in the shape of an open source effort where the algorithms and indexes could be crowd-managed - perhaps indexing via browser plugins?
I think a comment[1] I wrote a couple months ago about Facebook is relevant here.
Infrastructure is what services are built on. It's a prerequisite, not the end result, and its absence is extremely costly.
Google is not infrastructure[2]. Like Facebook, it could disappear tomorrow, and we'd all just switch to other search engines. I assume Bing would immediately pick up most of the users, either directly or via Yahoo. I wouldn't like it as much, but I would not be materially harmed.
Google has done nothing to make it harder for someone else to build a search engine except raise the bar for quality. It has a better product for most people, so it has the most users. That's how it's supposed to work.
Using Google's popularity as an excuse for regulation is nothing but a demand for mediocrity. It's saying good things aren't allowed to exist, and that people shouldn't have the right to choose (or make) better products.
[2] Well, Google does offer something closer to actual infrastructure of course, in the form of their App Engine/Compute Engine offerings, but they're even less dominant in that field.
I think what google provide has become societal infrastructure, particularly wrt their monopoly position. That someone else would take their place (however badly executed) is evidence of that. We use it for studying, planning journeys, shopping, finding news, converting measures etc etc. In the process it's taken a position of political and economic importance. It makes a difference to us if google suppresses or boosts certain information and can influence our electorate during an election (e.g. many countries ban publication of exit polls); it affects the courts if certain information is made easily available (e.g. can prejudice trials); economic data and editorial affects the financial markets - and so on. If one player dominates this sphere, it is problematic - indeed it's why there are limits on media ownership. That's nothing to do with a demand for mediocrity but a demand for diversity, which is already well established. And yes companies very much need to conform to the countries they want to do business in - that's a good thing for the citizens of those countries.
This is what I just heard you say: Regulation is needed because people might exercise free expression.
Do you have any idea how evil that sounds? If that is the argument, this is my answer: I will take up arms and die fighting to prevent the realization of such a goal.
Media ownership limits are justified only because of a resource scarcity. They do not apply to Internet publications, and with search engines, all I have to do is type in a different domain name. There's no spectrum to be monopolized.
That's disingenuous - I was talking about the normal limits on free expression (shouting 'fire' in the theater) and gave some concrete examples. Surely you're not suggesting it is viable for a foreign company to undermine a country's judiciary in the name of it's 'free expression'? (And let's not pretend that Google is following a social or cultural mission rather than a business one.)
Media ownership limits are about market monopolies, not scarcity, newspapers being a prime example.
Those are not "normal limits" in the United States, and I do not believe they should be "normal limits" anywhere.
If it undermines a country's judiciary for information about crimes to be published, that country's judiciary needs to be undermined. Once information has leaked beyond law enforcement officials, there is not and should not be anything anyone can do to prevent its spread.
I don't care what mission Google is on. Rights are not dependent on motive.
Newspaper ownership limits exist only in relation to broadcast station ownership. There are no separate limits on newspaper ownership.
About a year ago I tried it for receipts due to the OCR but at least half the scanned images got lost (some in transit, some after they had been viewed in evernote). Shame as I'd have have gone for at least one paid account if it had worked.
Seems the journalist and a lot of commenters here are saying that a service like this needs to be regulated so that there are consequences for negligence or carelessness. There's probably something in that, but in the absence of a regulatory framework for social media systems, snapchat surely has no liability or requirement around data security (beyond existing regulations).
> every despot on the planet sees that and can say "Well America does it," and have firm ground to stand on. That's why we need people like Snowden, to keep the American government in line...
Whether styled as a despot or not, when it comes to the exercise and maintenance of power, nobody is ever saying anything remotely like 'well America does it' - it's just irrelevant. It's never a moral question, but one of what power can be assumed (both at home and abroad). That's the interesting thing about Snowden - he just acted and took the upper hand. (And even more so that he further consolidated by maintaining it, despite huge efforts to bring him down a peg or two.)
Think about any big project you've been a part of. With the benefit of hindsight, is it not true to say that you might well not have taken them on in the first place if you'd known what would be involved?
You lost me here. Not building on OSS seems like setting yourself up or failure from the start, particularly when you are fighting a manpower war, which is where OSS is beating every proprietary entity. OSS already powers Google and Amazon and OSS db's will scale to billions of nodes, not a few thousand.