A dangerous duck, a bloodthirsty apple and a battle for privacy. Dominance of Google in search
The winter of 2020/21 brought two major developments - firstly, Google's clash with the Australian authorities amid regulations charging publishers for online links, and secondly, the fact that the search engine DuckDuckGo (1) exceeded the threshold one hundred million daily Google searches, which are considered the most dangerous competition.
Here someone can pout and point out that Google he still has an overwhelming 92 percent. search engine market (2). However, a lot of different information, gathered together, shows the features of this empire, or even early signs of its decline. ABOUT Google accused of manipulating search results, the deterioration of their quality and still unofficial, but quite clear statements by Apple that it will create its own search engine that threatens to force Google out of iPhones and other Apple technology, we wrote in the last issue of MT.
2. Internet search market share
If Apple thanked Google for their services, it would be a powerful blow to the dominator, but not the end. However, if more happens, such as Microsoft's active offering of an alternative in the form of Bing to countries fighting against Google, an increasing number of "conversions" from Google to DuckDuckGo, which has the opinion "as good as, and in some ways even better" of the search engine and legal issues, especially antitrust proceedings in the United States, this power may turn out to be much less unshakable than it seemed.
Wealth of metaphysical systems
there have been some pretty good alternatives for years now. We wrote about them in "Young Technology" more than once. In recent years, when the issue of privacy and its protection has arisen, there has been a tendency to confront the greed of the oligarchs, the so-called. All this has become one of the main currents on the web, these old and various new emerging tools for avoiding addiction to Google are rapidly and slowly gaining momentum.
In addition to well-known alternative search engines such as the aforementioned DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo! search for "meta", i.e. Consolidation of several search engines into one. Examples of "privacy" metasearch engines include the German MetaGer or an open source solution called Searx. SwissCows is from Switzerland, which emphasizes that it "does not track users." In France, the search engine Qwant was created with the same focus on privacy. Danish-based Givero offers more privacy than Google and combines search with charitable donations.
It is based on a slightly different principle than typical search engines. YaCy, the so-called distributed search engine, built on the principle of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. It is based on a program written in Java.running on thousands of computers, the so-called YaCy peers. Each YaCy-peer independently searches the Internet, analyzes and indexes the pages found, and stores the indexing results in a common database (index) that is shared with other YaCy users, as in P2P networks. There are opinions that search engines based on distributed networks are a real future alternative to Google.
The above private search engines are technically metasearch engines because they get their results from other search engines, for example. Binga i Google. The search services Startpage, Search Encrypt and Ghostpeek, often mentioned among alternatives to Google, are, as not everyone knows, the property of advertising or advertising companies. Similarly, the Tailcat browser, which was recently acquired by the owners of the Brave browser and will be offered alongside it as a privacy-protected alternative to Google search.
Unique in the list of alternatives to Google is the British Mojeek, a "real search engine" (not a metasearch engine) that relies on its own website index and crawler, i.e. a robot that searches the web and parses pages. In April 2020, the number of pages indexed by Mojeek exceeded three billion.
We do not collect or share any data - this is our policy
DuckDuckGo is also partly a meta search engine that uses Yahoo!, Bing and Yandex in its range of results, among others. However, it also uses own robots and resources. It was built on open source software (including perl, FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, nginx, Memcached). It is a "star" among alternatives to Google, as it does not belong to any of the technology giants, and has seen a large increase in the number of users in recent years. In 2020, DuckDuckGo searches reached 23,7 billion, up 62%. Every year.
The browser enforces HTTPS, blocks tracking scripts, displays the website's privacy score, and allows deleting all data generated in the session. It does not store previous searches and therefore does not provide personalized search results. When searching, it does not know who the user is, if only because there are no user accounts. Their IP addresses are also not logged. Gabriel Weinberg, the creator of DuckDuckGo, succinctly says: “By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. This is our privacy policy in a nutshell."
When a user clicks on a link in the results DuckDuckGothe pages you visit won't see what words he used. Each user gets the same results for the entered keywords or phrases. DuckDuckGo adds that it is aimed at those who prefer search quality over quantity. All this sounds like anti-google.
Vineyard he has emphasized in many interviews that he has improved the quality of his search engine results by removing search results leading to pages he believes are "farms" of "low quality" content "specially designed to rank high in the search index". Google.
DuckDuckGo also removes pages with a lot of ads. However, it would be a mistake to say that there are no ads in this search engine. They come out thanks to deals with Big, Yahoo! and Amazon. However, these are not ads based on user tracking and targeting, as in Google, but so-called contextual ads, i.e. their content is related to the type of content that the user is looking for.
DuckDuckGo has been offering map search on its search service for some time now. These are not his maps - they are taken from the site Apple Maps. Weinberg's collaboration with Apple may not be a big deal, but it does make one wonder if it's a trace of something to look forward to in the future, with the iPhone maker, as many speculations suggest, building a search engine (3) that should face Google. And this, if it turned out to be true, could be a project that Google really should be wary of.
3. Hypothetical Apple Search Engine - Visualization
The serious Financial Times wrote about Apple's intention to do this in the fall of 2020. According to other media reports, Google has to pay even several billion dollars a year to a company with an apple on its logo for the fact that its search engine is offered by default on iOS. These transactions and practices were aimed antitrust investigations in the US, but it's not just about money and legal issues. Apple has been striving for complete control over its ecosystem for years. And it depends less and less on the services offered by external entities. The conflict has recently been more prominent on the Apple-Facebook line, but there have also been clashes with Google.
Apple hired over two years ago John Giannoandrea, former head of search at Google and openly hiring search engineers. A team is formed to work on the "search engine". What's more, webmasters receive alerts about website activity from Applebot, an Apple crawler that crawls the web looking for new sites and content to index.
With a market capital of over $2 trillion and about $200 billion at its disposal, Apple is a worthy adversary for Google. On this scale, the money Google pays him to offer his search engine to Apple device users is not that significant. As you know, even after a heated dispute with Facebook, Apple is focusing on privacy and will apply the philosophy of DuckDuckGo, not Google, in its approach to a hypothetical search engine (it is not known whether the Weinberg mechanism will somehow participate in this apple project). For the Mac maker, it won't be that hard because, unlike Google, it doesn't depend on advertising revenue that uses the personal data of tracked users.
The experts just wonder Potential Apple search engine will be limited to the company's ecosystem or become more accessible to the entire Internet as a real alternative to Google. Of course, the very restriction on iOS and macOS will be very painful for Google, but reaching a wider market could be a death blow for Google. current dominant.
Google business model revolves around collecting data and displaying ads based on it. Both of these pillars of business are largely based on aggressive invasion of user privacy. More data means better (more targeted) ads and therefore more revenue for Google. In 146, advertising revenue was over $2020 billion in XNUMX. And this data should be considered the best indicator of Google's dominance. If ad ratings stop rising (and have been rising steadily over the years), that means the opposition movement is successful because the amount of data Google is making money off of is declining. If growth continues, then opinions about the "end of Google" are greatly exaggerated.
