Category: Search Engine

Filter bubble at google?

The personalization of search engine results and the networking of social networks has advantages and disadvantages. If I am interested in golf as a sport and do not click hits related to the car or the Gulf Stream, the algorithms will show me similar hits and related advertisements in the future. The more I click on certain pages, the more often they will be displayed. In extreme cases, my own website is displayed in one of the first places of the search results, because it is constantly controlled and accessed, while it is almost invisible to all other users. The device, PC, tablet, mobile phone with operating system and browser are also read out. With the same search query you get different results with different devices and sometimes different prices in Internet shops and when booking trips.
Whether this results in a filter bubble is controversial. See, e.g. Sebastian Meinek: Deshalb ist „Filterblase“ die blödeste Metapher des Internets, motherboard 9.3.2018 
In any case, I can actively counteract this as a user by regularly deleting search history and cookies, protecting the browser with complementary tools such as Ghostery, or even better, from the outset in a virtual environment. In addition, I am actively required as a user and not the willless object of the search engine: Fuck the Bubble: So bringst du deine Filterblase zum Platzen
Concrete studies on the effects of personalization are unfortunately not convincing. The Research project „#Datenspende: Google und die Bundestagswahl 2017“  has now devoted itself to this problem. The investigation is based on the search for 9 politicians and parties in Germany, which were repeated at regular intervals. As a result, it turned out that the search results differ only marginally.
The problem with this study lies in the nature of the search queries. They limit themselves to what is referred to in retrieval known item search, the search for facts that you already know. The meaningfulness is therefore very limited. The consequences of personalization under which circumstances on the supply of information can not be clarified.

Millionshort

The search engine with filter

Million Short is a search engine developed in Canada since 2012 that aims to provide users with access to websites that are not displayed most frequently or are prepared with search engine optimization.
The “Mission Statement”: “Million Short’s mission is to guide people on the road less traveled by providing alternate methods of organizing, accessing, and discovering the vast web of information that is the Internet.”
Million Short uses Bing’s API and uses its own crawlers to determine the pages to be excluded. Filters can also be set by e-commerce, live chat, date and country.

Qwant: Interview on the business model

An interview with Eric Léandri, head of the European search engine Qwant, has appeared in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau (14.04.2018). He presents his business model. It is especially emphasized that Qwant does not do user tracking and displays results neutrally.
It remains unclear on which database Qwant works: “We are currently working hard to build our own complete index with all pages that are searched during searches in order to offer a real search engine of our own for Europe. “It is likely, however, that data is mainly taken from the Bing interface, although it is officially claimed that there is no formal cooperation between Qwant and Bing: “The general “network” column in Germany is instead a colourful mixture of various publicly accessible network sources, as the meta search engine Duckduckgo does. “(Qwant shows Google the teeth, DW 12.04.2014)
The search results are displayed with their own weighting: “We don’t want to be Google, and we don’t want to copy Google. We’ve been working with our own algorithm for a long time now to list the search results, which has been tested for several years.”
However, the decisive – and therefore also secret – criterion is whether content can be searched promptly and a comprehensive index built up. We remember a search engine Cuil, which was founded by former Google employees. She claimed to have an index three times larger than Google and also not to track user data. Cuil was shut down after two years after the risk capital was used up.

Quaero: The myth of the European search engine

Quaero (Latin: “I am searching”) was a Franco-German consortium project in which more than 30 organisations were involved and several hundred million euros were distributed as a subsidy. It would be an important scientific work to work through this. We have to deal with three Wikipedia entries
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
and with two small questions and two oral questions from the German Bundestag.
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/024/1602492.pdf#page=7
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/035/1603565.pdf “German-French innovation project of a European search engine Quaero”, http://dipbt.bundestag.de/doc/btd/16/041/1604102.pdf#page=12
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/046/1604671.pdf Current developments of the search engine project Theseus – formerly Quaero
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus_(Research Program)

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Alternative Search Engines 2: Indexes

Whether one can plant trees in Africa by clicking on advertisements https://www.ecosia.org/ with Happiness Officer as staff or trying a serious alternative like metager –  http://www.metager.de . The problem remains: Where do the data, the search indexes come from? Almost all of them transfer their data from the programming interfaces (API) of Google and Bing/Yahoo. For this, either payment must be made, the placement of advertisements or the transmission of user data must be accepted. Some of the alternative search engines still let additional crawlers run across some special areas. But you’re not master of data. If Google and Bing/Yahoo set their API, all of these business models will be destroyed, because a crawler via Wikipedia and Chef can’t create a compelling search engine.
Google’s interest is clear: Google has the monopoly, and if you attack it and destroy the company, this API is an argumentation that you even offer data to the competition themselves. It is basically a building block for maintaining the monopoly.
Where does the data come from? (more…)

Alternative Search Engine 1: Privacy

In the german computer journal Computerbild 6/2018 p. 38/30 contains an article entitled “search without snooping”. The opening credits say: “Google’s search engine is successful because it delivers top results. But it also spys on its users comprehensively. Are there any viable alternatives?” The benchmark of an alternative search engine is then “data and privacy protection” rather than the search results (I will deal with this criterion separately).
In the german computer journal CHIP 4/2018 “Alternative Search Queries” it says: “A glance at the Google data protection statement peppered with subjunctives is enough to find out that Google not only stores search queries and IP addresses, but also personalises the data, uses it for advertising purposes and even shares it with third parties”.
More articles on the web
Search engines without collecting mania. These are the 5 best Google alternatives, Anonymous search engines: searches without snoopers or similar apply the same standard “privacy”.

So the question is: What does Google store and what does data protection mean?

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Google as a problem

Google has a market share of almost 95% in Germany. A monopoly position can be problematic in several ways:
– Quality of information <- >Advertising.
– Information bubble, if search results are displayed according to previous searches.
– Dominance of the advertising market and online market.
– Social and political aspect: Can political opinion be influenced or even controlled?
So the question arises:
– Can’t other search engines be used? How are their search results to be evaluated? What standards are applied?
– If the search results of the other search engines are not sufficiently suitable, does not an alternative have to be developed by public means?
– If the USA dominates the search engine market with Google and Bing and China with Baidu and Russia with Yandex develop search engines, is it not already necessary for this reason to develop a European search engine?
There are completely different aspects of the subject that we want to examine individually.