In reply to better overall results in the search marketplace I don't think it even matters at this point. People have already associated search with Google. If a magical no name engine appeared tomorrow with “Better” results than Google who would use it?

IMO I think only one company could compete with Goog in search and they are more closed than them and that is Apple.

I think at this time in the search space the masses use a comfortable brand. Bing or Yahoo don't have the same brand mind share that Google has in search and it shows in terms of use penetration. Take a popular brand like apple with a growing % of hardware devices such as Mac, Ipod Touch, Iphone, Islate(soon) and load them all with Apples search engine as the default and you will have a competitor to Google. Not Binghoo.

In reply to better overall results in the search marketplace I don't think it even matters at this point. People have already associated search with Google. If a magical no name engine appeared tomorrow with “Better” results than Google who would use it?

IMO I think only one company could compete with Goog in search and they are more closed than them and that is Apple.

I think at this time in the search space the masses use a comfortable brand. Bing or Yahoo don't have the same brand mind share that Google has in search and it shows in terms of use penetration. Take a popular brand like apple with a growing % of hardware devices such as Mac, Ipod Touch, Iphone, Islate(soon) and load them all with Apples search engine as the default and you will have a competitor to Google. Not Binghoo.

Yet, rather than own up to this choice as a deliberate revenue-maximizing strategy, GOOG patronizes us with sanctimonious posturing about being open”…and offers up dubious excuses about protecting users interests as to why said openness doesn't extend into (its only revenue producing areas) search and ads.

And without being “locked in” to Google's UI software (i.e. the home page). So if a user wanted to see his or her results with shade-of-blue #17 rather than #41, he or she is completely free to export the results into his or her own blue#17-based software.

Maybe you could get Cutts to post, because I have a hard time seeing how spammers could get an upper hand using info that is already available to them.

Yes, let's finish this discussion at SSM. Very relevant, I think.

Anyway, I am looking to having this discussion in person at SSM, where we aren't constrained by character width!

Put aside the philosophical debate for a moment. Can you describe a specific use case for web search openness that would make the world better for significant number of users?

I'd still like to get into this question with you at some point, like I said. Would actually make for a good topic at SSM. Hmm.. I've got ideas already..

But again, given Rosenberg's/Google's strong stance in that open letter, I would almost argue that the question should be turned around. The proper question to ask is:

Can you describe a specific case resulting from web search (results) openness that would make the world worse for a significant number of users?

If you can't, then search data needs to be open.

It's as simple as that.

Your question still comes, imho, from the wrong place. It would be like asking “what are the hits that have come out of the open gmail effort”? Has some radically fantastic, new email interface been created, because gmail lets you export your messages and contacts? No. Does that mean gmail should go back to being closed? Also no. The point is to be open, first, as Rosenberg called for in the letter.

Honestly, I'm not trying to dodge your question about what specific use case for search result openness would make the world better for a significant number of users. Believe you me, I've got dozens of ideas, some that I can talk about, some that I can't. But even if we did get into one specific scenario right now that still wouldn't be the point. The point is that you don't need to know a specific use case before opening things up. It's not that your question isn't important; it is. It's just a separate question, and unrelated to the decision of whether or not to open up.

The question that *is* related about whether or not to open up is the spammer question. And even there I have my doubts as to whether the web as a whole wouldn't compensate and defeat spammers, if Google/etc. were more open. Openness wins, right? But that is a question of algorithmic (source) openness, which is different than the question of data (results) openness. Yahoo BOSS has already shown that it is possible to be data-open, without spammers destroying your search engine. That is the sum total of information that Google needs to know before making the decision to go data-open. That was Rosenberg's only concern/excuse — the spammers.

My point re: BOSS was that we can learn from seeing how the market has responded to a serious effort to encourage interface innovation on top of a major web search engine. Duck Duck Go does (or at least did) use BOSS, and I've found it interesting enough to blog about. But I'm not aware of any hits that have come out of the BOSS effort. To me, that suggests that either there's a key missing piece (e.g., the licensing is too complicated or the API isn't open enough) or there really isn't value here.

Put aside the philosophical debate for a moment. Can you describe a specific use case for web search openness that would make the world better for significant number of users? I believe that folks at Google are very receptive to such arguments. And I suspect folks at Yahoo and Bing are too.

It's Google's world – we're just living in it.

http://code.google.com/closure/library/docs/xhr…

Why GOOG why double standards?

My counterpoint is that a game-changing innovation built on top of BOSS isn't something that Google has to wait for in order to “open data” its search. Let me quote Rosenberg, from the original Google post:

“If we can embody a consistent commitment to open — which I believe we can — then we have a big opportunity to lead by example and encourage other companies and industries to adopt the same commitment. If they do, the world will be a better place.”

Waiting until someone else proves that open search data is a game changer is exactly the opposite of leading by example. The “googly” thing to do would be to open early, open often. Eh? Because open wins in the long run.

And Kosmix isn't exactly the kind of mashup I was talking about. I mean where you can remix the results lists themselves. Interleaving and that sort of thing. Right now, Kosmix shows Google results as an impenetrable silo.

We should be able to do more than that, and we shouldn't have to sign any complicated licenses to do it, any more than we should have to sign a license to export our gmail data. That's open. And while I don't know all of BOSS's terms and conditions, I'm pretty sure that's more open then even BOSS right now.

BTW, isn't Duck Duck Go built on BOSS?

Also, there are mash-ups that combine Google and Yahoo! — and more. Check out http://kosmix.com/ as an example.

What say, Daniel? Ready to make it happen?

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/

Good guys have better things to do with their time. The only ones who will work 24/7 on it are the ones who are making money that way, i.e. the bad guys.

I agree that Google's rant was – not as simple and above-board as it might have been. But Google's approach has worked fairly well for over ten years now. It seems rash to change it just to satisfy some ideological hangups about “openness”.

http://irgupf.com/2009/12/23/a-fragile-local-ma…

In this manner, the community can come up with better ways of using, reusing, and displaying results than Google is willing to do. And at the same time, Google gets to protect itself from spammers.

So why isn't this happening? Why hasn't this happened?

But seriously, I'm not trying to hide my cognitive dissonance–and I've included links to save people the effort of hunting down what I've said on record. But it was a lot easier for me to critique black box approaches in non-adversarial enterprise settings than in the adversarial world of the web. I suspect there is an incentive system that works, but we have yet to invent / discover it.

I can also see de-emphasizing ranking and instead relying on interaction–an approach that I've advocated, particularly in domains where ranking breaks down. The problem with applying that approach more broadly to web search is that a lot of users would have to do more work for queries that are well addressed by ranking today. Not a fun trade-off.

I recognize that the current state of adversarial search is painfully wasteful for site owners. My words on zero-sum SEO precede me: http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/24/life-the-… But I suspect that most users are cheerfully oblivious to this arms race except when spammers win–in which case they blame the search engine for not being smarter. I don't think those folks are clamoring for open-source ranking.

I can hunt down the references, but there have been plenty of studies debunking the 'special' Coke flavor. Put RC Cola in a Coke can and suddenly it's delicious. There was a New Yorker piece recently (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/23/0…) which made a passing reference to our weak understanding of what governs taste – that it's not mostly in our taste buds.

So if Coke is a marketing company with relationships to bottlers, distributors and manufacturers who put in the 'hard' labor, and maintaining the illusion of a special recipe is vital to that function, can a similar analogy be made about Google?

http://jonathanstray.com/why-we-need-open-search

The trick is to become a cloud computing provider that sells not just compute cycles, but compute cycles with local map-reduce access to a full web index.