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In Some Places, Local Search Beating Google
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Oct 29, 2007 02:03 AM
from the think-globally-search-locally dept.
from the think-globally-search-locally dept.
babooo404 points out Newsweek coverage of Google focusing on areas in which the search giant may be vulnerable. In some countries outside the US, local competition is handing Google its head. In South Korea a company called Naver dominates. And in Russia, portal site Yandex leads in both search and advertising. In the Cyrillic language market Google is a distant third in search, and Yandex is trouncing Google in the advertising arena by 70% to 2%.
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Gotta Love It (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gotta Love It (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Gotta Love It (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Gotta Love It (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think you forgot to mention the European Continent where people speak underdeveloped languages like French and German, and Asia of course, which is just slightly bigger than China alone (Indonesia alone has about 240 million inhabitants)
Besides that, English is rather well spoken in India as well as large parts of Africa, underdeveloped as they might be.
American primary education, it's tough.
Re:Gotta Love It (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agreed on the the haziness, but logically, google was built around english so it shouldn't be that surprising that it's workers best know english and they haven't really had enogh experience in other languages, I believe that is a possibility.
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It sort of is. One of the assumptions is that search engine technology requires a lot of hardware resources and brainpower. It's true that building a prototype index with a new algorithm doesn't require industrial scale computing farms and armies of phds, but the conventional wisdom is that if you want to compete in the big leagues, you need a lot of money, hardware, and people.
What this article is showing is that this conventional wisdom is somewhat wro
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, my main *complaint* about Google is that it likes to let its search-results be influenced by the language of the searcher, even when that is explicitly not wished, and it doesn't seem to be possible to turn that off.
You can "Search the web" (default) "Search pages in German" and "Search pages from Germany", which is fine and dandy, whats less fine
Re:Gotta Love It (Score:5, Insightful)
While its fun/popular to make fun of the US and English speakers, few other language groups will praise someone for their broken sentences as they make their first attempts. Most people are pretty touchy when their tongue is mispronounced. Perhaps that is fair but I wouldn't say its English speakers looking down on others due to their language (perhaps other things but not language).
And no, most Americans do not have a second language. But why would they? Its not like a small European nation where you can travel or see people from other countries on a semi-often basis. There many parts of the US where you will go years without a foreign visitor. You could argue that people should travel to see the world but when you have a nation that is large and varied as a majority of Europe, what's the need? You have enough to do just to know your own country. Wait a few years and most Americans will at least be bilingual, the schools have really picked up the amount of Spanish taught.
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Re:Gotta Love It (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm no. Japanese will often compliment you on your attempts to communicate in their language. However they are just being polite, and actually you really suck at it.
I think this is a general rule for most languages. Paradoxically, people will stop commenting on how 'good' your language skills are only when you are fluent and they don't notice your shortcomings. If someone politely comments that you speak very well in a particular language, most likely you still have some way to go.
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I end up with 50% confused, 50% insulted.
Nothing is certain in the search market (Score:2)
Google has good search technology, and search is automated so it doesn't really matter whether the text is Norwegian or English. In Germany Google has a market share of over 90 percent although there certainly are contenders and there is money to be made, but Google is almost a monopoly. Could be the same in Norway or Russia, but apparently isn't.
T
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Kvasir use Google for net search, and add their own directory listings and stuff on top of it. No web search engine of their own (go to their page on how to get your site indexed, and they link you directly to G [kvasir.no]
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I got news for you, Kvasir gets their results from Google.
http://www.kvasir.no/help/kvasirguide.shtml [kvasir.no](in Norwegian).
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I think Google is special. They were the first decent webmail service (ie they offered more than 10 megs or whatever, no annoying ads, POP3 access etc). They offer free mobile phone apps to read Gmail, or use Google maps. The language translation works. Google groups is great - ok, it's a bit buggy and you can't employ killfiles, but there's no other way that I know of to search Usenet archives, and it's pretty quick at that.
That's what
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Yes. In China Baidu [baidu.com] is the leader, though search is a general term covering searching many things for many people. Though apparently, Google.cn are very effective in serving and marketing to the higher revenue, more educated, higher earning customer sectors.
My main purpose for commenting was to point out the article linked solely to Newsweek pages: a Newsweek
OTOH (Score:5, Informative)
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Too western? (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be interesting to get the view of someone in South Korea, for instance, as to how useful Google is to them when compared with local/regional alternatives?
It's more than likely that Google is far too orientated around the West, both culturally and in terms of results.
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It's not really comparable to Google. They're apples and oranges IMHO.
As a Korean (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest reason is because Naver actually hosts content, rather than just indexing content. Not only that Naver is a strong search engine company, it hosts a vast amount of blogs, forums, an online game site (Hangame), user-provided knowledge base, plus third-party licensed contents (such as dictionaries, public transportation routes, news contents provided by other medias, etc.). All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt), which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.
Plus, running a homepage *that looks cool* is a very complicated job for a non tech-savvy person. Thus, they don't get webhosting - they upload contents to big portals. I've even seen many small businesses forget about homepages, and instead have a blog/user-created forum/whatsoever on every major player. It would be much easier for normal users to reach them (since memorizing a URL written in a non-native language would be painful), and cheaper (near zero) to maintain.
Another downside of Google is that it DISPLAYS English search results, which would be useless to them. Yes, people are lazy enough to select the 'Search for Korean contents only'.
In terms of actual users, I believe Google would fall even further behind (far behind 10th place), since there is another big portal cyworld (http://cyworld.com/), which provides personal blogging services and web-based communities.
I use many different searching methods
- Naver or Yahoo for local information (public transport route, looking for a place for a nice dinner, etc.)
- Wikipedia for something that's expected to exist on an encyclopedia
- danawa.com and enuri.com for searching best deals (equivalent to PriceGrabber or whatsoever)
- Naver for anything else in Korean
- Google for everything else, or if all methods above doesn't give a good enough result.
As a result, I get to use google less and wikipedia more, while naver and everything else remains somewhat constant.
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Please NO! (Score:3, Insightful)
All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt), which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.
This could be the beginning of a slippery slope. Suppose Google responded by ignoring robots.txt files in Korea and protecting orkut, blogger and its own sites with robots.txt files that it does not obey itself. Up until now there has been an unwritten rule - something protected by robots.txt
Ignoring robots.txt (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/msn-ignoring-robotstxt-files/ [ewhisper.net]
There are ways to block search engines that do this..
http://www.ars.net/bots/ [ars.net]
The real problem ... (Score:2)
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In Soviet Russia... (Score:3, Funny)
in other news... (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia the currency transfer trounce you (Score:2, Insightful)
As a result, dealing with an external broker for services was too painful to contemplate. This restriction formed a protectionist barrier on any service dealing with relatively small financial transactions. As a result companies like Google were locked out off the market in favour of the local brokers.
AFAIK they have a freely convertible currency now which changes the rules of the game back in favour of Google and from there on
Re:In Soviet Russia the currency transfer trounce (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, if I'm searching information about, say, the name of Putin's dog I can use the following search query:
"Imja sobaki Putina" - (the name of Putin's dog) and Yandex can find documents with the words
"Imena sobak Putina" - (the names of Putin's dogs - note the plural) or documents with the words
"Imen sobak Putina" - ([about] the names of Putin's dogs)
"Imena sobakam Putina" - another grammar case.
Russian morphology is MUCH MUCH more complex than in English. Yandex started working on morphological search in 1996, so it's not surprising that it's still much better than Google.
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Re:In Soviet Russia the currency transfer trounce (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a matter of approach to morphology actually.
IIRC Google approach to morphology as a whole is to throw brute force statistical analysis at it. They use statistical models and loads of data for translation. This works wonders with languages like English who have more exemptions than grammar rules while having fairly rigid sentence ordering and relatively limited common vocabulary.
Russian is very difficult to be subjected to this approach. Due to it undergoing a forced language reform at the turn of the 20th century, russian grammar can be expressed in less than 10 pages of strict rules with around 30-40 exemptions. This grammar used to be drilled down with vengeance in Russian schools so it has not changed a bit since formulated 100 years ago.
While the rules are strict (and relatively easy) the meaning of many key grammar elements is positional-dependant. To add insult to injury it has one of the largest working day-to-day vocabularies and there are probably more ways to say the same thing than in any other language (I mean proper Russian, not "Na huja zhe tebe eto nado blad'"..
So no wonder an analytical model is more successful than statistical. Thanks for pointing it out.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.ipmce.su/~lib/osn_prav.html [ipmce.su]
I used to have a "legit" version at my old house (no access to it at the mo) which was printed by Moscow State. It was 35-40 pages in total with the preface and the contents.
By the way, when I taught Russian in the USA nearly 20 years ago I had that trimmed to 10 pages for the beginners.
The problem I found with it is that most English students of foreign languages are humanity students which are heavily into memorising and not trying
Character sets? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Character sets? (Score:5, Informative)
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But one of my favorite search engine is www.alltheweb.com . I think it is Norwegian or something. Yahoo Bought them indirectly and I don't know what they plan to do with them.
Obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
I'm surprised (Score:2)
The reason why NAVER in Korea tops google (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason is mostly ignorance (Score:3, Interesting)
China (Score:2)
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Re:Newsflash! (Score:5, Funny)
It's 20 miles but I make it work because I'm so self-righteous.
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That's not the complicated part (Score:5, Insightful)
Just simple lists of keywords associated with that link won't do. We already had that kind of search engines long before Google, and there's a reason why Google handed their arse to them.
And then there are the people gaming the system for a quick profit... even if it means ruining a valuable resource for everyone else. There was an almost epidemic of link spam on all possible forums and blogs, for example, just to raise the Google rank of a couple of pages.
Most of Google's uphill battle so far has been tweaking the algorithm to defend against such "attacks".
(And now that I mention it, it dawns upon me that maybe that's why smaller national engines can do better locally. With everyone trying to game Google and generally the larger English-reading world, it could be that noone bothered polluting the smaller national searches.)
So just being able to swap links around won't do much.
A second and third problems I see with your idea are, well:
1. timing. When I search for something, I'd rather not depend on the right people being online at that exact time. I also want the answer in half a second. Google does that with in-RAM indexes. I wouldn't bet a fortune on someone doing that equally fast via several hops over the net, P2P style.
2. reliability. P2P traffic has been poisoned repeatedly by interested parties, like, say, the RIAA and MPAA. And it's entirely trivial to do so. So what's to keep other interested parties from poisoning P2P search with falsely tagged links?
Even on Google, it's not entirely rare that someone buys ad-word keywords on their competitors' trademarks or such. E.g., if you have a company called, say, "Houndwire", I could buy that keyword for an ad for my company. Now everyone who searches for your company, will have my ad served to them. Then keep my fingers crossed that if I'm in roughly the same market, some people will just go ahead and buy from me. There have been even laws proposed against that kind of impersonation.
Now for adwords it's one thing, but the same could just as well be applied to poisoning a P2P search. Which could ruin its usefulness pretty fast.
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