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Comment by mslate | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think making Google’s index public would be sufficient. Their real core asset is not the index but the historical engagement data they have of searchers’ interactions with the index (both on the results page and offsite analytics Google has access to, eg Google Analytics/display ad network).

Making that historical engagement data public is not feasible/realistic, IMO.

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I think it is necessary though. Other search engine operators have cited this as one of the reasons their search engines fail or struggle to provide as good results. As far as the engagement data goes, it’s something that the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK has looked at as part of their investigation into google. See here for a very interesting analysis of Google’s and Bings click and query data: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5efb1db6e90e0...

Thanks--I learned some valuable vocabulary today! "Click-and-query data" was the phrase I did not have on hand.

I have never worked for a search engine company (or devoted much time to SEO), but I would suggest the click-and-query data advantage is invaluable to cementing Google's supremacy over any newcomers.

It was new to me as well, I think it was a phrase that was invented to describe the data during the CMA investigation but I am not sure.

I’ve heard search engine operators complain about the index consistently while they seem spilt about the click and query data. For example, DuckDuckGo and StartPage have made pretty good businesses out of pointedly not collecting click and query data. For my part, I think it’s the dual lock on distribution via exclusive agreements on being the default search engine and the advantages it has when web crawling that cements Google’s dominance over the search engine market.

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