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Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

Sergey is nothing more than a hypocrite. Get back to me when Google:

  1) Makes its search engine algorithm publicly available.
  2) Stops distorting its search results to favor those with Google Plus content.
  3) Stops allowing Android apps to be created.
  4) Stops releasing proprietary technologies e.g. WebM, WebP.

Then you can talk about how Apple and Facebook are bad for the "open" internet.

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the beauty of it is that if you don't like Google, it provides interfaces and APIs to extract your data in standard formats. You can export emails, contacts, calendar stuffs, docs, etc.

Facebook allows none of this. Once you're in, you're stuck there.

Well, apart from the whole "Download Your Information" thing that lets you download all your data, you're totally right.

Great, I'll provide instructions to users of my app on how to initiate this (IIRC) manual process that requires them to navigate a maze of FB privacy pages, confirm via email that yes, they do actually want their data, and then they can wait for the request to be processed by FB. Then they get emailed a zip file full of multiple files with everything they've ever done. Hardly the same as APIs that allow you to export the things you want, on-demand, in a documented format, seamlessly into alternative applications.

Cool. Please by all means show me how to get a list of my circles from Google Plus ?

Because last time I checked their API was very, very basic.

https://www.google.com/takeout/

Your initial comment would have been a lot more credible if you'd said exactly that.

That's hysterical. Have you ever clicked it? Yes. Enjoy that 50MB HTML file downloaded.

What a load of rubbish.

1) Google provides NO API for extracting all my data from Google Plus.

2) Facebook has a download my information link in the Preferences panel.

The API is anemic, but as jmillikin noted in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3846020 the data liberation has been there since launch. I hadn't used takeout before, but I just tried downloading my circles and got a zip of vcard files.

https://www.google.com/takeout

What interest could you have in their search algorithm? Or should I say, why should they disclose it? It would only allow SEO spammers to game the system so much easier. This would fill the top results with crap so I would think it's in everyone's best interest that the algorithm is kept secret. Also the quality results are what separates Google from the competition. Are trade secrets not allowed anymore?

Agreed on your first two. I don't understand either of the second. Native app markets are not necessarily a threat to the open internet... only ones that are locked-down "walled gardens." And WebM and WebP are openly licensed specs.

Open specs controlled by one company are only kind of open, especially when they can iterate the spec faster than smaller competitors can keep up. Here's a doomsday scenario with WebM. Google 1) updates the spec, 2) releases a new version of Chrome, and 3) transcodes all the videos on Youtube to the new format. The question becomes, can Google accomplish those three things faster than Apple/Microsoft/Mozilla can release updated browsers? The spec is open, even the source is open, so all you have to do is recompile and push an update to all your users whenever Google says so if you don't want them to see the "Your browser is obsolete" warning message.

Is this seriously something people think would happen? Wouldn't the internet at large be up in arms at Google for this kind of behavior?

Like I said, it's a sort of doomsday scenario. Then again, I've seen comments here on HN calling IE obsolete specifically because it didn't implement some HTML5 subspec that had been updated less than 48 hours before. It's hard to predict what will or will not enrage the internet.

While a horde of zombies voted you down I quite agree with that point of view.

Even if it's not as black & white Google already attempts a lot of this. They basically want to be the ones to decide.

There's no "consortium" it's just "lets push feat ZZ on our websites, web clients, and say its the new feat everyone has to support. Plus its open source anyway we're the good guys!"

If others disagree well, so far it's been pretty much a grey area. Google keeps pushing the technologies others refused. But when Google controls even more of the market, let's say with 50%+ Chrome (they have the market already, website wise, except for FB.), there won't be a need to push anymore. It'll be Google's way or, well, nothing. Even if it's features that are released within 48H.

This is absurd scenario on top of infeasbily-expensively-absurd scenario. Google has no desire to do this, it would completely fly in the way of WebM's original goals. Further, the idea that YouTube could retranscode content in any sort of timeline like that...

It's from the article, "Smartphone apps, as led by Apple: “all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it”"

When you run the second biggest app market in the world it makes you sound like just a bit of a hypocrite.

And my issue with WebM/WebP is that Google just seems to release these standards with a complete disregard for what the rest of the industry is doing or has done.

True openness happens when you have established open standards that everyone uses.

> It's from the article, "Smartphone apps, as led by Apple: “all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it”"

He didn't say that though. It seems like Wired added the Apple part. The only quote in the Guardian article (which I don't think includes the full interview, unless I'm missing the link), just says '"There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."' Which in most cases is a true statement.

> And my issue with WebM/WebP is that Google just seems to release these standards with a complete disregard for what the rest of the industry is doing or has done.

You only see the "established open standards that everyone uses" when you ignore the long painful sausage-making process.

  > "For example, all the information in apps – that data is
  > not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."' 
  > Which in most cases is a true statement.

Is it? Not crawlable does not mean non searchable. Google cannot crawl my messages too (I hope so!), but I can search in them.

Yes, and private messages should remain private (and hopefully searchable). Balkanized data isn't necessarily bad, and there are lots of shades of grey there.

As two examples, though, if the only way to search Twitter is Twitter, and Twitter won't let you search for tweets older than a week or two, then you're out of luck.

More hypothetically, if most people used Wordpress for blogging for the last 15 years, and Wordpress didn't allow indexing by search engines, but only searching on Wordpress.com, we would not have the internet we have today.

"You can't search it" isn't entirely true for Android apps. Android has had a pluggable search framework for quite some time (I think since 1.x, but I'm not 100% sure about that). It is straightforward for apps to respond to searches on your phone and some do, though like some of Android's other extension points, more should.

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