Author Topic: Duckduckgo and Yandex  (Read 1670 times)

Brad

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Duckduckgo and Yandex
« on: June 19, 2018, 11:35:08 PM »
For a smaller site, there may be an advantage to getting Yandex to index it.
https://r3bl.blog/en/exploring-duckduckgo-for-smaller-websites/

This seems to jive with some things I've noticed on DDG and site search.

aaron

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Re: Duckduckgo and Yandex
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2018, 03:36:13 AM »
It is a bit surprising someone like Yandex hasn't bought out one of the legacy search domains or launched a second brand targeting the US market.

I noticed on Yandex.com search results they cross link to the equivalent search results from Bing & Google. You'd never see Google even consider that idea.

Brad

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Re: Duckduckgo and Yandex
« Reply #2 on: June 23, 2018, 11:22:33 AM »
I think Yandex is devoting most of it's finite resources into staying No 1 in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey and fending off Google. 

I read they have 60% market share in Russia.

I find it ironic that there is more search engine competition in the former Soviet Union than there is in America and EU home of free enterprise. 

aaron

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Re: Duckduckgo and Yandex
« Reply #3 on: June 23, 2018, 04:44:53 PM »
Russian antitrust action against Google happened over default Google bundling of their search on Android devices.

Fine was tiny … single digit millions in dollars
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/17/google-reaches-7-8-million-settlement-in-its-android-antitrust-case-in-russia/

but it (along with the folding of their local Uber competitor into Yandex.taxi) led to the stock price of Yandex roughly tripling as Google quickly lost 15% marketshare in mobile search in Russia
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/mobile/russian-federation/#monthly-201607-201806

There was an old Matt Taibbi article where he mentioned the Koch brothers got their fortune from their father who did major innovations in oil extractions & refining. At the time he couldn't compete in the US market due to the overwhelming market dominance & control by corrupt oligopolies who sued him & his superior technology into the ground. So Fred Koch went to Russia & Hitler's Germany, made a fortune, then those funds grew for decades & decades and are now used to promote the ideology of free "market" plunder (e.g. monopoly capitalism / regulatory capture fascism) which is now more perverse than ever (based on growing inequality, growing power concentration & the rise of China's authoritarian state), but it was already so bad back then they needed to go to Russia to monetize their innovation.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-20140924
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In 1925, Fred, who earned a degree in chemical engineering from MIT, partnered with a former Universal engineer named Lewis Winkler and designed a near carbon copy of the Universal cracking apparatus – making only tiny, unpatentable tweaks. Relying on family connections, Fred soon landed his first client – an Oklahoma refinery owned by his maternal uncle L.B. Simmons. In a flash, Winkler-Koch Engineering Co. had contracts to install its knockoff cracking equipment all over the heartland, undercutting Universal by charging a one-time fee rather than ongoing royalties.

It was a boom business. That is, until Universal sued in 1929, accusing Winkler­Koch of stealing its intellectual property. With his domestic business tied up in court, Fred started looking for partners abroad and was soon doing business in the Soviet Union, where leader Joseph Stalin had just launched his first Five Year Plan. Stalin sought to fund his country's industrialization by selling oil into the lucrative European export market. But the Soviet Union's reserves were notoriously hard to refine. The USSR needed cracking technology, and the Oil Directorate of the Supreme Council of the National Economy took a shining to Winkler-Koch – primarily because Koch's oil-industry competitors were reluctant to do business with totalitarian Communists.

https://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-koch-brothers-traces-their-childhood-and-political-rise
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Fred Koch, the patriarch of the family, was an expert in building oil refineries, and he and a friend named William Rhodes Davis proposed building one in Germany during 1934, '35, that period in there. In 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich in Germany, so this meant working under the Third Reich. And in order to get permission, they actually had to go to Hitler himself, and William Rhodes Davis did the "Heil Hitler" to greet Hitler, and finally they got Hitler to greenlight this proposal so that they could build an oil refinery in Hamburg.

Whole circle is quite crazy.
Quote
Like a casino that bets at its own craps table, Koch engages in "proprietary trading" – speculating for the company's own bottom line. "We're like a hedge fund and a dealer at the same time," bragged Ilia Bouchouev, head of Koch's derivatives trading in 2004. "We can both make markets and speculate."

Koch exploited the contango market to the hilt. The company leased nine supertankers and filled them with cut-rate crude and parked them quietly offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, banking virtually risk-free profits by selling contracts for future delivery. All in, Koch took about 20 million barrels of oil off the market, putting itself in a position to bet on price disruptions the company itself was creating. Thanks to these kinds of trading efforts, Koch could boast in a 2009 review that "the performance of Koch Supply & Trading actually grew stronger last year as the global economy worsened." The cost for those risk-free profits was paid by consumers at the pump. Estimates pegged the cost of the contango trade by Koch and others at up to 40 cents a gallon.

Artificially constraining oil supplies is not the only source of dark, unregulated profit for Koch Industries. In the years after George W. Bush branded Iran a member of the "Axis of Evil," the Koch brothers profited from trade with the state sponsor of terror and reckless would-be nuclear power. For decades, U.S. companies have been forbidden from doing business with the Ayatollahs, but Koch Industries exploited a loophole in 1996 sanctions …
Plunder is only bad if you are not the plunderer = probably not a stable long-term ideology, but one which will be promoted forever.

Bad as the Koch plunder stuff is I still prefer that to being forced to buy a health insurance policy on the basis that I can't be dropped only to find out in spite of my forced payments/penalties if I don't have it, the corrupt insurance company would still drop a family member. Nothing like dropping 5 figures a year in pre-tax income on health insurance only to have to lie and say you don't have it because if you admit to carrying it you will be charged more … only to know that the person in your family who actually needed it had their policy illegally canceled by the wonderful health insurance company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adrdmmh7bMo

Wonder how high they can get the % of US GDP consumed by the healthcare industry before it collapses the global economy. Already at around 20% & could be close to 30% in a decade if it doesn't crash the global economy first.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2018, 04:52:06 PM by aaron »