[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
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Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
Despite all the posts about the declining quality of Google, we
haven't seen any serious competitors arise over the last years. DDG
is at about 2% market share, which is great but still very low.
Apart from Google's monopoly and the big technical challenges, what
would a competitor need to defy Google?
Author : hubraumhugo
Score : 169 points
Date : 2022-03-27 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
| Stealthisbook wrote:
| SpodGaju wrote:
| I will argue that he fact that Google is a monopoly is the only
| thing holding back competitors.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...
|
| The only thing that would have a chance is if Apple developed a
| search engine and used it as the default instead of using Google.
| People are busy/ignorant and do not care and will eat whatever
| search results they are given.
|
| But this might be a risk to Apple based on how many people use
| Gmail on their Apple phones.
|
| It is not about quality anymore, it is only about market
| domination. The only thing that will bring about new search
| engines will be anti-trust legislation.
| missedthecue wrote:
| How does anti trust action solve this? Forcing to divest cloud
| and Gmail will not make competition have an easier job with
| their search engines.
|
| Google search itself is irreducible, at least in any productive
| way.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I've been using Neeva, it works well.
| randomsilence wrote:
| That's funny:
|
| Their slogan:
|
| >try Neeva, 100% ad-free search engine, Totally private
|
| Their founders:
|
| >Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at
| Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at
| YouTube). They met in the early days of search ads at Google,
| and came up with the idea for Neeva over hikes and coffee.
|
| They have founded a company that explicitly doesn't need the
| knowledge that they had acquired in their job.
|
| [1] https://neeva.com/about
| mindvirus wrote:
| I think the way you'd compete is unbundling it.
|
| Building a general search engine better than Google is probably a
| non starter, but...
|
| Could you build a better image search for graphic designers?
| Could you build a better search for specific document types, such
| as academic papers or legal precedence?
|
| I think that's what we'll see - similar to how nothing replaced
| Craigslist, but a bunch of startups unbundled features in
| Craigslist and made companies around them.
| tormock wrote:
| > what would a competitor need to defy Google
|
| Google is hiding important information on purpose... so don't do
| that.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The thing that replaces Google won't look like Google at first.
| This makes it hard to predict who will dethrone them. In the past
| we use to say how do you beat Microsoft? Or why isn't there a
| Microsoft competitor (besides Apple etc...). Now we have Google
| and chromebooks and android. That's a big step beyond a search
| engine and competitive w/ MSFT. Amazon basically owns cloud
| computing. Arguably there are competitors in different markets.
| These challenges to MSFT happened due to the massive force of the
| Internet which basically reduced consumer costs by transferring
| it to advertisers.
|
| If we are talking about search then it will likely be something
| AI based probably operating under a different model than Google
| search. AI is a huge force probably akin to the Internet.
| borapdx wrote:
| The principal step will be to move on from keywords and indexing,
| which are now a legacy technology, almost 26 years after Google
| started it all.
|
| Returning blue links is a thing of the past, as the Web of
| yesterday is long gone. Blue links always were about surfing i.e.
| following hyperlinks just for the sake of it since the main
| premise was most of them were of high quality and quickly
| proliferating.
|
| All that is gone now and the links are a promotional thing how to
| get paid in one way or another. This is why Google results have
| been deteriorating, regardless of tens of trillions of archived
| pages on the Web. Google has lost the principal ranking signal
| years ago.
|
| The next huge scale smart information system will be based on
| dense vectors (a few hundred dimensions) such as in AI but the
| key will be much bigger scale, of (tens of) billions of vectors.
| Contemporary AI works won datasets 4-5 orders of magnitude
| smaller, getting bogged down in gigantic transformer models such
| as GPT-3 with 175B+ parameters that take weeks and millions of
| dollars just to train. One might wonder what is innate knowledge
| of such a huge model, and it is not much as one can see for
| themselves as GPT-3 is now open (until Apr 1).
|
| The future will be based on embeddings that are NOT
| contextualized i.e. no separate vectors for different senses in
| superpositions. Such systems will not be based on ads nor
| tracking as the resources required will be orders of magnitude
| less than what is currently required at Google.
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| Did you notice Google's monopoly over online ads? Competitors
| can't make money. It's literally called anti-competitive.
| jakub_g wrote:
| This article has insights from folks who actually tried:
|
| https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-fr...
|
| TL;DR you need a lot of money and users (catch-22). Also, massive
| scale and massive noise.
|
| You can also search HN for 'cliqz' for discussions about Cliqz
| shutting down.
| vmullin wrote:
| Cliqz' blog is really insightful.
|
| In case you weren't aware, Brave Search is led and built by key
| team members from Cliqz: https://search.brave.com/
|
| The growth and usability of Brave Search this past year has
| been strong, with some significant features planned throughout
| 2022.
| elorant wrote:
| People don't seem to realize how good Google is in regional
| results. I live in a European country and every other search
| engine I've tried in the past is lacking when searching for local
| content. I can search for news articles that date back two
| decades in Google and get results.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| DuckDuckGo does quite well here for me, as long as I enable the
| button for localized results. I very much like that it's an
| option there.
| jws wrote:
| _What would a competitor need to defy Google?_ - A billion users
| who have not already chosen a search engine.
|
| I slightly better experience should get a larger portion of new
| users, but existing users do not say "Today I will develop a
| methodology to conduct a survey of internet search engines and
| select the best one for me."
|
| At this point everyone has either chosen a search engine or had
| one chosen for them.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Because Google is the best you're going to get with ad-supported
| search.
|
| If you're willing to pay for search there is an alternative
| emerging: Kagi. It's not a Google competitor, though. It's a
| niche product for people (like me) who are willing to pay a
| significant amount of money for access to a search engine whose
| creators make money by providing value to their users rather than
| by providing their users to advertisers.
| Closi wrote:
| Kagi's pricing strategy is ridiculous. A single search can cost
| 5 cents in charges if I click through a few filters.
|
| IMO Kagi can only appeal to people who care about search enough
| to pay _and don't search enough to make it too expensive_ ,
| which is probably a contradiction.
| johnqian wrote:
| Google's search results are bad by default because they're
| hijacked by SEO farms. Despite this, I find that there's almost
| always a way for me to find what I want with Google. If I want
| thoughtful discussion about a topic, I'll append
| "from:news.ycombinator" to my search. This also often surfaces
| great personal blogs or old documents or other things that don't
| rank high in search results.
|
| If it's not covered on HN, I'll append "from:reddit" instead
| (they're not always wise but as at least they're not getting paid
| per word written, and the upvote system gives me a sense of what
| real people think). If I want a broad survey of a topic,
| Wikipedia or some other wiki are usually great. If I want a
| really deep dive, I'll append "book", usually in conjunction with
| "from:news.ycombinator". Lastly, I sometimes add a time filter,
| e.g. "after:2021".
|
| Clearly this is an awkward pattern. But it really works, and I'm
| having trouble thinking of something that would be meaningfully
| better. I suspect most people have found ways of using Google
| that work well enough for them. So I'm afraid Google Search will
| stick around for awhile.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Google seems to have optimized its search engine with the goal of
| making it as easy as possible for potential consumers to connect
| with Google advertising customers. Google also collects data on
| consumer search patterns again with the goal of connecting the
| consumer to the advertiser. That's the business model as far as I
| can tell. If you don't want to be sucked down their engagement
| hole, you have to clear your cookies after every search and
| probably going through a VPN is better.
|
| There is an obvious problem here - companies who don't advertise
| with Google could easily find themselves blocked from appearing
| on the first pages of Google search results. Would anyone really
| be surprised to find that the internals of the Google search
| algorithm have a weight factor that assigns better scores to
| sites that advertise with Google? Hence requiring Google to
| expose the internals of the algorithm to public scrutiny really
| seems like the only way forward. Yes, those are 'trade secrets'.
| So are the contents of your favorite hot sauce, but government
| regulators require those contents to be displayed on the product
| label (for good reasons).
|
| On top of all that, Google's also under pressure from governments
| and media corporations to push their information content (aka
| propaganda, influence, etc.) to the top of search results,
| burying anything like independent content in those areas (world
| events, domestic politics, etc.) far down. This is particularly
| obvious on Youtube incidentally, but Google has the same problem.
| Some of this can be avoided using the 'verbatim' option and some
| interesting word choices in your search string, but it's a fairly
| tedious exercise.
|
| Again, exposing the internals of the Google search algorithm
| would be interesting here, as it seems clear certain
| 'authoritative sites' are assigned better scores in the search
| ranking - not because they have more backlinks or more accurate
| content, but merely because of governmental and media pressure.
| janto wrote:
| Chrome is currently a major component to Google's hold over its
| users' web experience. When it is measured in terms of market
| share, it appears to me that the browser wars and search engine
| companies fight in the same battles.
| helph67 wrote:
| User privacy should be #1 and some search engines do provide it.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Privacy...
| Another not listed above is StartPage which may use Google
| https://www.startpage.com/
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I vaguely recall part of an interview with Warren Buffett, where
| he was talking about tech investments. At the time he was
| interested in cloud providers and not interested in search. He
| said that "search is winner-takes-all," while infrastructure-as-
| a-service is not. Maybe that's part of it.
| gyulai wrote:
| Actually, I don't think that _search_ is winner-takes-all.
| Rather the piece that is winner-takes-all is monetization of
| search through advertising. Because advertising networks are
| winner-takes-all. ...so the path forward leads through
| monetizing search in a way other than through advertising. And
| this is precisely what the next generation of challengers like
| Neeva and Kagi are doing. Another alternative might be public
| funding.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Contrary to many posts here, I think that Google completely
| controls the quality of the results. The feeling is that quality
| has gone down because a lot of top ranked website are SEO ads
| filled websites. I think this is true and on purpose. Two years
| ago top results were very often Wikipedia, Stack overflow or
| reddit. Sending users to those websites is not profitable for
| Google.
|
| I also think that's why it's very hard for competitors to
| compete. As soon as one is going to get credibly menacing they'll
| improve on the quality again to preserve their position.
|
| I think that has happened with McDonald's for instance. A few
| years ago the quality was at it's lowest, the food definitely
| started to feel fake, air filled and not satisfying. Since the
| small local competition of hand crafted hamburger popped up a bit
| everywhere, and credible international competitors ramped up (5
| guys, in n out...) they had to improve the quality. And my
| impression is that it's been a bit more than a year that the
| quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers actually
| taste like food again.
|
| I think it's simply the quality versus profits cursor and it can
| be adapted any time.
| randomhedgehog wrote:
| I don't quite understand what you mean when you say "sending
| users to those websites is not profitable for google" -
| referring to Wikipedia, Stack, Reddit etc...
|
| Organic search results only ever profit Google if they answer
| the user's question, because it makes that user more likely to
| use Google again and click an ad in the future. If a user
| searches something and the top result doesn't answer their
| question, then Google hasn't done it's job and the user is less
| likely to use Google again and therefore less likely to click
| an ad in the future.
|
| Surely the most profitable option for Google is to answer
| people's questions quickly and easily, whether you think these
| questions are answered by Wikipedia instead of a business site
| targeted to answering that question is a different story.
|
| I just don't understand how Google's goal of "answering
| people's questions" is somehow opposite to "providing quality"
| for users. I think for most of HN, they have a very narrow view
| that "quality" means antiquated wiki-type sites.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > And my impression is that it's been a bit more than a year
| that the quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers
| actually taste like food again.
|
| Huh, maybe I don't eat there enough to notice differences, but
| on the occasions lately that I've had a McDonald's burger, I
| haven't noticed the quality being anything but terrible. Not
| entirely unpleasant, but just not at all a high quality meal,
| even compared to some of the other fast food burger places.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Well it's still McDonald's we're talking about, it's still
| going to be 3mm thick patties and very sweet sauce. But with
| less soy derivatives, non caloric sweeteners and corn instead
| of wheat I have the impression.
| patientplatypus wrote:
| sotu wrote:
| google competitors already exist they're just not obvious - When
| you want to find a place to stay you dont search google you go to
| airbnb.com when you want to buy random stuff you go to amazon,
| even coming to hackernews is a competitor. You are seeking
| something and find it. I do get your point tho about a direct
| competitor, at the end of the day - all the innovation around
| search is happening in that we are unbundling the search engine
| and turning each category/search result asset into a monetizable
| marketplace. My .02
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| You really think DDG gets 2% as much traffic as Google? There's
| no chance
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| How many Larry Page competitors are there? How many Sergey Brins,
| to listen to an idea without any validation, and judging it with
| independence? Why do they have to do everything?
| subb wrote:
| Because I believe a search engine for the internet should be
| nationalized, like the internet itself.
|
| Google "solved" the internet search engine problem. Other
| competitors are just replicating it poorly. There's nothing good
| for the consumer here.
| steve76 wrote:
| e-clinton wrote:
| I think there may still be a quality issue. Every then and again
| I change my search engine to Bing. Bing works perfectly fine for
| most of my searches. However, every few hours there's one search
| that reminds me "you're not on Google" because I don't get the
| results I expect. I tried DDG as well with a similar outcome,
| although it doesn't perform as well as Bing for me.
|
| I realize I am a sample size of one, but I run this exercise
| about twice a year, and sadly always go back to Google.
| webmaven wrote:
| All the posts here suggesting that the thing that is needed is
| some technical advantage, or a business model, or a niche, are
| all true, but miss the point; a competitor that actually beat
| Google due to one or more of those "ingredients" would simply be
| acquired by Google, or crushed in the marketplace with due
| application (mostly fairly, prima facie) of Google's warchest
| (which may be inherently unfair).
|
| Managing to grow enough in an unappreciated search niche while
| staying under the radar in order to better withstand that kind of
| eventual attention seems unlikely. Targeting a segment that
| Google has been burned on (like social search) may help, but that
| probably just draws attention from a different MANGAM.
|
| Eventually, someone will be both smart and lucky enough to carve
| out some of the search space, but don't hold your breath, it is
| going to take so much luck it won't be soon, and may look
| accidental.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| A business model.
| kkfx wrote:
| Resources matter: you can craft few better services, but if you
| do not have Alphabet resources your better service can't compete.
|
| For instance how can you offer a better maps for PND if you can't
| elicit traffic data from the density and speed of android
| smartphones that are around of 80% of phones traveling around the
| world?
|
| To defy Alphabet you do not need a better Google, you need a
| different kind of solution, for instance instead of competing in
| modern web crap to lock down users and surveil them you can
| propose classic desktop computing with decentralized tools. Try
| looking for instance at Jami, Retroshare, ZeroNet, you can
| integrate them in a suite and say "hey, instead of depending on
| Zoom, Meet or Teams, proprietary services with limits that might
| change, surveil, etc use this system, there is no SPOF, no
| service behind".
|
| Some have tried something, for instance DeltaChat seems to be a
| WA clone, but it's actually a MUA, in that case it doesn't took
| off much because most people simply do not care, you have to know
| your public. Starting from CS _and humanities_ courses [1] to
| attracts students and plant the seed of something new, being
| prepared to face years before a success simply because no empire
| born quickly and when some are against you it 's even more
| complex.
|
| The old adage: people have the power, but they do not know how to
| use it it's unfortunately very true, you can only bend people,
| use them, to elicit a slice of power :-)
|
| [1] most CS students haven't enough skills to comprehend the
| world, they just explore few aspects ignoring the rest and that's
| why dictatorships like STEM, because they help to generate
| "ancient Greek's 'useless idiots' to be employed" instead of
| Citizens (disclaimer: I am an engineer, I learnt than personally
| in years)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think that has more to do with the information source than the
| market.
|
| It's possible HN is an unreliable guide to Google's actual
| prospects.
| prismatix wrote:
| I've been using Kagi as my default search engine on my phone to
| test it out. Honestly, it just doesn't hit the convenience mark.
| when I search for a restaurant + hours, Google shows the hours in
| a card at the top of the results. Kagi can't or doesn't do that,
| and often doesn't even find the restaurant. I haven't used DDG so
| I'm not sure if they're similar, but for the average user Google
| just consistently hits the mark (of convenience)
| lessname wrote:
| Thats because many companies directly type in their data on
| Google My Business to make their business easier to find. There
| is also a community doing this (same with facebook). Smaller
| competitors could do the same with a community or at least
| manually typing in the data at least for bigger companies.
| shafyy wrote:
| I also use Kagi and I think it's good enough for most things.
| But you're right, for local search results Google still is
| better.
| indymike wrote:
| > Apart from Google's monopoly and the big technical challenges,
| what would a competitor need to defy Google?
|
| Which monopoly? Email? Search?
|
| Regardless, the answer is time. It took Google a decade to win
| the search war completely. It will take a competitor time to
| dethrone Google.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Despite all the posts about the declining quality of Google
|
| We assume people in general are dissatisfied with Google, because
| there are blog posts about it, and some people on HN agree, and
| because we have certain strongly held beliefs and technical
| knowledge that lead us to this conclusion. What we have not
| validated is whether people outside the tech community are as
| dissatisfied as we are. If they aren't willing to switch, then
| there won't be a notable competitor to Google.
| sidibe wrote:
| I don't know anyone outside of HN who talks about bad google
| search results. The ones I know using other search engines are
| doing it for privacy or anti-monopoly reasons. Only HN seem to
| remember the glory days when Google always delivered exactly
| what you need before the continuous decline that warrants
| several of these 100+ comments threads a week for 10 years. For
| me today as in yesterday it is just a decent search engine that
| works as I expect
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm dissatisfied with google for my normal use cases too... But
| that is more with the state of the Internet in general. But on
| other hand I hate fuzzy search, trying to help me... Those
| keywords are there for reason and might even be spelled
| right...
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, I don't buy that at all. There are way more factors that
| play in to this. To me, the biggest one is humans just are
| lazy. In face of factual evidence, people continue to ignore
| it. This plays out in many different facets.
|
| We know that Big Tobacco maniuplates their formulas to make
| things unnaturally addicting and are incredibly bad for
| people's health. People continue to smoke.
|
| We know that processed foods are just not healthy for people,
| yet because of it's readily being available and cheap prices,
| people continue to eat it.
|
| We know that the Earth is not flat, but people continue to
| believe that it is.
|
| Just having the knowledge that
| [Google|Facebook|TikTok|$socialMediaPlatform] is manipulating
| what you see/read/consume in ways that benefit them and at
| times is actively harmful to the users doesn't mean people will
| stop.
| calltrak wrote:
| onion2k wrote:
| Google pays Apple ~$10bn a year to be the default search engine
| on Apple devices. They pay Mozilla a significant percentage of
| Mozilla's revenue to be the default in Firefox. Obviously Google
| is the default in Chrome.
|
| You can't compete with that by building a better search engine.
| Even if you had the infrastructure, capital, and you offered
| Apple and Mozilla more money than they get from Google, Google
| could beat your offer.
|
| The only way someone could beat Google, or even just compete with
| them, would be if they could make everyone understand that they
| can change their default search engine _and_ give them a reason
| to do it _and_ have Google screw up how they respond. I wouldn 't
| bet on it happening.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| You could beat them in a small segment market though. EG: A
| group tired of being banned by google.
| metadat wrote:
| > EG: A group tired of being banned by google.
|
| Huh? I don't understand what this means.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| What if an entity like the EU mandated that google make a
| public search index API, which would allow any competitor to
| create a low-cost clone. Google gets to stand as it is, relying
| on its brand and extra suite of tools to compete.
|
| It's heavy handed, but if you view search indexing as a natural
| monopoly, it's relatively simple for how effective it would be
| at curtailing market power.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Duckduckgo wrote about this a decade ago. So much investment
| needed to just get on their list of search engines.
|
| Meanwhile on Android, there's no practical way to completely
| move towards ddg for searched info unless you basically get rid
| of some voice and search features.
|
| Without laws, Google set up an ecology of everything search
| related hits google one way or another. On Apple there are ways
| around it because Apple isn't a search company.
|
| Having said that......... Most people don't care. It's why
| Microsoft pushes so hard for ie. Because they get to set the
| default which nobody will change.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| You could lobby the govs to require search engine selection in
| browsers / device on first install. I don't think that would
| change anything though. Google's results might be declining but
| they are still arguably better than their competitors and ATM
| at least the majority of people would still choose them.
| lawwantsin17 wrote:
| retrocryptid wrote:
| well... i've been "binging" and "DDGing" things a lot more often
| in the last couple of years.
|
| Bing isn't the perfect google replacement as it seems to have
| gone the google route of not returning hits for things you search
| for, but for things it thinks you wanted to search for.
|
| Maybe the "site:reddit.com" hack works well enough for people who
| care about search results.
| samwillis wrote:
| Ultimately I think it's because the internet is just too big!
| Google were only able to do it because they had the right
| algorithm early in the age of the internet. They were then able
| to grow with it to achieve the scale required. Starting from
| scratch now on a general internet search engine would be close to
| impossible without 10s, if not 100s, billions of investment. And
| you would need that to build the index before even beginning to
| be competitive. No one is making bets that big on search,
| especially when the online advertising industry (which is the
| only way to fund it currently) is in danger of massive
| regulation.
|
| I think there is massive opportunity for domain specific search
| engines though, imagine a search engine specifically designed for
| software engineers and developers, or one for academic research
| (not just papers but all online scientific content, news and
| discussion), or one targeting the arts. I think it's these
| verticals that could be incredible.
|
| You then potentially move towards a building "meta" search
| engines (if your are older than about 35 you will remember these)
| that work out what you are searching for and uses a domain
| specific engine.
|
| Edit:
|
| Just to add to this, people who say that "decentralised" search
| engines are the only way to compete with Google are not
| completely wrong, it's just that it's not about protocols and
| distributed indexes. It's about a community of smaller search
| engines working within specific domains and collaborating
| (commercially) on meta search engines, prompting people to search
| on each others engines if it would be better for that search.
|
| We almost need an "Open Search Co-Op" which smaller search
| engines can join to share technology and refers users to each
| other.
| belter wrote:
| Could not agree more. Not only that, would be willing to pay,
| for a domain specific, high quality, ad free search engine. In
| the same range of prices of a Netflix or Amazon Prime
| subscription.
| asperous wrote:
| I think are right but not because of the size of the internet.
| Although the web has grown, the cost of computing and bandwidth
| has decreased and there's a lot of open tools, technologies,
| and open datasets like YaCy and Common Crawl. The data you
| would want to index is a tiny fraction of the total internet.
|
| The challenge comes from the massive investments in turning
| that data into a good search engine and cutting through spam.
| That is the investment I think Google has scaled over time.
| Secondly, mind share; the moat Google has is immense, although
| I think DuckDuckGo and Bing has shown given enough time it is
| possible to get mindshare slowly; though if anything this
| demonstrates the challenge.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Another way is to add search for walled gardens: The most
| common by far are corporate documents and datastores.
|
| It's also a harder problem to solve than Google's algorithm.
|
| After two decades Microsoft seems to have brought in support,
| but they left the hard part to others.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Isn't Algolia pretty much eating this market?
|
| They seem to be very dominant on the problem of "here's my
| dataset, please provide me with an api / interface to search
| it"
| csa wrote:
| Maybe?
|
| When searching for something on HN, I get much better
| results using Google and site: rather than using the
| embedded algolia search.
|
| I would have to think that this would be true of a
| corporate data set as well.
|
| Their api might be what sets them apart, though. I'm not
| sure... not in that space.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Maybe a search engine for niches, where the mid-sized
| contributors to those niches may even pay something to support
| the search engine? And new people contributing sites to those
| niches could pay some small fee to be listed (maybe under
| certain conditions or after 1 year free) and would be "elected"
| into the search results by a random selection of others in the
| niche? Where the interests of the group are aligned because
| they all want more people to use the search engine to find
| them, so they are incentivized to grow the amount of quality
| content available.
| temp8964 wrote:
| You do have a point. However, the internet today is very
| different from its early days. Its content is much more
| centralized.
|
| In the past, Google search results will point to some good
| websites you never heard of and are very low traffic. But
| nowadays, the first couple pages are all popular websites with
| huge traffic even when they are low quality on the content. You
| can only find low traffic but good content websites in comments
| from social sites like reddit and HN.
|
| So it seems to me, to build a usable search engine, you only
| need to index most popular websites.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There is an opportunity for niche applications. I would like a
| search engine that only indexes discussion forums. These are
| hard to surface on the SEO driven major search providers.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Kagi is working on this with its "lens" feature. I think it
| works pretty dang well. Most results I get when using the
| discussions lens come from Reddit, but you can block or
| reduce the ranking of sites, making this less of an issue, if
| it is even an issue for you. I suggest trying it out and
| joining their discord to share feedback (they're responsive).
| tmsh wrote:
| > Ultimately I think it's because the internet is just too big!
|
| I would disagree actually. I think the majority of searches
| people do and the solutions they would be satisfied with
| require only indexing major sites. Create a better UX attached
| to PageRank of the top 10-100k+ Alexa ranked sites and you'd
| have a competitor that could focus on other improvements.
|
| At the bottom you could search Google or DDG if you want more
| niche results.
|
| I.e., optimizing UX of the p90 searches would be enough for
| people to move and the p90 of searches are happy with a pretty
| narrow range of sites. (You could insert value prop of: no ads,
| no tracking, and crowd-sourced refinement -- i.e., realtime
| upvote/downvoting -- of the top results, previews, caching,
| more knowledge graph stuff on the right side, deeper metadata
| processing of top sites (i.e., avoiding the need to 'site:*'),
| or some other revolutionary UX like a one sentence hypothesis
| solution of exactly what the person is asking for again
| upvoted/downvoted for refinement -- Google does this but there
| is a lot of room for improvement). It's fun to think about.
| There is an order of magnitude in both precision and accuracy
| that can be improved for huge swaths of common questions people
| ask on Google.
| brentadamson wrote:
| `We almost need an "Open Search Co-Op" which smaller search
| engines can join to share technology and refers users to each
| other.`
|
| Can you elaborate?
| samwillis wrote:
| Something like a cooperative where companies become the
| franchisee owner for a specific search vertical. They could
| get access to technology, software and knowledge, but the
| costs of infrastructure would be the responsibility of the
| member. As well as having their own "front page", website and
| branding there would then be a "meta" search engine that
| intelligently searches the franchisees search engines based
| on the query.
|
| If someone searches for something on one engine and it
| doesn't have the results the "meta" search engine could be
| checked and direct the user to another engine that would
| better fit their query.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The internet is big, but information has shrunk. Content has
| been slurped into walled gardens.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| So basically google is the MLS listings of the web now. Sounds
| like a job for regulators to step in for both the problems.
|
| Agree we need a coop of search engines, but I'll add that
| probably an org like mozilla is best suited for it, that way it
| can stay non-profit and recycle any profits back into R&D.
| personally I believe most of these solid business plan
| companies can be replaced by a simpler open-source version as
| IMO a lot of their energy is spend in securing revenue lines &
| profits.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think your post is key. I would be interested in anyone
| posting what they think is an economically viable path to
| challenging Google. Pretty much the one company that has done
| it at scale (Microsoft) isn't exactly eating Google's lunch
| (though I think there _are_ a few areas that Bing is better).
|
| It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to
| challenge Google at generic Internet search, and the few
| organizations with that capital are pretty clear they don't
| think it's a good bet. For example, Amazon is quite content
| just being the place you want to go to first _for the things
| you want to buy_ , as that is obviously the most lucrative
| area.
|
| Even in niche areas, I think it's still an enormous task to
| challenge Google. Despite the fact that 90% of my searches for
| "WTF does this stacktrace mean?" end up on StackOverflow, I
| invariably _start_ my search on Google because every now and
| then it gives me useful non-StackOverflow tidbits, and I know I
| can always drill in more with specific tags on StackOverflow
| later.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Even in niche areas, I think it's still an enormous task to
| challenge Google. Despite the fact that 90% of my searches
| for "WTF does this stacktrace mean?" end up on StackOverflow,
| I invariably start my search on Google because every now and
| then it gives me useful non-StackOverflow tidbits, and I know
| I can always drill in more with specific tags on
| StackOverflow later.
|
| It's telling, that a Google search scoped to a particular web
| site (xyz site:website.com) almost always produces better
| results than that web site's actual built-in search engine.
| If a web site that knows in detail its own content, its own
| users, and its own domain, still can't make their built-in
| search better, how does anyone else have a chance?
| xhrpost wrote:
| I guess the motivation is low as I frequently have to do
| this it seems.
| mbrameld wrote:
| I don't think the fact that the web site owner hasn't
| implemented better search than Google for their site is
| evidence that they can't do it, simply that they haven't.
| native_samples wrote:
| Google knows about external inbound links, so has more data
| on which to rank your pages than you do.
| hattmall wrote:
| Assuming someone has ever used that link you should have
| that data as well and with potentially even more
| relevance than google because you can see which pages are
| most often visited through external links.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| I think the most important data that is difficult to
| obtain is a history of which links people click on for
| each search query term. I think that's really the special
| sauce that Google has that others do not. There is a
| catch-22 where you need a lot of users to get the data
| but you can't get the users without the data. Initially
| Google pulled ahead with inbound link counting, but
| anyone can clone that. It's the click data that's
| missing.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Would there be a way to crowdsource the web crawling effort?
| Crawling@Home? I think that even with this you'd need a legal
| department to deal with takedown requests and illegal
| material.
| jasode wrote:
| _> It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to
| challenge Google at generic Internet search, [...] For
| example, Amazon is quite content just being the place you
| want to go to first for the things you want to buy, as that
| is obviously the most lucrative area._
|
| I understand your intent with that domain-specific example
| but surprisingly, that reasonable intuition sometimes doesn't
| work...
|
| E.g. for Amazon product search, I often deliberately use
| Google's engine to find the Amazon page because Amazon's own
| search can't do it. See example screenshots in my previous
| comment about that:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27539199
| akrymski wrote:
| Surely the only viable path to challenging Google is to own
| the web browser. Most users will use the default search
| engine.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| I don't know about "only" path but not sure why this is
| downvoted as it's a valid point of view.
| Gunax wrote:
| I would have thought this back in 2005, but eventually IE
| did fall. If users eventually dropped IE, why can't they
| also learn about Kagi or DDG or bing?
| jtolmar wrote:
| > I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is
| an economically viable path to challenging Google.
|
| You only search whitelisted sites, which removes a lot of the
| SEO and blogspam from the results, and makes the index is
| wildly smaller. Search is free, but users can also pay a
| cheap subscription for the ability to flag sites as spammy,
| submit sites they think are missing, and submit queries the
| site has trouble with. Someone manually goes through the top
| N most-repeated submissions each day (early on this is all of
| them) and determines whether to tweak the whitelist.
|
| Because your initial audience has to be people who are very
| enthusiastic about better search results, you should identify
| what they're interested in and focus your efforts on initial
| whitelists to things they care about. That might be technical
| questions (MDN StackOverflow, every random framework's docs
| site), or maybe whatever it is journalists would want to have
| access to (I'm not qualified to answer).
|
| I don't think VC-encouraged hypergrowth is possible with the
| above strategy, but you could probably get to ramen
| profitable in a reasonable time frame, with slow growth ever
| after.
| bsder wrote:
| > I don't think VC-encouraged hypergrowth is possible with
| the above strategy, but you could probably get to ramen
| profitable in a reasonable time frame, with slow growth
| ever after.
|
| The fate of runnaroo seems to provide evidence to the
| contrary.
| [deleted]
| avazhi wrote:
| "though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better"
|
| Curious what you think these are. I prefer Bing's UI to
| Google's but aside from that Bing is (IMO) a dumpster fire
| that quite literally makes me feel negligent (towards myself)
| when I use it - am I missing something?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Porn, in particular, but surprisingly I find that video
| search in general is better in Bing. Surprising because
| most of those video searches end up on YouTube, yet I seem
| to get better/higher quality results when I search on Bing
| than I do when on Google or YouTube.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Who would fund you if you said you wanted to be a competitor?
|
| A competitor would need to avoid being bought by one of the tech
| oligarchs. That's pretty hard to avoid.
|
| If by some fluke, you find a breakout opportunity, you would need
| to somehow avoid getting crushed like Parler. The tech oligarchs
| will use any excuse to crush any competition.
|
| That episode basically shows that to compete you would basically
| need to build your own internet first, and also your own banking
| system.
| [deleted]
| limeblack wrote:
| Bing is becoming fairly popular in the US
| https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/deskto...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Microsoft is pushing extremely hard for it. In Windows if you
| miss a barely visible button you will find yourself switching
| to Edge and Bing without realizing it.
|
| That Google is still at 85% show that people really want to use
| Google, it is not just "whatever comes with the computer".
| InCityDreams wrote:
| ..."you will find yourself switched* to...." Ftfy.
| bkav wrote:
| Have you tried Brave Search? It's not 100% yet but it's better
| for many searches. I made it my default and only use Google as
| secondary now.
| rytill wrote:
| Are people funding founders who want to make new search engines?
| cryptica wrote:
| No Google alternative will be able to raise funding because top
| VCs own Google stock and they have no interest in seeing their
| Google shares lose value.
|
| Secondly, the media would not allow it because many top media
| executives own Google shares. If a better Google competitor came
| along, media companies would do everything to suppress
| information about it so that nobody would know it exists.
| [deleted]
| bigcloud1299 wrote:
| Have you all used presearch?
|
| Presearch decentralized search engine, powered by blockchain
| technology.
|
| https://presearch.org/
| daqhris wrote:
| Google built a moat around its essential product: searching on
| the Internet.
|
| Speed of access, an Internet browsing engine , contracts with
| non-GGL browsers, cloud data centers, maps/locations/navigation,
| fiber cables/internet pipelines, social networks and personal
| management software, AI/ML research, personal devices OS ...
|
| Impossible is nothing, but any incumbent will likely take in
| capital linked to Google. GGL is dominant across the world's
| hundred and something countries. Excpect places where it is
| banned(China) or shunned(Russia), anywhere it is equivalent to a
| monopoly of internet services.
|
| From a technical perspective, a challenger can rise up. From an
| economic standpoint, a challenger would not last long (maybe
| locally if favored by regulation). Even the most successfull
| others: Apple or Amazon would not dare take on Google's Ads or
| Search Engine. Microsoft tried with Windows Phones and Bing, then
| ended failing to dominate the market. Google is not singular
| business. It has so many tentacles in the tech sector that wave a
| web of interlocking tech products. Growth numbers in Search are
| boosted by integration in all of Google's own products and the
| rest of internet users and companies.
|
| To answer your question is to figure out what advantage it has on
| any competitor starting from zero... Sadly, its network scale is
| too large to allow an equal challenger.
| julialaroche wrote:
| You.com is one new entrant to the search engine space. It's ad-
| free, private, and customizable with preferred sources.
| telesilla wrote:
| I've been a happy kagi.com user a couple of months now. It's
| like lo-fi Google, less results, no ads anywhere and similar to
| duck duck go bang commands if you want to use other search
| engines to check different results.
| lettergram wrote:
| DuckDuckGo just ended their value proposition:
|
| https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
|
| Not that there are many great alternatives, but the whole point
| of a SEARCH ENGINE is not censoring results. I understand ranking
| makes it searchable, but omitting views / results based on
| politics is self-reinforcing and makes anyone using the service
| blind to views and in a sense reality.
|
| I think search can't really be "improved" until it's
| decentralized and uncensored. The quality decline IMO has to do
| with the social networks and "trusted news sources", which I also
| think is a walled garden limiting accuracy of info.
|
| See "trusted news initiative":
| https://www.bbc.com/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/
| notsound wrote:
| The main reason a lot of people use DDG is privacy, not
| uncensored search results. I do think that this move could have
| been handled better.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Both go hand in hand with trust. When you compromise one you
| poison the other due to lost trust.
| lettergram wrote:
| I think your mistaken, the only reason DDG took off, at least
| in the circles I've visited (open source communities, privacy
| focused, politics, etc) is the freedom to research anything
| in a safe way.
|
| Think of it another way, "who cares about privacy?" Probably
| those searching for "unacceptable" ideas.
|
| If they censor, who's to say they wouldn't turn you into the
| authorities for "wrong think".
|
| Their value proposition of privacy was damaged by this
| BECAUSE they want to limit your search results.
| aghilmort wrote:
| thank you for articulating this properly -- privacy &
| censorship are intricately intertwined, like yin & yang
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Spreading lies is a value proposition? I disagree. I don't
| think "censoring child porn" is a bad thing either, which DDG
| does. Just because information of some sort exists, doesn't
| mean it's inherently valuable to spread.
| sofixa wrote:
| > but the whole point of a SEARCH ENGINE is not censoring
| results
|
| Disagree. I hate it as much as the next person when Google
| censor results due to DMCA request (a law i couldn't care less
| about which shouldn't have jurisdiction over me), but you have
| to admit there are things to limit. Should a search engine
| return child porn results? (Yes, it's an easy and egregious
| example, but that's the point - there are such subjects).
|
| Furthermore, censoring low quality enemy propaganda is a public
| service.
| lettergram wrote:
| > Furthermore, censoring low quality enemy propaganda is a
| public service.
|
| I think anyone looking to keep people from understanding is
| an enemy. You fight propaganda with truth, not censorship.
| detaro wrote:
| Did anyone seriously believe that DDG or its data sources did
| not filter content before?
| wenbin wrote:
| When google got started, they indexed ~25 million web pages. Then
| they grew together with the web, compounding over ~30 years.
|
| Today, it's totally possible for a single person or a small team
| to build a domain specific search engine that indexes 10s or even
| 100s of million documents.
|
| Building the index v0.1 that kind of working is not hard. But
| maintaining the index to handle countless edge cases is tedious
| and need non-stop investment (eg, infrastructure + paying salary
| for talents)
|
| Also, a search engine is more than "keyword matching". You need
| to do search result ranking. And it gets exponentially difficult
| to do as # of indexed documents increases.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Empirical question: Can any kind of cluster analysis result in
| identifying robust selected subject-domains/content-areas for
| search specialization, still allowing for good coverage with a
| set of these? This could fight what you identify as an
| exponentially difficult problem. It could also allow for
| selective marketing and mind-share.
| productceo wrote:
| Google Search enjoys multiple economies of scale. To list
| several:
|
| 1. Data about what the population is interested: More people use
| Google today, giving Google more data to train its AI with.
|
| 2. Server capacity: It's cheaper for Google to store 1 image than
| for me to store 1 image, because it stores many more images. Same
| for compute, such as training AI. Google can get one A100 GPU
| cheaper than I can.
|
| 3. Ads: If I had the exact same search quality and even the exact
| same number of users, Google will make more money from the same
| operation, because it has more advertisers.
|
| They set up their business well!
| gutitout wrote:
| For search I think a big issue is you can't crawl the web like
| you used to. Cloud flare and others have made that difficult.
| nightski wrote:
| I wonder how much of the declining search quality can be
| attributed to the rise of walled gardens and social networks. It
| probably was a lot easier to index blogs and personal websites
| back in the day vs. TikTok/Snapchat/etc.. today. It's ironic that
| Google itself directly contributed to this.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| What you need as a competitor is awareness by users. But it's
| hard to beat a dominant player with lots of cash.
|
| Google owns one of the major mobile platforms, where it is the
| default search engine. It pays competing Browsers like Firefox to
| be the default and is so tied in public perception that "to
| google" is a verb.
|
| Also Google is fast and mostly reliable.
|
| Also Google search integrates with other services like Maps for
| localized search so that one is torn back to them easily.
|
| And if you were to get close to it they have tons of money to
| fight you.
|
| The interesting aspect is that outside the broader search domain
| their approach often enough doesn't work. They didn't get social
| networking, they didn't get messaging (except mail) ... so they
| way to beat them likely is to find new segments and occupy that
| space (like Zuckerberg wants to do with "Metaverse," whatever
| that shall be)
| ck2 wrote:
| Google has a TWENTY year head-start of building server farms all
| over the world and hiring PhDs to develop the complex algorithms
| and software to do the indexing.
|
| Can't just buy time on someone else's cloud network and hire a
| couple of coders to compete with that.
|
| You could throw a lot of money at it but not compete on years of
| investment.
|
| My brain is swiss-cheese these days, I wish I could remember the
| name of that one-man startup a decade ago that actually had a
| lightweight high-speed crawler and was making a serious attempt
| at competition. Was covered around here several times. But
| obviously they didn't succeed if I can't remember the name.
| Method-X wrote:
| Brave Search [1] is the best alternative I've come across so far.
| They have this concept called "Goggles" [2] on their roadmap,
| which I think has incredible potential to disrupt the status quo.
|
| [1] https://search.brave.com
|
| [2] https://brave.com/static-assets/files/goggles.pdf
| schleck8 wrote:
| Brave Search is really impressive indeed.
|
| There is also Kagi
|
| https://kagi.com
| Closi wrote:
| Kagi is just showing google and bing results mixed together.
|
| Also there is no actual path for them to be profitable (their
| pricing strategy isn't viable imo) and they are currently
| loosing money on every search.
| hobofan wrote:
| > Kagi is just showing google and bing results mixed
| together.
|
| It's not _just_ that: https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-
| results-coming-from
|
| Anyways, Kagi results vastly outperform Google results in
| quality for me. I'd happily pay the rather steep price they
| are currently targeting, should that end up being how
| expensive it is.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Because google's search engine is still better than all of its
| current competitors and the barriers to entry are extremely high.
| junon wrote:
| It used to be, at least. As years pass, Google's search quality
| deteriorates. It's been quite dramatic in the last few years
| especially - I won't pretend to know why.
|
| A lot of it started happening when they took away the ability
| to search for exact terms, etc.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >when they took away the ability to search for exact terms
|
| You can still do this. Put quotes around the terms.
| junon wrote:
| This doesn't work like it used to.
| Ivoirians wrote:
| It does work. In the past when I mentioned it, someone
| provided an apparent counterexample, a search with a term
| in quotes that wasn't found on the page. When I reported
| it to the search team, they found that the quoted term
| was actually in a hidden submenu on the site. So the term
| was still on the page, but not findable with ctrl-f,
| except in the source. Try it out and if you find a
| counterexample, let us all know.
| zo1 wrote:
| Okay, I had this issue _today_ and looked it up. Sure
| enough the term I had to quote _and_ add a plus sign
| infront of was in the linked page after clicking through.
|
| But that's it, it was just "there" near the bottom. They
| put in all this fancy AI understanding and ML and NLP
| effort but when I go out of my way to tell the search
| that "this word right here is super important and
| critical", they just go ahead and append
| "page.includes(word)" as a filter to their super
| algorithm. Instead of using that signal to drive the
| search. No better than when sites used to stuff their
| html pages with keywords to trick search engines.
|
| #grumpy
| Ivoirians wrote:
| The problem would be that you probably wouldn't want to
| exclude the page from the results in case people expect
| to find it. Did the page get ranked above other more
| relevant pages that had the quoted term more prominently?
| If it did, you're right, that should probably be a
| stronger signal.
| addaon wrote:
| It sometimes works. Maybe more so than when signed out
| than signed in? I spent a huge amount of time at one
| point trying to search for a "tost ring" when signed in
| (as an account that has a history of searching for
| developer-related content, which this is not), and no
| combination of quotes, verbatim mode, etc could prevent
| it from being "corrected" to "toString". Eventually ended
| up going to Bing, and it was the first hit. This was a
| while ago, though, and today I hit tost rings
| immediately. No idea if this is a change in my profile or
| a change in the algorithm, of course.
| [deleted]
| MMS21 wrote:
| Kagi keeps showing up here, perhaps check that out.
|
| https://kagi.com/
| sanderjd wrote:
| I can't figure out what their business model is. Do you know?
| poxrud wrote:
| Yes they are planning to charge a monthly fee.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| https://kagi.com/faq
|
| How much will Kagi cost?
|
| Kagi will be completely free during the beta-test period for
| all users. Once we officially launch, we are dedicated to
| providing the best possible search experience to our users at
| a reasonable price. We plan to offer entry level plans for as
| low as $10/month, unlimited plan at around $20-$30/mo as well
| as have bundles (to include Kagi email and other services),
| organization/team plans, family plans and annual payment
| discounts available.
|
| We understand that for some user this may sound prohibitively
| expensive, but unfortunately we are not in the position to
| set the price point by consensus or market expectation, but
| by realistic cost of providing the service at a given level
| of quality in a way that potentially ensures sustainability
| and serving our customers long-term.
| tonymet wrote:
| Some platforms are complicated enough to require at least $100m
| to compete. search engines , OS , autonomous vehicles , voice
| assistants
| tom899 wrote:
| The internet has become from being a source of information to a
| marketplace everyone wants to make a quick buck instead. The
| times where you can just search for information without being
| tracked what and when you search, is over. I never received spam
| or when, i had known it came from the shady website i signed up
| with. Today, my whereabouts, my age and sex are exploited as
| information for useless and silly spambots. They are not even
| trying to entertain me. And all that because using a mobile
| phone, goole knows where you are and where you are working. That
| estimates the income, making more stupid wine offers possibel, im
| non-alcoholic, that info they didnt get because i called help
| hotlines and those numbers are not listed and info is not legal
| to share. But well. If one wants to build a free search engine
| and knowledge base, has to fight with users not knowing that the
| world is round and alternatives available. It starts in school,
| kids end up in front of Windows Computers, Word is a text
| processor and google-ing stuff is the way to go. It goes to that
| extent that recommending alternatives, people refuse it, even if
| its better because they dont know it. Humans are sometimes stuck
| in their behavior.
| halotrope wrote:
| One can be doubtful that googles downfall will come from another
| search engine.
| ergonaught wrote:
| They would need to be Apple, they would need to understand how to
| write software for this purpose and then deliver it, and they
| would need to be able to make this the default search engine for
| iPhones without antimonopoly distractions.
|
| Beyond that, Google's dominance isn't going away due to their own
| "monopoly-like" positioning, their business relationships, the
| inertia of their massive public adoption, all of these applied
| within three or four other vital areas (ie: YouTube), their
| ability to pivot in response to anything novel that appeared to
| undermine their position, no apparent stories of Google
| executives hosting puppy kicking parties for the entire company
| to Satanic Panic everyone away from their products, the problem
| of promising companies being acquired because the owners (VC or
| founder or otherwise) are happy to be bought, the general "ick"
| factor of someone like Facebook attempting to enter the fray,
| some other things none of us have ever considered, random luck,
| and the initial conditions of the universe.
|
| You have to have good results against the inconceivably vast
| amount of content out there, you have to be easy to use, you have
| to be free, and you have to be able to do all of this and more
| for the yeeeeeears it would take to wiggle into the space and
| expand while resisting the pressures above. Doable, wildly
| improbable.
| elnygren wrote:
| Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the
| monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning market.
|
| However, I guess big tech companies have become part of the
| superpower games (USA vs. China etc.). Breaking up Google might
| just mean a Chinese company takes over. Can't trust the other
| governments to enforce similar market conditions.
|
| So yeah, like you said, conditions of the universe :)
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| >...Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the
| monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning
| market.
|
| You can break up the phone systems because the child
| companies can provide similar levels of service. But how do
| you break up a single search algorithm?
| smitty1e wrote:
| > Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the
| monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning
| market.
|
| Well-crafted arguments showing where Google (or ilk) are
| anti-competitive are likely to gain some traction.
| Vespasian wrote:
| You could discourage them from buying out smaller competitors
| en Masse.
|
| In my mind it shouldn't make sense to found a company with
| the explicit goal of being purchased by one of the tech
| giants in a few years.
|
| Many are never even really trying to get s sustainable
| business model and venture capital is fueling this machine.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Why shouldn't it make sense?
|
| One point of view is that it's a more efficient way for the
| tech giants to develop new features. An internal team
| trying to do greenfield work will inevitably be slowed down
| by bureaucracy, where a startup can iterate more quickly
| without all the friction of things like performance
| reviews, HR exercises, and if I'm being cynical, pesky
| issues like user data protection frameworks.
|
| It's risky, but the payoff for founders is significantly
| larger than what an equivalent employee would get for
| leading an internal project.
| yokoprime wrote:
| DDG is absolutely emerging, usage year over year is rising
| rapidly. I've personally switched over to ddg after years of
| jumping back and forth. It's finally good enough. For the
| Indernet as whole to switch over will take time. One thing that
| keeps customers coming back to google is the integration across
| their applications, i.e. email, collaboration (google docs) video
| (youtube) etc. That being said, I don't really feel theres much
| of a benefit being logged in when searching, so I think search
| engine traffic could switch over to e.g. ddg while people still
| are heavily invested in other google services.
| go_prodev wrote:
| Their Android browser is great. It kills ads and floating
| videos, and has excellent features.
|
| However I just can't rely on the search results. It's rare for
| me to get a decent result for a search so I switch between
| chrome. I'm not sure why because I thought DDG used Google
| search.
| ditsuke wrote:
| DDG uses Bing (like most other alternative search engines). I
| believe Brave's new search engine uses its own index though.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| Exactly, they use their own index, which AFAIK can be
| seeded by other search engine results. Here's an overview:
| https://support.brave.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
| jeffbee wrote:
| despite the HN party line on this subject I think DDG is
| practically useless for long-tail searches. I was reserving the
| history of a city owned property in Oakland, California on DDG,
| using the address and the assessors parcel number. DDG results
| were _all_ unrelated real estate advertisements in other
| cities. Google returned many pages of official city records.
| It's almost as if Bing is not capable of indexing PDFs?
| Whatever the cause, this put me off Bing for the time being.
| taeric wrote:
| The biggest barriers to competing with Google, IMO:
| * Google (and all of FAANG) have a stupid high percentage of the
| worker pool. * Google's biggest asset is that they are
| Google. Kind of like competing with Coke. Intrinsic quality of
| what they do is kind of irrelevant. * General lack of value
| in most things internet. Google is getting a lot of value out of
| what they do, but they are having to put stupid levels of
| manpower into squeezing out that value.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Willpower and technical ability. It's a hard problem. Look at how
| many resources Microsoft has thrown at it with limited success.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , what would a competitor need to defy Google?_
|
| One thing a competitor needs is a _new and innovative technical
| algorithm_.
|
| Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that
| calculated relevance based on _counting back links_ instead of
| parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search
| engines. This created a _noticeable improvement_ in quality of
| results.
|
| Nobody seems to have _The Next Big Idea_ for a better search
| engine yet. Somebody did a Shown HN of a new search engine based
| on whitelisted curated domains such as reddit discussions. But
| there are many technical problems with that (e.g. Goodhart 's Law
| & Hawthorne Effect creates bad feedback loop of gaming the reddit
| discussions which then poisons the search engine.)
|
| Another technical idea of _crowdsourced decentralized search
| index_ creates a very slow query engine which is a hard sell when
| web surfers are used to Google results appearing in less than 1
| second.
|
| DDG's idea of "privacy" is interesting, but being (mostly) based
| on Microsoft Bing's search engine doesn't actually create a
| quantum leap in better search _results_.
|
| What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good signal
| from all the noise of a trillion web pages?
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| There's a potential technical improvement with Vector Search.
| Specially for the type of queries that are more "human" ("how
| do I...", "where can I...".
|
| At least for me, I find myself adding "site:Reddit.com" all the
| time I need a good answer and not just a SEO-tricked ad page.
| Vector Search could be a technical solution for this. Although
| it's fairly new and there is still a lot of research to do.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Yeah Google does this already though
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I like the idea of "crowd sourcing". When the SEO-tricked ad
| pages come up and I either scroll past them or, if I do click
| on them but come right back to the search results and
| continue scrolling/clicking ... rank downward those brief or
| passed-over links.
|
| Seems like with enough actual humans I should never have to
| see another geeksforgeeks page come up in my search results.
| samarthr1 wrote:
| Heh, Geeks for geeks wasn't that bad when I frequented it a
| few years back.
| quitit wrote:
| It seems the problem of "search" is mostly well solved. What
| isn't well solved is the problem of "SEO gaming". Perhaps the
| advancement in search isn't by having an AI that chooses a
| better page, but rather an AI that is really good at
| identifying a good result from a gamed result.
|
| However as for Google, I feel like even merely surfacing a
| range of relevant filter options can help their search engine,
| since it's what informed users are already doing by structuring
| a query when the first one produces crappy results. E.g. _These
| results mostly contain links to Pinterest.com, would you like
| to repeat the search with these omitted?_ (or even just being
| able to collapse these site-by-site.)
|
| Additionally I think modern search could be broken down into a
| range of sub-tools that exist beyond google or even online. One
| such example is searching our web history, perhaps browsers
| could produce a privacy-preserving way of storing information
| about each webpage and its images that the user can then search
| later (by either terms or images.)
| Beltiras wrote:
| Read an article which mentioned that Google degraded the search
| service because good results no longer made financial sense,
| perverse incentive is that it benefits them better for a
| customer to pay money for ads than provide a good search
| (meaning that competition for keywords is now the algorithm).
| The next innovation in search then necessarily must be to find
| a different funding model for the engine besides ads, otherwise
| the same perverse incentive will arise.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| That's ridiculous. Google's search dies if people stop using
| it. They stop using it if the results are poor. There are no
| perverse incentives here unless you believe Google is hoping
| to cash out tomorrow and close its doors.
| amirkdv wrote:
| It's not ridiculous at all.
|
| > They stop using it if the results are poor.
|
| These are not laws of nature. There are so many reasons why
| most people would still use $X even if the performance of
| $X was underwhelming.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The quality would have to degrade dramatically for people
| to stop using Google em masse for that reason. It can still
| degrade a bit to increase revenue.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This hits the nail on the head. I feel like Google results
| have gotten worse not because technical problems need to be
| solved, but because the financial incentives means that I'm
| now scrolling through tons of ads, little "tidbits" that have
| just gotten more annoying over time, AMP carousels, and god
| forbid I'm searching for anything that happened over 20 years
| ago that has any slight resemblance to a current event - all
| I get are pages and pages about the current event, and Google
| has "memory-holed" the past.
|
| IMO, all startups have a sweet-spot where they've figured out
| what the market needs, and they can be profitable, but they
| haven't yet sucked that bone dry to where they're forced to
| extend more tentacles to grow their revenue. For Google, for
| me, that was about the 2007-2012 time frame.
|
| Any other competitor would have the same financial pressures
| eventually. Long term, it's impossible to "not be evil".
| briandear wrote:
| DDG also lost the plot when they started censoring results
| based on geopolitical opinion.
| speedcoder wrote:
| Evidence?
| georgehill wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/duckduckgo-
| rus...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Whatever Algolia is doing, it is amazing. Would it be possible
| for them to scale as a general search engine for the web?
| grog454 wrote:
| > counting back links
|
| Do the algorithms weight links based on visibility or
| relevance? A link at the top of a sorted content site HN should
| probably be worth more than one at the bottom, and one buried
| in invisible metadata somewhere should be worth 0.
| ghgr wrote:
| PageRank is a neat algorithm that recursively weights
| incoming links based on their own incoming links. So a link
| from HN has more weight than from a small blog. And how does
| it know that HN should have more weight? Well, because there
| are many important sites pointing back to HN. And how does it
| know that those sites are important? And so on...
|
| But AFAIK Google no longer uses PageRank, or at least not the
| same version as we know it.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| "next big idea" is probably "selectable algorithms".
|
| Create 3-5 different search algorithms, with names and
| understandable characteristics, then let me choose which one
| when searching. You may have some algorithm that prioritizes
| recency, or rapid changes, or more interaction, and others that
| prioritize longevity, citations/links, others that prioritize
| that type of information - prioritize regional or noteworthy
| events over historical info, etc. Have some algorithms that
| penalize spam/linkfarms more heavily than others. The git/so
| spam farms that come up when I search for an error message are
| simply useless, and would love ways to switch away and try
| other algorithms, without necessarily having to switch entire
| search systems.
|
| Have algorithms that explicitly take in to account the
| search/click behaviour of others. Let me choose to have the
| search behaviour of friends/colleagues/famous-folks explicitly
| included or excluded in search results ranking.
|
| Let people easily switch between multiple algorithms, and let
| 1000 gardens bloom (or something like that).
|
| Also, determining better ways to 'search' non-text stuff. If
| virtual worlds become a thing, finding ways to 'search' those
| (whatever that might mean) will be big.
|
| Image search still has a _long_ way to go, IME.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| EDIT: adding on to previous post.
|
| We now have a couple digital generations of folks who've
| grown up with 'web', and we've generated billions of
| 'documents'.
|
| TIME ACCURATE QUERIES need to be mainstream.
|
| "Let me search for FOOBAR and get results that would have
| been accurate/returned for Dec 11, 2006. Now search for
| FOOBAR and get results from Dec 11, 2014", etc.
| antli35 wrote:
| This could be a niche search engine for advanced users, but I
| feel that to average users this would be a strictly worse
| experience because they have no interest in figuring out how
| to "select an algorithm." They expect to type a query and the
| result they want comes up at the top. The search engine
| should be able to infer whether the user wants results that
| are more recent, more interactive, more authoritative, etc.
| based on the query, past search behavior, and anything else
| that is known about the user. If that isn't happening, the
| search engine needs to be made "smarter."
|
| The way it's likely seen by many tech companies is that the
| more decisions you have to offload to the user, the less
| advanced your system is. An old car with a lot of knobs and
| dials and levers is not more advanced than a self-driving car
| with a single control, select destination. Some people will
| still prefer the old car, but it will be a niche market.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| 3 big buttons at the top after search results
|
| "You're viewing through FOOBAR lens. Click here to view
| results from another lens".
|
| Doesn't have to be that complicated.
| antli35 wrote:
| To some extent that's already implemented in the form of
| the various tabs - if you want very recent results, go to
| the News tab or click the Tools button and select a time
| range. If you want academic results with citations, go to
| Google Scholar. If you want information from books, go to
| the Books tab. If you don't know/care, the main tab will
| mix results from all tabs.
|
| You can add three more buttons on top of the tabs that
| are already there, but would their value for more
| advanced users be worth the extra friction/confusion for
| average users? And how would it scale if someone wants a
| fourth, fifth, or tenth "lens"?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I agree, it's the classic example of "people don't _really_
| like choice". When you are presented with the option of a
| search algo, there's always this feeling that you chose
| _wrong_. It's an additional thing to think about, and makes
| things more complicated.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| it doesn't have to be an irreversible choice. clicking
| between 'filters' should be something that takes an
| instant, and is one click away.
| imglorp wrote:
| > Image search still has a long way to go, IME.
|
| Try images.yandex.com: it's vastly better than most others.
| It's not too good at identifying specific people but it will
| find prior exact uses of an image (like TinEye) but is
| especially very good at abstracting what's the abstract
| subject, color, pose, setting etc in a photo and show you
| similar.
| zw123456 wrote:
| I agree with you on this. I search for tech topics a lot and
| google offers an option to search "scholarly articles". I
| like that option as sometimes a tech term gets confused with
| something else. It would be great if there was a way to
| select from some check boxed, like an advanced search,
| "search only for semiconductor datasheets" or "search all
| Jazz music" or upload a picture and "identify an insect"
| (agree that does not work well yet) or whatever someone might
| be interested in.
|
| The question is if such an approach would lure a lot of
| people away, I could see an entry angle might be a front end
| to google with an app that does that.
| Method-X wrote:
| This is what Brave Search calls "Goggles" [1].
|
| [1] https://brave.com/static-assets/files/goggles.pdf
| jollybean wrote:
| It's not going to be 'search' that displaces search, it'll be
| impossible. It will be made irrelevant through something else.
|
| For example, someone comes up with a 'Finder' thing that's
| barely a comprehensive directory of the internet, and that,
| along with 'site search' aka for FB, Amazon, does better for
| the use case.
|
| Most people are not 'searching' the web, they're often typing
| URLs or searchers for things they want answers to.
|
| When I type a technical thing I'm really just searching 'stack
| exchange'.
|
| On mobile, we use apps, which are different than pages.
|
| Apple could come up with something that renders Google less
| than necessary.
|
| Google will not be replaced directly.
| klenwell wrote:
| > What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good
| signal from all the noise of a trillion web pages?
|
| Here's another recent Show HN that demoed a new search engine:
|
| _Show HN: Goopt - Search Engine for a Procedural Simulation of
| the Web with GPT-3_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443738
|
| I know this was offered as a bit of joke. But it prompted a
| really thought-provoking discussion and seemed to me to suggest
| a genuine paradigm shift in search or information organization.
| It is a novel way to extract a useful signal from all the
| noise. It brought to my mind "Dr. Know" from Spielberg's AI
| movie:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0QkgAuEPbk
|
| Will the signal be a good one? It will need to get better and
| inevitably will. The thing that worries me: will it even
| matter?
| polote wrote:
| > What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good
| signal from all the noise of a trillion web pages?
|
| To me this is going to be manual ranking, but the biggest issue
| with manual ranking is not that you have to do it manually, but
| how do you know if you can trust users who rank pages. The
| Wikipedia system is a good start but not enough, and the second
| issue is how do you prevent its business model to kill its
| quality
| mgkimsal wrote:
| You let the rank sources be selectable. Allow me to
| connect/select individuals or groups to include/exclude.
| akrymski wrote:
| The only viable alternative to PageRank I know of is social
| search: show me results that my friends (and friends of friends
| and so on) liked/bookmarked.
|
| Delicious sort of tried it but never executed well on the
| search side.
|
| In a way it's a personalized PageRank algo with users linking
| to pages they like and to other users they follow. This always
| made more sense to me than a global authority ranking.
|
| When looking for a babysitter you want recommendations from
| friends you trust, not some global ranking of popular
| babysitters.
| amirkdv wrote:
| I've heard this a lot. I think there are two problems with
| this. First, you need massive adoption for the "social" part
| to be at all useful, hence only the few big social platforms
| can even try it. Second, even at maximum possible adoption,
| you'll probably run into the problem that actual human social
| networks have nowhere near enough branching breadth to help
| rank the behemoth that the web is today, i.e. for most
| queries and most possible hits, there's not enough signal
| coming from the social network.
| akrymski wrote:
| The benefit of this approach is that it's an addition to
| PageRank, not a replacement. You don't need massive
| adoption of the social part I think cause you can link to
| eg HN, which already links to other sites. It's simply
| extending the backlinking concept to add personal pages.
|
| Most long tail queries work well enough with Google and
| indeed most of the benefit of this approach would be in the
| head where ranking matters more. Furthermore nothing
| prohibits users from liking domains, not just individual
| URLs.
| grumpopotamus wrote:
| I never see this one mentioned: Google crawls the web at a high
| rate and is able to index new content rapidly. This is possible
| because every site lets googlebot through. But if you are not
| already an established search engine everyone will throttle your
| crawler, and you will have no chance to compete with Google on
| keeping up with the latest content.
| flowctrl wrote:
| The network effect, the Lindy effect, and the Schelling point. If
| you wanted to learn about these concepts, what is the first thing
| you would do? :P
| CyanLite4 wrote:
| Bing.
| durnygbur wrote:
| Google's competitor in what? As far as search goes they pay
| billions to device manufacturers and software vendors to have
| Google as default search everything, how would you compete with
| this? The actual search functionality, its speed, intuitiveness,
| etc. of any competitor is irrelevant.
| robinsoh wrote:
| > how would you compete with this?
|
| The implication of OP's question and perhaps the heart of the
| matter is whether Google is unfairly applying some impediment
| or anti-competitive behavior. My personal opinion is that
| they're not. I'm not a software guy so maybe I don't know the
| facts. I would very much like to be educated on that here, the
| same way I've tried to educate people here about display
| industry facts on the ground.
| sytelus wrote:
| I had worked out some costs. If you want to build an index-based
| search engine that is at least competitive on coverage, if not
| relevance, it would cost you about $2B/yr for at least a period
| of 4 years just to boot things up. So, that is at least $8B of
| upfront investment. This is similar to the problem of if someone
| wanted to match TSMC on 5nm feb. This cannot be achieved by
| traditional VC funding and startup model.
|
| Remember, search is not just web search. It includes vast array
| of things such as maps, images, videos, knowledge datasets,
| discussion groups, real-time news and so on. Each of these
| segments is an enormous effort on its own requiring massive
| capital investments. Relevance algos these days are mostly driven
| by thousands of tweaks, ML models and legions of rules. It's a
| complex beast that takes thousands of PhDs and years to perfect.
| Even than performance is pretty subpar than most expectations.
| So, what chance do you have as a new entrant in same game? The
| key is that you don't want to play same game if you want to win.
|
| A lot of companies have came and gone announcing themselves as
| Google competitor and trying to play same game. Things like DDG
| survive only because they can lower the COGS by offloading real
| work to other people like Bing which itself is fine example of
| what you might be able achieve if you only had a tiny fraction of
| Google's budgets. If you consider dollar for dollar capital
| investment, Bing is actually quite good.
|
| This is not to say there will never be a viable competitor for
| Google search. I just don't think it can be through the
| traditional framework of index serving. No one really knows what
| other alternatives can arise in future. One very possible thing
| is language models. If we can figure out how to scale up serving
| of massive language models that effectively "memorizes" whole
| index in them, they can provide quality, capabilities and
| experience that cannot be matched by simple index serving. If
| this is viable route, I think we are still at least 3-5 years
| away.
| binwiederhier wrote:
| So I agree that the quality of Google search is declining, but
| long story short the others are still worse (IMHO obviously).
|
| I tried DDG for a couple of weeks and it was just awful. For
| almost all non-trivial searches i had to result to !g. I finally
| switched back after two weeks or so and suddenly I'm much happier
| with the quality of Google search results.
|
| Obviously this is just one man's opinion.
|
| I think the technical challenges are big enough to make this a
| really difficult task.
| nunez wrote:
| because they Peter Thiel'd 10x'ed search and ads and competing
| against them would require extraordinary cost and a breakthrough
| in either.
| 02020202 wrote:
| y42 wrote:
| First you need to ask, why everywo is using Google:
|
| Habits and ignorance. The casual web user is just fine with what
| Google has to offer.
|
| And besides that: Google is convenient and everywhere. To get rid
| of it it requires not only the will but also the technological
| skill that the common user just does not have.
|
| And that leads to the answer of your question: Create an
| alternative that is easy to use,ofcourse, that can be implemented
| by just "a click" and is has to be everywhere. On your phone, TV
| and computer.
| simonh wrote:
| > Habits and ignorance. The casual web user is just fine with
| what Google has to offer.
|
| I think that's a contradiction. If it's just fine for their
| needs, the they have all the relevant information they need.
| They know perfectly well finding another service would take
| considerable effort, might well lead to a worse experience, and
| there's a high chance they'd switch back anyway. That's an
| informed decision, not an ignorant one.
| azangru wrote:
| So why did everyone start using Google when before that
| everyone had been using Yahoo or AltaVista?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Because Google at the time was a _dramatically_ better
| experience than AltaVista, and Yahoo was more of a directory
| than a search engine.
| jollybean wrote:
| Why isn't there an Amazon or Microsoft or Boeing competitor
| emerging?
|
| These are systematically entrenched monopolies of sorts.
| kmt-lnh wrote:
| A possible alternative was discussed on HN half a year
| ago:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764
|
| Check it out, it's great!
| amelius wrote:
| Because nobody is writing good benchmarks for search engines. You
| can't improve something if you can't see what you're doing.
| 3825 wrote:
| I find it interesting that you mention the word benchmark
| because reviewers used to rely on benchmarks for new phones and
| such but then iirc at least OnePlus and Samsung devices have
| been caught and banned from multiple benchmarks.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Banning them is silly. The benchmark programs reported
| unthrottled speeds, but when the phone has per app throttling
| (to save battery) you may not get the speed you measured in
| each app.
| amelius wrote:
| You can use benchmarks to sell a product, but you can also
| use them to improve your product. I'm thinking of the latter.
|
| The absolute no 1 prerequisite for building a good search
| engine is having good benchmarks.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| No one is going to beat Google at _their game_. But the game will
| change. And Google is unlikely to win the next one, if past
| similar examples can teach anything.
|
| There will be a dramatic change in how people ask questions and
| access information.
|
| Maybe it will be personal assistants. I doubt it.
|
| Perhaps these kinds of Neuralink implants? Could be...
|
| Whoever nails it, will be one of the near-future trillionaires.
| pxue wrote:
| Here's a thought, if Reddit fixes their terrible search engine,
| they would steal a large chunk of my search.
|
| I've been attaching url:reddit.com to my Google searches to
| bypass all the blog spam thats taking over Google.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| The realist in me knows google would likely not be allowed to
| just buy reddit for anti-trust reasons.
|
| I guess the, pragmatist(?) in me thinks, "google kind of
| legitimately provides a solution to a problem that reddit has
| had like, _forever_. And reddit provides an organic source of
| knowledge that I feel google is at least trying to get back in
| the mix. Why should that combination not be allowed to exist?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| The complaints regarding google's quality isn't because google is
| being bad or doing something anti-consumer it's just that spam
| and ranking has become harder and harder over time. A new
| competitor wouldn't be free from those issues.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I vehemently disagree with this. Gmail is an excellent example
| of worst-in-the-business spam filtering today. Literally
| everyone else is better at it now. Google is getting worse at
| things that were originally their core competency.
| zo1 wrote:
| Spam is only hard if you're accepting low-quality content and
| not pruning it heavily. But Google can handle the scale of the
| spam, they just don't want to reduce it because the spam
| increases their ad real-estate. That's one theory, the other I
| would argue is that once you peel away the genuine spam and the
| blogspam, there really isn't much content left on the web
| (besides a small handful of big sites like Reddit) and Google
| knows this.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| My opinion hasn't changed much since writing this (just disregard
| the blockchain commentary at the end):
|
| https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-beat-Google/answer/M...
|
| A few competitors such as you.com are in the works. I think
| there's a lot of potential, but the ranking algorithm is going to
| need to be decentralized (aka user-configurable) in some way.
| This configuration would also need to be sharable, maybe
| something akin to an App Store, because not all users can be
| asked to be technical enough to configure everything.
|
| There is an enormous amount of wasted value stemming from the
| disconnect between what Google thinks the user wants to see, and
| what the user actually wants to see.
|
| If I had to guess why this happened, I'm betting that Google and
| others had a notion that AI and other advances could eventually
| approximate a user's needs to a degree that would keep up with
| the demand. But the monopoly set in and there was no longer an
| incentive to innovate that far. I'm sure Google tried, but not to
| a degree that would have happened if the competition had really
| stepped it up, or even existed. However, I'm sure by now there's
| less optimism that the above effort is even a solvable problem,
| or one worth solving. One-size-fits-all is extremely suboptimal,
| but that paradigm is Google at its core. Without a paradigm
| shift, it's diminishing returns all the way.
|
| What Google is good at, however, is monetizing what they do have.
| If you're trying to challenge them in the monetization game, with
| the same business model competing for the same customers
| (advertisers), you most certainly will lose. Seriously, don't do
| that. Get to unicorn status first.
|
| Focus on the tech, make sure the business model isn't competing
| with the giants, and say no to any buyout offer from Big Tech.
| p1esk wrote:
| _the ranking algorithm is going to need to be decentralized
| (aka user-configurable) in some way_
|
| What do you mean? What configuration options would you like?
| faitswulff wrote:
| I think 99.9% of users would hate to have to configure their
| search results.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| The Google hate is so thick that people don't even think
| about what a Google competitor or replacement (that isn't
| Google rebranded) looks like. No user is looking to pass
| around configuration file, or have discoverability issues
| because they haven't joined the right community that has
| what they are looking for. People want an omnibox that
| takes them to what they are looking for, even if they don't
| know what that is, full stop. Needing to essentially have a
| Makefile to find out "Who is the main actor in Spider-Man"
| is dead on arrival.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Absolutely no need to provide a makefile. But... there
| can be multiple selectable algorithms for people to
| choose from, and eventually some ways to configure those
| to your needs.
|
| Having results come up that are also explicitly labelled
| "You are viewing results through the FOOBAR lens - click
| here to use another lens".
|
| Our results are already skewed by factors that we don't
| have much visibility in to - being more
| explicit/transparent about it, while giving people some
| ability to influence/change the lens they view results
| through would be useful.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| From parent comment:
|
| > This configuration would also need to be sharable, maybe
| something akin to an App Store, because not all users can
| be asked to be technical enough to configure everything.
| faitswulff wrote:
| That's still configuration. Sharing a config? Asking a
| friend for the best search algorithm? Most users are
| accustomed to just typing in their search query into
| random input fields and _getting_ perfectly serviceable
| results.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Okay, one example:
|
| Suppose you're a gamer - You could configure search results
| related to gaming to be limited to games you own, games you
| want, the subset of platforms or genres you care about, games
| your friends own, and so on. It wouldn't be a priority for
| most search companies to make something like that, but it
| would certainly provide some value for certain people.
| Decentralized configuration would allow for communities with
| given interests to configure and distribute customizations
| for that audience, in a way that would appeal to that
| audience. It's not that farfetched of an idea, very realistic
| both from a tech and adoption POV.
|
| You.com is starting the building blocks of such a thing, but
| I don't know how far they're going to push the envelope.
| https://about.you.com/apps/
| JSONderulo wrote:
| I've been pretty stoked on you.com so far. I do like the
| ability to pick my search sources (apps). It would be cool
| to see search results for different genres/communities.
| brentadamson wrote:
| `see search results for different genres/communities`
|
| Can you elaborate?
| bsdetector wrote:
| > the disconnect between what Google thinks the user wants to
| see, and what the user actually wants to see.
|
| Results being what Google wants the user to see seems to be the
| real problem.
|
| Youtube for example in the past would show suggestions from
| small channels that were interesting and fun, but now you can't
| even find them in search using an exact video title. I've seen
| Google News completely shut out a breaking news story for half
| a day and the only reason I can think of was the ranking AI saw
| some 'bad' words in every story - even from NYT/WaPo, whose
| articles were among the many dozens on Bing News. Presumably
| they've applied their anti-"I hated it" ideas to Search as
| well.
|
| So now is a great time to compete with Google because they're
| handicapping themselves and even though they could just turn
| off the bias and return good results, they probably would
| rather lose than stop trying to influence users.
| blihp wrote:
| A viable business model. DDG has done a spectacular job of
| navigating the search space with arguably a very good product and
| look at how long it has taken them to get as far as they have.
| There isn't likely room for a 2nd DDG-type approach.
|
| Setting aside all of the specifics related to building and
| running the engine itself, how do you make money doing it? Unless
| you are servicing a very specialized and lucrative vertical that
| doesn't mind paying, everyone else gets their search results for
| free so you generally can't charge users for it. This typically
| leaves advertising (which Google arguably owns the market for re:
| search) and/or selling user data (which is both unpopular with
| users and depending on jurisdiction, illegal). Figure out a new
| way to monetize search and you may have something...
|
| This is a problem with today's world dominated by mega-tech
| companies: to compete in many areas of it you need to essentially
| be a monopolist in some other area so you can afford to compete
| in something like search as a loss leader at least until you get
| established. Look at how much Microsoft spent on Bing[1]... and
| they got how much of the market? Facebook wasn't initially
| profitable either, but they had a distinctly different approach
| to aggregating a pool of data Google couldn't search and users
| they couldn't monetize.
|
| [1]
| https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/i...
| fassssst wrote:
| TikTok algorithm applied to search. "I'm feeling lucky" but with
| quick swipe up/down user feedback on results.
| gman83 wrote:
| So Stumbleupon
| jasinjames wrote:
| I think this is a neat idea. Google has tried a lot of products
| and models, but "gamifying" (at least in this sense) search
| itself isn't one I can recall.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Google Discover is the closest they have to this.
|
| As a side note, I'm a publisher and Google Discover traffic
| alone has made me about $1k in the last week alone to just
| one single article by itself
| ntauthority wrote:
| Thanks, now I know this 'personalized feed' seen in the
| Google apps on mobile actually has a product name!
|
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/mobile/g
| o...
|
| Some of the content on there is, however, fairly obvious
| clickbait, but there's also a super easy (working!) 'not
| interested' button in there.
| adventured wrote:
| You can't be just a bit better than Google and you certainly
| can't be worse. It's very difficult to be better than Google,
| that's an enormous challenge unto itself. That's greater than a
| billion dollar problem just to get warmed up if you're talking
| competing with them at large scale. If you listened to HN, Google
| sucks and it's easy to produce a superior search engine because
| of how bad they are now. That's false; even if Google's quality
| has eroded, they are not a mediocre search engine. That notion
| comes from the same place wherein people proclaim they can create
| a serious Uber competitor in a weekend (and mysteriously these
| people never do anything of the sort).
|
| You're going to need a quantum leap improvement over Google to
| unseat their positioning. It has to be very substantial to
| overcome all the various moats they have, not least of which is
| consumers being used to using Google, the brand awareness.
|
| The next great search engine will emerge from a niche and conquer
| one segment after another from there. It won't be a massive
| general search engine that shows up one day (which is what the
| Google watchers have been waiting for forever - that new behemoth
| comprehensive competitor is never going to arrive fully formed).
| There's a decent possibility consumer Web search will be a later
| stage addition to said new niche competitor, consumer Web won't
| be its primary or initial target. They'll add on general consumer
| Web search as a "we might as well" offering once they conquer
| enough niches.
| 3825 wrote:
| > The next great search engine will emerge from a niche and
| conquer one segment after another from there. It won't be a
| massive general search engine that shows up one day (which is
| what the Google watchers have been waiting for forever - that
| new behemoth comprehensive competitor is never going to arrive
| fully formed). There's a decent possibility consumer Web search
| will be a later stage addition to said new niche competitor,
| consumer Web won't be its primary or initial target. They'll
| add on general consumer Web search as a "we might as well"
| offering once they conquer enough niches.
|
| I love this because I want it to be true. However, iirc Google
| wanted to sell itself to Yahoo! for a million dollars and about
| five years later again for a billion dollars.
|
| I know there are quite a few millionaires here but for me, five
| million dollars would change my life. I can't imagine being
| able to turn it down.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> The next great search engine will emerge from a niche and
| conquer one segment after another from there._
|
| Even if by some lucky circumstance Google doesn't become aware
| of the new kid conquering their beachhead, as they start down
| this expansion path Google will acquire them or throw resources
| at competing. A deliberate strategy of only going after
| segments that Google avoids (like social) almost inevitably
| attracts the attention of some other MANGAM.
|
| Still, given enough dice rolls someone will _eventually_ have a
| streak, but we 'll be waiting a while for that to happen.
| keyme wrote:
| The internet is too different now to what Google (or any SE) was
| designed to index.
|
| Too much of the up-to-date high value information is posted onto
| semi-public channels. Like facebook groups, instagram posts,
| telegram channels, etc.
|
| At the same time, too much of the publicly available websites are
| becoming clickbait and mindless marketing drivel.
|
| Just try to research anything slightly obscure that has to be up-
| to-date information (from the last few years).
|
| Like "how to get from Nairobi to Kisumu by bus". Google maps
| doesn't have this (not surprisingly), but what about the SERPs?
| Nothing there. 90% of the results are useless bus ticket sale
| websites that have no info, just SEO. (You can't buy this ticket
| online anyway).
|
| Is Kenya just such an off-the-map destination that no backpacker
| has ever written about taking this route? No!
|
| The information is out there. You'll find it inside the related
| facebook groups for travelers in east Africa. And if not? That's
| where you'll ask. But the answer? It'll never reach a SERP in the
| future.
|
| Even more sad, is that if you keep looking on Google, you may
| find buried results from years ago. From travel forums and such.
| What's sad is that the info will be 10 years old, since no one
| uses public forums anymore. (Unless it's on reddit, pretty much
| the last public forum with any reach).
| khazhoux wrote:
| Either Google engineers reacted to your hour-old post, or you
| picked an example where Google actually does well.
|
| The top-of-page "featured snippet":
|
| > Kenya Airways and Jambojet Limited fly from Nairobi to Kisumu
| every 4 hours. Alternatively, The Guardian Coach operates a bus
| from Nairobi to Kisumu every 3 hours. Tickets cost $6 - $11 and
| the journey takes 6h 30m. Two other operators also service this
| route.
|
| Then the rest of the page links to route-planning websites, a
| Tripadvisor discussion about bus from Nairobi, and other
| _actually relevant_ results.
|
| Google disappoints me too, but TBH I can't _objectively_ gauge
| how good it is. My own opinion is just based on spotty personal
| experiences that I don 't keep track of.
| keyme wrote:
| You are actually right :) Stupid me. But other similar
| searches have failed me in the past.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Your Nairobi question results in the top answer today on
| [https://millionshort.com/] It has _some_ info, not sure how
| useful.
| vmception wrote:
| Somewhat related is how there is a whole generation of people
| that think they are entitled to finding information on a search
| engine, or a web indexed accessible source, and if its not
| there then it must not exist!
|
| I see this in discussions a lot where many times the answer is
| that the data doesn't exist, but thats not satisfactory to the
| person making the challenging.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I mean, this is the state of the world currently. I doubt I'd
| be able to do my job without some sort of search engine. I do
| talk to people in my company who worked in tech before the
| internet and they mention going to bookstores and reading
| books and how weird that seems now even to they who lived
| through it.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Anecdotally, I'm in a couple+ tech (ish) groups on FB. More
| and more the questions posted are obviously by passing
| internet search (e.g.,Google) and going right to the group.
| Simple shit that people simply can't be bothered to search
| for, and they don't even bother with the FB group search.
| Imho, this behaviour wastes too much of the groups'
| collective bandwidth.
|
| So not only has FB hoarded the infomation, but it has no
| incentive to fix the group experience (e.g., prompt an input
| for group search during the asking bit) as it keeps
| engagement up.
| arrakis2021 wrote:
| This. Whenever I search anything informative, I append "Reddit"
| to the phrase to get the top Reddit threads about the topic.
| Everything else in the SERPS is usually SEO trash
| chx wrote:
| Try https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feo
| jag... then.
| tmh88j wrote:
| Is there a way to provide a date range when specifying a
| site? I frequently append reddit to my google searches as
| well, but the results often include outdated posts. I don't
| want restaurant/service/whatever reviews from 7+ years ago.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Press "Tools", then change "Any time" to "Custom range" and
| set the range you want.
| tmh88j wrote:
| I've tried that but the filter seems inconsistent. I can
| specify a date range and get some focused results, but if
| I remove the date filter and search the same terms I
| often receive additional results that weren't previously
| displayed but are within the range I used.
| aghilmort wrote:
| after:YYYY-MM-DD & before:YYYY-MM-DD work on Breeze,
| Google, & some others, e.g.,
|
| - recent March Madness results; thread of examples,
| https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1506826439961858052
|
| - hot-off-the-press startup funding,
| https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1504901028520640514
|
| - new free trip contest announcements w/ query breakdown,
| https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1506443371828686848
|
| after: & before: cover many use cases, and can be used in
| any combo
|
| before X date, before:2022-01-01 range of X to Y dates,
| after:2022-01-01 before:2022-02-01 multiple ranges, easiest
| to split up queries since X date, after:2022-03-14
|
| & per OP question, can be used with site, e.g.,
|
| after:2020-12-31 before:2022-01-01
| site:news.ycombinator.com intitle:search
|
| all posts w/ search in title during 2021 on HN
|
| https://breezethat.com/?q=after%3A2020-12-31+before%3A2022-
| 0...
|
| or
|
| after:2020-12-31 before:2022-01-01 site:reddit.com
| intitle:russia intitle:ukraine
|
| all posts on Reddit during 2021 w/ Russia & Ukraine in
| title
|
| https://breezethat.com/?q=after%3A2020-12-31+before%3A2022-
| 0...
|
| (all posts with search in title during 2021 on HN)
|
| there's also some more advanced techniques, post on that
| forthcoming
| narrator wrote:
| Yandex gives good results on the first page[1] with tripadvisor
| and other community sites. Google I think got majorly messed up
| when they started doing "anti-misinformation" patches that down
| ranked forums and other community sites where people can freely
| post wrongthink. Yandex doesn't do any of that.
|
| [1]https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=how+to+get+from+Nairob
| ...
| technobabbler wrote:
| You know, if that were the only roadblock, I wish someone would
| take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate
| them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel,
| cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in
| some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned
| librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the
| latest findings and queries.
|
| Would happily pay for that... even if it only has 5% of the
| coverage of Google, that's fine because Google is like 95%
| noise anyway.
| shisisms wrote:
| The problem is, you probably won't pay for it.
|
| Google's revenue per user in the US underlines that point,
| taking a credit card out for an annual subscription for a
| $100 probably isn't going to score a good conversion rate for
| anything beyond a very small userbase.
|
| The predicted economic/behavioural constraints are inhibiting
| innovation. You're forced to play Google's game.
| technobabbler wrote:
| I'd gladly pay for a good search engine, but I'm probably
| in the minority.
| jonshariat wrote:
| +1 I see this repeated over and over in tech where an algo is
| great but why not manually craft the top value queries?
|
| Like with smart speakers, why not manually add a bunch of
| interactions? You can do it yourself in settings by adding a
| phrase and desired response, why not have the team adding a
| bunch they would want?
| Sujan wrote:
| The top 10.000 queries at Google are probably 99% brands, pop
| culture or current news things, one word or name only, that
| you would not care for at all. Have a look at the top 20:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/265825/number-of-
| searche...
| achr2 wrote:
| I think there is an easy exclusion to be made for these
| types of 'too lazy to type a url' type searches (or
| 'weather' which is similar in getting a specific piece of
| data).
| jasode wrote:
| _> , I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries
| and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups
| -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the
| best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms,
| just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly
| updated with the latest findings and queries._
|
| It's not exactly your specifications but 2007 Mahalo
| attempted something like that and they shut down after a few
| years:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
|
| The website is no longer there so you have to use Wayback
| Machine or image search to see what the landing page for
| Mahalo search UI looked like : https://www.google.com/search?
| q=%22mahalo.com%22+search&tbm=...
| nr2x wrote:
| You just invented pre-Google Yahoo!
| technobabbler wrote:
| I know. I remember and loved it then.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Isn't that more or less what Yahoo was supposed to be (an
| index of curated links)?
| technobabbler wrote:
| Yes. There was a period of several years when Google's
| results were better than Yahoo, but once the human search
| engines bankrupt, the algorithmic SEO just kept getting
| worse and worse =/ Too bad...
| polote wrote:
| > It'll never reach a SERP in the future.
|
| Why not ? A scrapper may not be able to find it, but we all
| have a Facebook account. You dont need an automated scrapper to
| create a search engine. Info can be manually curated or
| scrapped through web extensions
| majewsky wrote:
| > but we all have a Facebook account
|
| God no.
| oakpond wrote:
| > but we all have a Facebook account.
|
| Nah.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Google's advantage over competitors isn't that the search is
| great it is that they are much better at montesization.
| davnicwil wrote:
| It's kind of a facile answer perhaps, but I think the answer is
| as simple as 'you cannot out-Google Google'.
|
| The declining quality of Google results seems pretty clear, but
| only in relative terms. That is, Google now compared to Google in
| the past. In an absolute sense the service remains pretty great.
|
| A confounding factor is that maybe the quality decline is in fact
| in internet content in general. That is, Google per se is as good
| as ever, it's just it's become much more difficult to find good
| results.
|
| So, simply, the answer is perhaps that no matter the effort a
| competitor could put in they simply cannot outdo Google at their
| core competency. Perhaps for fundamental reasons, but even if not
| in some niche, surely then for sheer funding and scale reasons
| when trying to expand beyond that niche.
|
| If a competitor to Google emerges, it'll be in some non obvious
| thing that is not core web search. Basically, when core web
| search becomes less important and Google can't pivot quickly
| enough to the new more important thing to compete.
| gyulai wrote:
| ...because antitrust authorities have been asleep at the wheel.
| dazc wrote:
| DDG simply needs to raise awareness that they have a good enough
| alternative that most people would be happy with if only they
| knew it existed.
| ck2 wrote:
| DDG is just a Bing front-end/proxy. They do not have their own
| crawlers.
|
| If microsoft quit search for some reason, DDG would go away
| with them.
| MichaelRazum wrote:
| brave.search is pretty good. BUT it is not the default search
| engine on most devices. AND google is still better for some
| specific queries. A competitor must be not as good but much much
| more better. Don't see it coming, especially it is very expensive
| to query the whole web.
| modeless wrote:
| There are some. Neeva is one I've heard of, and there was another
| similar one mentioned on HN just recently that I've forgotten.
| There was also Cuil. Bing exists of course. And then there are
| the language specific ones, Yandex, Naver, Baidu, and others I'm
| sure. And that's just the ones that make their own index, there's
| a sea of competitors like DuckDuckGo and StartPage that mostly
| license results from someone else (including Google). And there
| are also verticals with competitors like Amazon for products or
| Yelp for food, which Google very much considers as competition.
|
| As much as people claim otherwise, it's not that Google has no
| competition. People are trying! Google's product is legitimately
| good, despite the widespread perception of declining quality.
| vmullin wrote:
| Add Brave Search to your list: https://search.brave.com/
|
| Private, anonymous and independent search index. Generally,
| search has a lot of attention on it right now, lots of great
| efforts to compete with G.
| shafyy wrote:
| Kagi is also good, in fact I get better results on Kagi than on
| DDG.
| jimmar wrote:
| > what would a competitor need to defy Google?
|
| A competitive business model. You can create tech that is easier
| to use and more powerful than Google's services, but you won't
| last unless you actually make money.
| spicymaki wrote:
| The problem with monopolies is they can easily purchase serious
| competitors. That is why we need the government to regulate these
| companies and spur competition.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Even if the competitor tries to hold their ground and refuse to
| be bought, the monopoply can still bend the competitor to their
| will in other means.
| janmajayamall wrote:
| What do you think of a p2p marketplace for search queries? You
| post your query to the p2p network that consists of indexers.
| Indexers interested in servicing your query would place a bid
| (i.e. the charge), from which you select one. The selected
| indexer would then service your query.
|
| I think this would allow a competitive market for indexers in
| different verticals to emerge.
|
| Most probably you wouldn't want to use it for every small query.
| But in situations when you need high quality results in some
| domain, the p2p marketplace would be a good choice.
| heybecker wrote:
| A super tight mobile os. Search, Maps. Excellent developer tools.
| Long term vision. This 10+ year android user is disappointed
| recently.
| Decabytes wrote:
| Because imo it would require being more than just a search
| engine. Google has Chrome, Gmail, YouTube and Search. People like
| having a lot of their services consolidated, just look at the
| Apple folks.
|
| Also while the quality of search has declined it is nowhere near
| the point where casual users would be bothered enough to switch
| shantara wrote:
| And Android, that keeps users tied to Google services through
| the power of defaults.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| One strategy might be to monetise Googles
| failure/difficulty/broken business model with regard to SEO,
| promoted, and brand sites. How might one do this? Create a market
| for filter add-ons to Google's results. A market for quality
| filters (subject to different user groups subjective view of what
| quality means). For example, let's say I am a specialist in some
| particular area, and I've devised a "quality filter" or "screen"
| for my specialism. A user, an ordinary user might choose to pay
| for my filter to cut down the firehouse of junk normally coming
| out of a google search. The platform owner, for this value added
| search market might have an App Store for filters and skim off
| some of the recurring subscription revenues for the 5, 10, or 50
| filters the user might subscribe to.
| eveningtree wrote:
| I have a broader answer for this:
|
| By the very nature of solutions: a new company cannot beat google
| at general search. Google was and is search.
|
| Like a tree that has grown up and shadows the entire land around
| it. There will be random small pockets of sunlight with smaller
| plants in it. But the big tree owns the area.
|
| There can be a short term competition via extremely specialized
| search engines, but they will not rise to the same dominance.
| Google, in a way, is the entire idea of searching the web.
|
| The next dominant generation has to be from a new paradigm, that
| makes web search obslete.
|
| ---
|
| A relatable current example could be: youtube being dwarfed by
| tiktok. The nature of the new thing is such that it very
| naturally dethrones the old thing, without directly competing
| with the incumbent.
|
| There will be specialized providers like vimeo, But at this
| point, youtube IS the idea of video on the internet.
|
| ---
|
| Just note the context of this understanding: This understanding
| came from struggling to change the education system of my
| country. And then it seemed to apply everywhere I saw.
|
| I'll round-off my reply with this quote:
|
| "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To
| change something, build a new model that makes the existing model
| obsolete."
|
| - Buckminster Fuller
| togaen wrote:
| Everyone complaining about google's "declining quality" is living
| in some fantasy world where there's something better to compare
| google to. Its results are significantly better than any
| competitor, check for yourself. If you think you can do better,
| go for it.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Nope. Living in the real world with experience of how good
| Google used to be.
|
| The high number of posts on the subject suggests real decline,
| and stopping that decline won't be helped by a rose-tinted
| assessment of the current situation.
| ls15 wrote:
| > Its results are significantly better than any competitor,
| check for yourself.
|
| Maybe I don't have very high standards, or maybe it is the way
| I write search queries, but I almost only use DDG and the
| results are good enough for me. I just find what I am looking
| for. There usually is just no reason for me to use something
| else, so why would I want to put my privacy into the lion's
| cage?
|
| The few times I landed on Google's result page during the last
| couple of years, I found the results more confusing than
| helpful. Maybe I unlearned how to use Google.
| festive-minsky wrote:
| "declining quality" means current google vs past google, not
| other search engines
| bostik wrote:
| In 2014, I was cursing the shitty search results of GDrive -
| and asked aloud why can't a company known for their search
| engine make all their search systems equally good.
|
| It's 2022, and Google search is just as shitty as their
| GDrive search.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| This is also not a fair comparison, because Internet is
| changing constantly.
| tyingq wrote:
| Seems fair to me. They did improve quality for quite a long
| time. The quality only seemed to start dipping when
| shareholder expectations started driving what SERP pages
| look like.
|
| Or, roughly, _" The goals of the advertising business model
| do not always correspond to providing quality search to
| users"_
| keiferski wrote:
| "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow
| [search engine]; true nobility is being superior to your former
| self."
|
| - Ernest Hemingway, paraphrased
| tyingq wrote:
| I think that's a good point. Google knows nobody is reasonably
| able to do better. So they are free to optimize for ad revenue,
| and leave organic search "just good enough" to stave off anyone
| else.
|
| In fact, great organic search could lower ad revenue. I imagine
| there's some balance there.
| [deleted]
| jdrc wrote:
| You are comparing google with other search engines but they are
| instead an ads monopoly. If someone else invests big on an ads
| marketplace, a search engine will spontaneously form around it
| sudhirj wrote:
| Lots of competitors have emerged or are emerging. No single one
| can or maybe even should take over the mantle.
|
| Google's death will come not from some upstart search engine, but
| from many walled gardens that each have perfectly good topical
| search inside them. We're already in a case where different kinds
| of information are checked at different destinations.
|
| Google will keep trying valiantly to more aggressively turn into
| a knowledge base instead of a search engine, and ultimately will
| probably settle at being an interactive encyclopaedia.
|
| The internet has moved past search engines. Now if you want
| information you need to know or figure out where to ask the
| question.
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