[HN Gopher] The next Google
___________________________________________________________________
The next Google
Author : dbrereton
Score : 313 points
Date : 2022-04-05 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dkb.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dkb.io)
| Minor49er wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just
| worse versions of Google.
|
| I disagree. I use Bing for about half of my searching because
| Google simply struggles with things like exact phrase matching in
| many cases. Where Google falls off, Bing tends to succeed. Though
| Bing also sometimes lags behind, where Google tends to do better,
| hence my split usage.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Why not just use DDG as an interface?
| Minor49er wrote:
| DDG is basically just a wrapper around Bing. I'd rather just
| use Bing directly
| bob1029 wrote:
| Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web crawler
| and building my own damn search engine from scratch. I can't ever
| come up with a hard reason it wouldnt work in 2022, other than
| the dynamic javascript blogspam that may be more challenging to
| trawl for meaningful content these days. Perhaps this is a win-
| win: The shit I can't crawl I wouldnt want to read anyways.
|
| Compete with google? Who gives a shit. I just want to be able to
| hit a full text index that points back to URLs. I don't need
| instant PhD-tier answers for life questions.
| acatton wrote:
| (Disclaimer: I work for a big company which makes a browser, an
| OS for smartphones and a search engine. This is my own opinion,
| and does not reflect my employer, and so on, and so on...)
|
| > Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web
| crawler and building my own damn search engine from scratch.
|
| A few things:
|
| * Storing the index. For example if I search for "Sushi",
| google says there is 1.3 Billion results. That's already 19.3
| GiB just to store the relationship between "sushi" and its
| results. (If you use UUIDs) And you need to do that for most
| words in the english dictionnary. And I'm assuming you're not
| even storing what you crawl for debugging/re-indexing.
|
| * Website admins might throttle you. For example, discourse --
| a website which runs most discussion for Rust, Ocaml, and many
| other projects -- blocked the bingbot at some point[1] due to
| its crawling aggressivity. Cloudflare, which is the front-
| facing caching service for almost half of the internet now, is
| notoriously anti-crawling. (It will quickly display captchas)
|
| * grep over the web will yield you bad results. (most of the
| time) You want a search engine which at least groups words
| semantically. If I search for horses, I'm usually also
| interested in mares and ponies.
|
| [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/bingbot-is-no-longer-default-
| th...
| the_common_man wrote:
| Let's be honest.. If it's any good, it gets bought by Google :-(
| simoneau wrote:
| I want to pay for researched, impartial answers to my questions.
| Would someone build that, please?
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Have you considered JSTOR /s
| yumraj wrote:
| > The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out
| links.
|
| I have a fundamental disagreement with this. The best search
| engine is still an input box that spits out links based on what
| was typed. This allows the user to express what they're looking
| for, their query, in most natural terms.
|
| Everything else is secondary. At least for me..
| Soupy wrote:
| > The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out
| links.
|
| Hard disagree. I spent years of my life working on a "new way to
| search" (Graph Search at Facebook, ~2012) and the biggest
| takeaways for me from all of that time is:
|
| 1) people don't want to learn a new way to search, and they don't
| want to learn new tools, filters, lenses, whatever you want to
| call it. it must be a keyword-search based input because Google
| has trained billions to search (and to think) this way for 20+
| years now. imo the next google shouldn't fight this behavior, but
| rather adopt it as part of the core strategy
|
| 2) ownership of the "search intent entrypoint" is key. people
| generally don't care what they are using to search, as long as
| it's easy and fast to use and actually works. google understands
| this and makes it almost impossible to bypass searching with
| google if you're on an Android phone. All of these alternative
| search engines have a huge barrier to entry not only on the
| technology and data side, but mainly on the entrypoint side. They
| can't reasonably expect hundreds of millions of the people to go
| through and manually update their default search engine on all of
| their devices. What about when I go to use Google Assistant?
| Google maps? All entrypoints that Google has used to lock up
| search intent. It's brilliant. I believe there are moves still
| available for a future Google assailant to overcome these
| barriers, but I haven't seen many that have directly touched on
| this point yet. new technical shifts may open up new entrypoints
| here (VR/AR?)
|
| 3) the search engine that has the lowest time between [query] ->
| [answer] for a user wins. any search engine that adds additional
| cruft through forcing more clicks, usage of advanced tooling
| (filters, lenses, etc), visualizations, etc will lose out because
| they are getting farther and farther from the core problem a user
| has - "find me x". this is the thing that is driving the
| hero/knowledge units on Google, further cementing their
| leadership
|
| 4) the one brightspot - verticalized search intent is a huge area
| of untapped potential in the search arena. Google is great at
| general search (and honestly also at a huge number of verticals
| that it's developed over time), but there are many verticals that
| google honestly sucks at. I do believe there is a potential
| entrypoint here for a "new google" if they can take on a
| vertical-by-vertical expansion strategy. Owning the intent
| entrypoint would still be as important as ever, but this play
| would look a lot like the early Yelp vertical expansion strategy
| from the early 2000s. It's anybody's guess what the actual right
| starting vertical and entrypoint match is though
|
| tl;dr Google won't go down easy, and a Google killer may actually
| look incredibly similar to Google in it's end-state
| focom wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just
| worse versions of Google.
|
| Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great.
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| Almost. Annoying are things like geographic context in results
| that are terrible (for me) but it's more adapting queries.
|
| It's sad what today's web has become. Each year you see it
| degrade and there's no real fix I'm afraid.
| u2077 wrote:
| > Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great.
|
| For anything that isn't the least bit obscure or technical.
| (Same with just about every search engine)
|
| IIRC, someone on hn said that search engines are only good for
| things you _already_ know are there, not for finding new
| information or different perspectives.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I use it as daily driver and I wouldn't say DDG is great, but
| it's good enough definitely. I rarely use !g, like <5% of the
| time I search for stuff.
|
| And I use it in two languages. Not bad.
|
| For other results I find myself reaching to a bookmarked searx
| instance. I thought it just agreggates results but somehow it
| gives me different stuff.
|
| And you also get magnet links :)
| abhinavsharma wrote:
| The problem with trying to replace Google is that you have to..
| 1. Do (nearly) everything Google does as well as them AND 2. fix
| Google's weak spots (usually in subjective queries) AND 3. offer
| something new and exciting.
|
| It's hard to do (1) well given Google's data moat and how good
| that makes them at head queries. It's rare that people stick with
| one of these alternatives because they struggle to be as good in
| the majority of simple queries.
|
| We built a few such search engines before choosing a different
| route -- we made something that augments Google (or Amazon, or
| whatever other search engine you use) and improves it in areas
| that it's weak in.
|
| I posted our thoughts on this a few weeks ago on HN that
| generated some discussion as well --
| http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933
|
| The apps we built are a mobile browser extension for iOS and a
| desktop browser extension
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperweb/id1581824571
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag...
|
| It's one approach, but we're trying to be more non zero-sum about
| it, and consider that the search engine doesn't have to be
| replaced 1:1 with a better search engine.
| [deleted]
| swethmandava wrote:
| I might be biased but I see myself depending on trusted sources -
| no SEO links, no spam! I want yelp for restaurants, stackoverflow
| for coding questions, reddit for opinions or allrecipes for
| recipes.
|
| So I love you.com - it has an app for everything!
| kristianpaul wrote:
| Developing search engines and personal assistants are the way to
| go. Too much information these days to digest , what a better job
| for a computer that helps us with the literacy aspects of it.
| KindAndFriendly wrote:
| "The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out links"
|
| I think one strong contributing factor to Google's success is its
| simplicity. All the listed competitors add a lot of complexity
| imho. While all the customization buttons, knobs, lenses, meta
| crawling, code generation features etc might add some value for
| the advanced and technically skilled user, it provides rather
| little value for the average user who just wants to look up a
| cooking recipe.
|
| So maybe when searching for "the next Google" the interesting
| question is not "what search features can be added", but "how can
| search even be simpler than using Google".
| darinf wrote:
| Actually, just taking the ads out of the experience can make
| for a simpler and better search experience. I think the google
| founders knew this too (https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comme
| nts/rzr2n3/the_founde...). They just couldn't hold back the
| avalanche of revenue that search ads yields.
|
| I work for Neeva, and this is a big part of why I left Google
| to join Neeva. There has to be a better experience, and it
| doesn't start from another business that works just like
| Google. It has to be a different kind of business. Neeva does
| not make money from showing you ads, so it can provide a
| different search experience... a simpler search experience,
| like the original google even, but it can go further...
|
| With the Neeva app for example as you start typing in the URL
| bar, it will take your input as search suggestions (just as any
| other browser + search engine would) but instead of just
| showing you completed search suggestion, Neeva will show you
| the results from running those searches inline. The idea being
| that maybe those results will be helpful to you and make it so
| you don't even need to go to the search results page. You can
| just take the result right there from the URL bar suggestions
| drop down. Saves you time. Simpler.
|
| Stuff like that. There's a swim lane of innovation and ideas on
| how searching and browsing can be better that is just really
| hard for Google to build, even though many of these ideas are
| thought of inside the walls of Google. They just can't ship
| them if they are stuck being beholden to their search ads
| model.
|
| Another great example... ever wonder why Google isn't working
| to make it so Chrome doesn't have a million tabs at the top of
| your browser? It gets to the point where it is hard to get back
| to what you were doing. Me, I just end up closing the tabs,
| declaring tab bankruptcy. Google is okay with that because it
| means I have to search again. The Chrome team wants to fix this
| but it is hard to do so as it would result in people searching
| less often!
|
| Again, just means there is opportunity for a simpler better
| experience to be had and Google won't be the ones creating it.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| To be fair to Google, they do have the I'm feeling lucky
| button, which will take you directly to Amazon (example from
| the article) rather than showing you links.
| darinf wrote:
| Exactly. Notice how "I'm feeling lucky" is only on the home
| page and not part of the search experience when using
| Chrome or any modern browser where you search from the URL
| bar? Wonder if that is intention? Not a wonder at all.
|
| The "I'm feeling lucky" button would never be added to
| Google if it didn't already exist. It was grandfathered in.
| u2077 wrote:
| I think they each capture different markets. Google is simple
| _because_ for most people it is "good enough". Google isn't
| going to spend a ton of time developing new features for the
| (large) minority that find it inadequate.
|
| Google also has a few good things going for them:
|
| - it's the _standard_ when it comes to search and is setup by
| default on just about every platform
|
| - People use the brand name itself when talking about looking
| stuff up (no one says "just duck it")
|
| - They control the ad market, the standards for what a
| "optimized" site is, _and_ the web standards themselves.
| beamatronic wrote:
| No search engine has tried to address the issue of the user's
| context for the search.
|
| - does my current location matter for the search?
|
| - am I trying to spend money (shopping), or trying to get
| information (facts)?
| [deleted]
| sanxiyn wrote:
| You can configure Kagi to disable location based customization,
| which can be a big improvement indeed.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| These are variables taken into account by Google AFAIK.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| How do I disable location based customization for Google?
| beamatronic wrote:
| The user does not get a choice
| taosx wrote:
| I too like many others feel that Google results have gone really
| bad in the last year which may be partially due to web pollution
| but the main issue is that I feel like google's search totally
| ignores my requests, a lot of times it even ignores exact matches
| using quotes.
|
| If only we could get some sql-like powers in that simple input
| box. Maybe I'm not their target audience...who knows.
| darinf wrote:
| Happy to answer any questions you all might have about Neeva. I
| left Google to join Neeva about a year ago. Got inspired by the
| opportunity to make a better product. AMA :)
| relaunched wrote:
| nerds like nerd knobs... not sure customization has a mass market
| appeal. I also fundamentally disagree with the sentiment that the
| general public cares about privacy... though nerds do.
|
| Good luck!
| Shadonototra wrote:
| google is not just search anymore, why stuck with a title that
| pretends we are living in 2004?
| db1234 wrote:
| The problem with so many customization options is that it creates
| friction to users. We need something that just works out of the
| box. Just like Google did when it launched.
| antishatter wrote:
| I find ddg is an improvement on google because it's more like
| google 10 years ago plus a quick !g tosses it back to google for
| the occasional topic google does better.
| lcnmrn wrote:
| The next Google should be powered by AI/ML algorithms to go
| around SEO tricks. If lots of people pick a result from page 16
| that result should be on the front page.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I mostly replaced my use of Google Scholar with Elicit. You ask
| questions, and Elicit gives answers, with citations. Elicit is
| powered by GPT-3 and it is amazing. Go try it.
|
| https://elicit.org/
| mahmutc wrote:
| We cant even search without account.
| [deleted]
| hedora wrote:
| The next google is to google as Craigslist is to classified ads.
|
| Google is ripe for disintermediation by a competitor that doesn't
| siphon cash off search to subsidize other things.
|
| Now, all we need is a technology shift that erodes their moat.
| JSONderulo wrote:
| "DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just
| worse versions of Google."
|
| "The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out links.
| We need new thinking to create something much better than what
| came before."
|
| Could not agree more.
|
| Great roundup of some exciting search alternatives. Thanks for
| sharing.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| The next Google should have less AI and be more deterministic. At
| least it should have a mode where it searches exactly what I
| specify instead of searching what it thinks I want. Also give me
| options to filter out certain domains. Again, let me tell the
| search engine what I want instead of the engine telling me what I
| may want.
|
| I feel a lot of modern software is becoming very authoritarian.
| "We know better than you what you need".
| kivlad wrote:
| Google used to let you block domains a long time ago. I'm not
| sure why that was removed, but I have a feeling it had
| something to do with giving the expectation that you can block
| ads from a specific domain.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Kagi can filter domains. Do try it.
| umvi wrote:
| > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads
| are not an option
|
| Ok, so how does the new generation pay for itself? I couldn't
| find that anywhere in the article.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just
| worse versions of Google.
|
| Bing - maybe. DDG - it used to be much more of an alternative,
| now a little less, with their decision to actively censor their
| content. Still, they - supposedly - don't collect and store
| information about you. That's the sense in which they're an
| alternative. And in Google, there is massive, manipulation of
| results with all sort of commercial biases. In DDG we don't know
| that that is the case.
|
| > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads
| are not an option.
|
| Hmm. I notice they didn't didn't say search results manipulation
| is not an option.
|
| > Why should everyone have the same search experience?
|
| As far as search results are concerned - so that you don't get to
| play games with what's more and less visible on the Internet? For
| the sake of fairness?
|
| > We all have our own preferences about how things should look
| and work.
|
| Oh, so you want to _flaunt_ how you'll manipulate people's search
| results to fit your interests? I'm sorry, I mean "the default
| preferences"?
| uhtred wrote:
| How is DuckDuckGo a worse version of Google?
|
| I get less ads, more privacy, and pretty much the same or better
| results. Plus I can use my down arrows to traverse the results
| list!
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| I don't think displaying data in different fashions is enough to
| come even remotely close to dethroning Google. It's their data,
| how much of it they have, and the algorithm that sits in between
| the search input box and the delivering you results that makes
| them the best.
| advael wrote:
| You lost me at "Duckduckgo is a worse version of google"
|
| Privacy aside, I find the results much more helpful on average
| these days, and weeding past sponsored links is enough of a
| hassle within google search results to consider it a UX QOL
| downgrade
| xmly wrote:
| So kagi is still returning bunch of links, right?
| alphabetting wrote:
| In my view Google could possibly be the next Google. They're
| leading in AI right now and if they can get the magic we've seen
| in some of their papers into products like Search or Google
| Assistant it would be major moment.
| MockObject wrote:
| People aren't complaining about Google because of a lack of AI,
| but because of product decisions they're intentionally making,
| presumably that increase their profits, but many of us would be
| overjoyed if they simply rolled back to their 2012 algorithm.
| tdrgabi wrote:
| 2012 algorithm with today's advanced seo and spam won't give
| you good results.
|
| Nobody uses yahoo search today...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Minus ads.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Pathways was the first time when Google got to a level where
| they could collapse multiple searches into one. They needed
| working chain-of-thought prompting to make deep learning useful
| for researching solutions for problems.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >But right after that, we're greeted by an "Interesting Finds"
| section, which has a fun blog post by Derek Sivers, an article
| filled with stories of Steve Jobs in Japan, and some other cool
| things you can't find on Google.
|
| You can definitely find these on Google.
| superasn wrote:
| Google can be the next Google if they just stopped being evil for
| a second:
|
| 1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow
| clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome
| extension.
|
| 2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the
| plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been
| deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with
| what it thinks I want.
|
| 3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search
| results. Where I can narrow down the search results using
| additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So
| i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to
| weed out spam and narrow my search accurately.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 4. How about an image search that... actually returns the URL
| of the raw image?
|
| Here's a dead simple use case that is just unnecessarily
| frustrating. As a user, I want a high res picture of a buffalo.
| So:
|
| a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page
| contains thumbnails of buffalos.
|
| b. I click the first result, it's tagged with
| "nationalgeographic.com" so it's probably gonna be good.
| Instead of the image, I get another page, but with a slightly
| bigger picture than a thumbnail. When you over over it, it says
| "3,072 x 3,072" but the image itself is clearly not that
| resolution.
|
| c. So I click that image, and it opens a new goddamn tab of
| nationalgeographic.com's web site, with another picture, still
| not the promised 3,072 x 3,072! WTF!? When I try scrolling down
| to look for the raw image somewhere I'm hit with an E-mail
| signup-wall. Good grief!
|
| d. Little did I know, if at step b. I instead _right-clicked_
| on the image and selected "Open Image in a new tab", I'd have
| gotten the image I was looking for. Thanks, Google, for hiding
| the 99.9% use case that people want to do.
|
| The actual user experience _should_ have been:
|
| a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page
| contains thumbnails of buffalos next to clickable .jpg links.
| The End.
| vikingerik wrote:
| For step d, why is that Google's fault? Your browser already
| has a means to view an individual image, why should Google
| reimplement something that a right-click can just already do?
| lupire wrote:
| Yes, everyone likes content better when they don't have to
| pay for it, all else equal. But content IP owners don't want
| to make content for free.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They are welcome to disallow the Googlebot in their
| robots.txt.
| airstrike wrote:
| Well, in the age of "creators" I'm sure there are countless
| of people who would be willing to post pictures of buffalo
| "for free" if they believed they had a chance of having
| their work actually make it to the top of the search
| results
| arecurrence wrote:
| Alas, Getty sued that experience into oblivion
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-
| after...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Why couldn't they litigate it? As far as I know it wasn't a
| court decision but a settlement, which means no legal
| precedent has been set and it wasn't determined whether
| their original behavior was actually illegal.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| It's amazing to me that Pinterest hasn't been sued for
| this, despite having much more blatant examples of
| copyright infringement that don't link back to the source.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Wow, I forgot about that--you're right. I guess I should
| rant at the lawyers instead. Thanks for the reminder!
| superasn wrote:
| You can thank Getty images(1) for that :/ I personally think
| Getty and most stock image results are pure spam and google
| should have just ditched them altogether and kept the
| original search. Now google image search is also shit and
| full of stock photo spam:
|
| (1) https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-
| get...
| sam0x17 wrote:
| There is actually a chrome extension that brings it back
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Maybe they can include these features in a premium service, and
| call it... Google+?
| superasn wrote:
| I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but I happily pay for
| Youtube premium and it's truly an amazing experience compared
| to the ad-ridden non-usable free Youtube. If Google created a
| similar Google premium where it had such features and no
| pesky ads I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.
| cpill wrote:
| yeah, but then your just encouraging them to make the free
| version a bad as is acceptable, like YouTube, and
| possibility create classes like on commercial airlines. you
| want the world divided into classes?
| DocTomoe wrote:
| We already have classes, and some people do pay premium
| for better service and quality happily.
|
| A world without that choice, where everyone's experience
| is equally bad ... how sad that would be. Just ask your
| average east-European soviet-era survivor.
| airstrike wrote:
| The world is already divided between "free" and "paid",
| so I'm not sure what you're getting at here
| joering2 wrote:
| I'm about to do this as well. Must be amazing experience.
| First when I stareted youtube on my FireStick it was one
| commercial 5 seconds. Then 2 comms 5 sec. Then 2 each 1:30
| seconds, but I can "skip ads" after 5 sec. Now its 2,
| sometimes 3, each 2:50 (I seen ad for some Christian church
| had 28 minutes!) and sometimes no "skip ads" button. The
| YT+ cost $18 per month... alot, until you realize huge
| freedom of not wasting 15 to 30 minutes a day when you want
| to do some research and watch some science-focused videos.
| booi wrote:
| Me too. and Youtube premium is insanely expensive for what
| it is.
| lupire wrote:
| Google already did it, and killed it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
| gigaflop wrote:
| An easy way to personally blacklist (and a bare minimum on/off
| switch if you need to toggle it) would make me so damn happy.
|
| Why should I be forced to look at a page full of purple links
| when searching for some specific programming topic? It feels
| like there's a bunch of potentially-fake developer blogs that
| copy/paste from Azure documentation, without adding anything
| novel.
| xmly wrote:
| So Kaji is still returning a bunch of links, right?
| taxonomyman wrote:
| Likely not the next Google but wanted to share:
| https://sanction.millionshort.com
|
| SANCTION is an experimental search engine powered by the popular
| experimental search engine Million Short - an experiment within
| an experiment. (This is alpha and buggy!) With SANCTION you can
| choose to remove results from any Country you wish, for whatever
| reason.
|
| Result removal is based on both the ccTLD and geographic location
| of where the page is hosted (a 1st degree connection). We have
| also provided the ability to remove results based on the ccTLD
| and location the scripts a particular page includes via script
| tags (a 2nd degree connection).
| davidkunz wrote:
| > The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out
| links.
|
| An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.
| luckydata wrote:
| I would prefer it returned "knowledge" instead of links but I
| hear you. Still, I think the fundamental flaw of all of this
| including Google is everyone looks for info in documents, while
| what you really need is a queryable knowledge graph where
| documents are linked to. Google made a half assed attempt at it
| but never took off, I'm looking forward to what that space
| could look like in the future.
| dvirsky wrote:
| Also, most of these examples in the articles are input boxes
| that spit out links :/
| educaysean wrote:
| Your answer reminded me of the Ford quote: "If I had asked
| people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
|
| I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, I just strongly
| believe that in 20 years we'll look back at our Googling years
| and wonder how we managed to find anything at all. Who know
| what the next pattern of information retrieval will be, but I
| personally think it'll be an even bigger jump than the jump
| from reference desks and encyclopedias to Google.
|
| Edit: okay, maybe not 20 years. Decades, perhaps.
| amelius wrote:
| Faster horses could have been better for the planet than
| cars.
|
| https://horses.extension.org/what-is-the-carbon-footprint-
| of...
|
| > The digestive process of horses produces far less methane
| than the digestive system of cattle and sheep. (...)
| Jyaif wrote:
| You want the information that you'll eventually get from
| visiting links, not the links themselves.
|
| In fact often you don't even want the information, you just
| want to solve a problem. I don't know about you, but I don't
| like learning all about air conditioners and spending time
| finding the product available in my area with the highest
| quality/price ratio that fits into my budget. I just want the
| best air conditioner for me.
| skt5 wrote:
| To go a step further - you probably don't even care about
| having the best air conditioner. You probably just want to
| reliably feel cool when it's hot at a reasonable cost.
| akvadrako wrote:
| There is no way you can trust an info box to give you that
| information.
|
| Providing links is the only thing that scales, since you can
| delegate the aggregation work to specialists and you van
| verify the source.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Never mind the creators of those sites. Do they really want
| the Reader's Digest version of their pages scraped and
| presented to a user without getting the click?
| convolvatron wrote:
| clicks == value is a big structural failure in the
| current web
| MockObject wrote:
| Folks have been working on answer engines since Ask Jeeves,
| but none has surpassed the utility of a good search engine.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I'd prefer answers to links.
| ezekg wrote:
| Exactly. Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam.
| Don't correct my term, especially when I'm searching verbatim
| (which I almost always want). It'd also be nice to be able to
| downvote certain results.
| egeozcan wrote:
| > Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam
|
| I think achieving this would be worth billions, at least?
|
| We really tend to underestimate the amount of spam on the
| internet.
|
| Google does badly here: it overcorrects and you get only
| super safe results. Yandex? Unless you get lucky, lots of
| spam.
| np- wrote:
| The problem is that for every $1 someone is willing to
| spend to not have spammy results, a spammer is willing to
| pay $10 for you to see it anyway. And the more
| "trustworthy" a platform grows, then the going price for
| manipulating it will keep rising until they hire the right
| MBA who decides to squander the company's reputation for a
| quick buck. Seems to be a recurring theme at least.
| wormer wrote:
| I think it would probably be worthless. SEO means money
| spent to the search engine company, and why improve UX when
| you could buy your seventh super yacht?
| ezekg wrote:
| Not every search engine needs to be an ads company,
| though.
|
| I'd pay /mo for a good one. Why not? Currently trying
| Kagi.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather
| than trying to detect whether something is spam or not,
| just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics,
| affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking
| signal.
|
| You'll still get spam if that's all that matches your
| query, but now all it takes is for someone to make a page
| matching the query without the aforementioned items to
| outrank the spam results. You wouldn't need to append
| "site:reddit.com" to your queries because the (mostly) non-
| commercial Reddit results would automatically outrank all
| the blogspam and listicles.
|
| If ads were downranked it would make a lot of
| spam/clickbait/listicles unprofitable overnight as they'd
| rank low enough that the costs of creating & maintaining
| the spam site/content would outgrow the returns from ad
| impressions.
| xtracto wrote:
| > Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step.
| Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or
| not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads,
| analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a
| negative ranking signal.
|
| This would be a really interesting experiment: A search
| engine that ranks websites by the amount of Ads and other
| spam that they contain.
| usui wrote:
| Kagi is experimenting with this already. It's one of the
| options to filter trackers in the page.
| bsparker wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I love working for You.com.
|
| SEO is killing Google and it needs to be addressed before
| it kills the internet. Having the opportunity to build an
| app that solves a search, instead of perpetuating a spam
| system, has been really rewarding... and we're just getting
| started.
| ezekg wrote:
| It's crazy how quickly I got quality results for "java
| ed25519 bouncy castle" on both You and Kagi. I literally
| spent all day on Monday using Goog and DDG trying to find
| implementation examples of Ed25519 and AES-256-GCM in
| Java, trying every variation of keyword, verbatim quotes,
| and site scope I could think of, and ended up using GH
| gist search instead to find what I was looking for. The
| results on Goog/DDG were literally all SEO spam sites
| copying content from SO or the Bouncy Castle docs that I
| had already read.
|
| I've been trying out Kagi as my default search engine,
| but will give You a try next.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I still get lots of spam on Google. Maybe it's better for
| English? I mostly search in Korean.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| A lot of the snooping does have an actual role with search - they
| need to guess the intended domain of the query [1]
|
| Welcome to my side project, a better organized directory of
| domain specific search engines, based on duckduckgo !bang
| operators
| https://github.com/MoserMichael/duckduckbang/blob/master/REA...
|
| The project also adds some explanation on the role of each search
| engine, also the page has been auto translated into several
| languages.
|
| Ideally this directory/thesaurus should help you to find a domain
| specific search engine, without the need of snooping on the part
| of the search engine.
|
| [1] of course they also need the snooping for targeted
| advertising, but that's a different story!
| qeternity wrote:
| > Everybody has different preferences of how they want a search
| engine to look and feel.
|
| This sounds like it was written by the infamous Dropbox
| commenter.
|
| No, most people have never given a single thought to this.
| masturbayeser wrote:
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| putting aside the (idiotic) negative framing of third-world
| countries, that are called developing countries nowadays
| anyway, they also represent 3/4 of the World's population.
|
| Doesn't seem so bad as a market.
| kyrra wrote:
| By what data?
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-
| sta...
|
| Android is 42% of the US market.
| IshKebab wrote:
| And 69% in third world Europe.
| GoatOfAplomb wrote:
| Agreed, but I think there's probably a profitable business to
| be made out of 1% of Google Search's users.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Maybe it should be titled "The Next Bing"!
| qeternity wrote:
| I think you're still off by an order or magnitude (or two).
|
| It might plenty to create a nice business, but a bit absurd
| to call it the next Google.
| joering2 wrote:
| I'm longing for categorized YouTube site... When doing home
| project I can navigate with tabs: home -> security ->
| outside cam installation -> softfit mounted -> how to strip
| softfit / how to run cable / how to drill and patch cables
| hole etc.
|
| Could be Wikipedia-style cultivated if enough people know
| and care.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Even if it's not everyone or most people, you can still segment
| the market into power-users and others.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > No, most people have never given a single thought to this.
|
| Probably because they're stuck in a local maximum with no idea
| how much better it can be. They may not even be aware that
| there are sites out there that have quality non-commercial
| content if all they've been given for the last decade is spam
| to the point where spam has been normalized.
| dogleash wrote:
| > We need new thinking to create something much better than what
| came before. In the last few years, different groups of people
| came to the same conclusion, and started working on the next
| generation of [foo]. For this new generation, [bar] is necessary,
| and [baz] are not an option. But that's where the commonalities
| end. Beyond that, they've all [zoz] in very different directions.
|
| This pitch voice makes me want to gouge my fucking eyes out.
| gotostatement wrote:
| > Everybody has different preferences of how they want a search
| engine to look and feel.
|
| I will never ever ever ever spend time going into the settings of
| a search engine to customize my search experience. Not when
| Google does a good enough job for most of my tasks.
| [deleted]
| codemk8 wrote:
| This reminds me of the user interface for pied piper's
| compression algorithm
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/G1K7J8gZ135x98mz7
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| I think the replacement of Google can't come sooner. Google
| invades our privacy and keeps users hostages for more money.
| Thanks to HN I am aware now how bad Google is. I always recommend
| people to switch to Amazon, Apple or MS. Google is EVIL.
| cmarschner wrote:
| People don't understand that Google is in a game of user data:
| you can only win this game if you have the largest market share,
| plus a plethora of additional data sources like ads. Microsoft
| invested 10s of billions into bing to get to the level it is at.
| But more clicks and user behavior data means you would win
| against bing.
|
| The only company that could theoretically build a web search
| engine due to the amount of data they have is Meta.
|
| Search is one of the biggest moats ever built.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| There's an opportunity for helping with enterprise data. There's:
|
| - Files (Box/DropBox/Google Drive/SharePoint)
|
| - Static(ish) Pages (Wikis/internal CMS's/Actual websites hosted
| on some random nginx/apache)
|
| - Web Apps (eg Internal Learning Platforms or helper HR apps or
| whatever)
|
| - Chat (Slack/Discord/Teams/??)
|
| - Email
|
| - Files stored on my actual laptop
|
| - Source Control (eg GitHub/GitLab/whatever ... which have their
| own wikis/pages/content)
|
| Is it just me? Anyone else feel like finding something across the
| above mediums is difficult?
| ktsayed wrote:
| I agree 100% but for corporate usecases many would be slightly
| uncomfortable giving Google (or a competitor) access to all of
| those to search though
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Remember Google Desktop? I want Google Desktop back. (Google
| Desktop was discontinued in 2011.)
| mikehollinger wrote:
| I do too!
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I want Google 2011 back.
| calbruin wrote:
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| My problem with google is that it often tries to figure out my
| search intent and then return results accordingly. the attempt
| might be commendable but for many types of searches they fail
| miserably. when they misread my search intent, the results are
| completely awful.
|
| and to make matters worse, 95% or more of the web isn't even
| being shown to users and so I keep getting the same stupid search
| results: which is fine for many cases but not all cases.
| sometimes I need more than just another post by NBC.
|
| I will say, google search is very good at technical searches,
| that's for sure. But, for example, they totally suck if you're
| looking information or doing research on financial matters or
| economics.
| donnoit wrote:
| Nitpicking here.. but the title and article are presumptuous are
| out-of-touch in 2022. Google is primarily an advertising company.
| Gmail, YouTube, Android, Mobile Apps, Google Home, Maps, devices,
| Search App all synergistically funnel users towards advertisers.
| G-Cloud and G-Pay may be among the few exceptions to that but
| also constitute Google. Point being: you cannot be the Next
| Google by building a better search engine, just like you can't be
| the Next Microsoft by building an email system better than
| Outlook or a desktop OS better than Windows.
| bambax wrote:
| Most of these features have been tried, and abandoned, by Google
| itself. It's possible Google stopped doing them because they hurt
| its ad business, but it's also possible (and likely) they
| confused users or were difficult to maintain and not actually
| used. (What's a "non-commercial website"? And what happens when
| it suddenly becomes commercial? And when there are millions of
| them? etc.)
|
| I predict that in 10 years Google Search will still be dominant,
| and we'll still be complaining about it.
| api wrote:
| I now use Kagi as my default and will definitely pay for it.
| kegi wrote:
| sorry for you :P
| asciimov wrote:
| The older I get the less I want to waste time on customizing
| things.
| calbruin wrote:
| logicx18 wrote:
| I've been using you.com for a couple of months now and I think it
| has a lot of potential for one reason: choice. You can choose to
| be in private mode where they don't track you or you can choose
| to see some sites higher than others. Feels more customizable and
| the layout feels new
| code2life wrote:
| I love you.com mobile app, just saw that they made a layout
| update, really cool
| boomer918 wrote:
| These solutions don't answer any of the fundamental problems with
| Google:
|
| - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will
| never use a paid service if a free one is available)
|
| - how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been
| fighting spam for decades)
|
| - how to personalize without invading privacy, e.g. Google had an
| option to search through your email in Google search...it's gone
| now, I wonder why?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will
| never use a paid service if a free one is available) - how to
| resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting
| spam for decades)
|
| The solution for o both of these might actually be a paid
| service. If you have a paid service, there is a possibility of
| it being profitable with much fewer users. As an example, let's
| say you have 1,000,000 users at $10/month, that is a
| $10,000,000/month which might be enough to run the service and
| provide a comfortable profit.
|
| With regards to the spam issue, the fact that you have a small
| user base would be to your advantage. Because there are so many
| Google users, it is in websites' economic interests to spend
| money to try to game the algorithms. With much fewer users,
| your paid search users may not be worth it for the sites to
| spend money trying to game your algorithms.
| avsteele wrote:
| It will still pay to put ads in to paying customer's feeds.
| It's more or less inevitable if the customers tolerate it. If
| you think that's impossible I'd point to how streaming
| services are now serving up ever more adds.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The spam issue can trivially be addressed by implementing
| actual penalties for rule-breakers. If it takes a long time
| to acquire a good reputation & ranking on the search engine,
| you're unlikely to risk it by doing something nasty in fear
| of your domain, keyword or brand name being banned for a long
| time.
| _jal wrote:
| Also important for anyone actually thinking of taking Google
| on, very few of the features listed are things Google can't
| easily do, too. Attacking their strengths is crazy. You better
| have something both crazy good and hard to replicate by someone
| with more money than god.
|
| Whatever replaces Google will be doing something that Google
| can't without causing them other problems. The first thing that
| comes to mind is make them choose traffic vs. advertisers (I
| don't know, if I had an idea of how to, I would not be writing
| this), but they're big enough that other wedges could start
| chipping away at their margins.
| darinf wrote:
| Actually, you are spot on. One simple feature of the Neeva
| app is that it shows inline search results as you type into
| the URL bar. This is because we aren't trying to show you
| ads, so we don't need you to visit the search results page
| (where Google and others show you those ads). We just show
| you the results straight away in the suggest experience. Now,
| this isn't going to show you everything you care about and
| you can still click to see the search results page. It is
| just handy to be able to quickly get to where you are trying
| to go and especially if it is likely to match what you are
| looking for (e.g., a wikipedia link). This is something
| Google cannot bring itself to do because it would be cost way
| too much in terms of lost ads revenue. There are other
| examples like this where Google and other ad-supported search
| engines just can't innovate, can't change the search
| experience. The current way of searching is too lucrative and
| there is too much business inertia around it. That's why
| Neeva is interesting and why I left Google to join and help
| :)
| jsnell wrote:
| But that is exactly how Google searches worked on desktop
| platforms for more than half a decade (Instant Search), not
| some kind of a new idea. Given how long they kept that
| feature on, it seems pretty obvious that it can't have been
| the kind of revenue killer you suggest. If you can serve
| and display search results for a given possibly partial
| query, you can obviously serve ads too.
| darinf wrote:
| I was talking about mobile. As for desktop, Instant
| Search was serving up full page results instantly, which
| included ads. That's a different thing altogether, and of
| course, in the case of Instant Search there was plenty of
| room for both sponsored results as well as real results.
| On mobile there isn't.
| mkmk3 wrote:
| I think this comment is a bit strange in the present,
| considering search engines like duckduckgo, which is
| basically Bing promoted with a "we don't track" advertising
| campaign (also hashbangs are pretty cool). DDG is not at
| google numbers, I know, but you don't need google numbers to
| make money. I don't think privacy is a very special angle to
| advertise from either, promising to remove amazon-affiliate
| blog-spam from results for example, would be a major feature
| in this space as far as I'm concerned. Being able to edit
| searches, and potentially gain some intuition for how the
| search space is set up, might be a much more significant
| feature, depending on how people take to it. It might flop
| but atm I'm excited to check it out
| _jal wrote:
| > but you don't need google numbers to make money
|
| The article is titled "The Next Google." I was responding
| to that, not "A Profitable Also-Ran".
| sanxiyn wrote:
| While "The Next Google for Wall Street" is one
| interpretation of "The Next Google", I am more interested
| in "The Next Google for me".
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Kagi is "users pay". Yes, average users won't pay, but I don't
| see how that matters to me as a Kagi user.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I guess it depends on whether you consider "The Next Google"
| to imply that it becomes a the dominant company in the space,
| used by every "average user", or if it's enough to be a niche
| solution for highly technical users who prefer it to Google.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| So the question will be "Will the average user prefer to
| feed on free junk food when healthy food is ten bucks a
| month?"
|
| Chances are there will be both.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Another important feature of Kagi that I'm paying close
| attention to is: they are currently privately bootstrapped as
| far as funding goes.
|
| To me the fact that Kagi is not currently VC funded is _huge_
| for me as far as adoption. Every customer facing VC funded
| startup I 've worked at inevitably starts to institute
| increasingly anti-user practices while grinning and talking
| about "customer first!"
|
| I know it's a huge ask, but if Kagi remains privately
| funded/non-VC I'll happily pay the moment I can.
|
| I've only been using the service for a short while now but
| have been enjoying it a lot. The ability to blacklist domains
| has already dramatically improved my search.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| A paid search engine? Bold. I'd pay if it could do anything
| close to what the old google code search could do. I miss it
| every day.
| josh_p wrote:
| It's free while they're in beta. There's a "waitlist" but
| put your email on it and you'll get an invite within a
| week. Give it a try.
|
| I've been using it for a couple weeks now on my work laptop
| and for programming-related searches its been great so far.
| And the usual annoyances that show up at the top of google
| and DDG don't show up on Kagi (geeks4geeks, etc).
| fallat wrote:
| It's actually so good I plan to pay when they start
| charging.
| spiderice wrote:
| It's really good in some ways, and very lacking (for me)
| in others. The search is fine. Good enough that I would
| switch. However, if I was out and about and quickly
| needed directions to Walmart, my normal flow with Google
| is
|
| Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> click on
| the map -> Maps app opens and starts guiding me
|
| When I switched to Kagi, the flow went like
|
| Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> top result
| is Walmart.com... no address to nearest Walmart to be
| found -> Close Safari -> Open Maps app -> search for
| Walmart
|
| And it got so annoying to have those extra steps. I know
| I can change my workflow and get used to it. But it
| wasn't just directions. It was other basic searches. Like
| if I needed a phone number for a local business. It drove
| me crazy. I really hope Kagi gets better at those sort of
| things. I want them to succeed. But it was just too much
| friction for me.
| richardsocher wrote:
| We found similar issues at https://you.com a while back.
| We just had to be good for more query families. Now we
| have both the walmart locations in a map app, eg
| https://you.com/search?q=walmart and coding related
| useful results, eg. https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I
| %20find%20all%20files%2...
|
| or https://you.com/search?q=pyspark%20filter%20array%20el
| ement
| Ennea wrote:
| Too bad you.com does not work in Firefox with the
| "beacon" function disabled (beacon.enabled set to false
| in about:config).
| richardsocher wrote:
| Hi Ennea, Can you help me understand why you make this
| particular change in the config?
| Ennea wrote:
| To be perfectly honest, I cannot even remember making
| that change, but also couldn't find any info on whether
| Firefox or some extension may have done this. I will
| leave it disabled, however, because its purpose seems to
| be analytics, and opting out of (at least some of) them
| this way seems like a good idea.
|
| Since disabling it this way removes the `sendBeacon`
| function from existence, you should just be prepared to
| properly handle its absence.
| smk_ wrote:
| I'll do the same as well. Kagi has literally improved my
| life a significant degree.
| href wrote:
| Same. I switched to it for a day just to give it a try
| and I never switched back. Absolutely willing to pay if
| the quality stays the same.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I do think there's actually some space opening up for paid
| services.
|
| From what I'm seeing, if you could create a bot free eco
| system, people will pay for it.
|
| The question is "can you make it bot free". This is gonna be
| the next trillion dollar company.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Raising the cost of spam would be a good first step.
|
| At the moment, spamming Google seems to be trivial with no
| long-term penalties if you get caught doing something nasty.
|
| A simple rule (manually enforced on a case-by-case basis)
| that would ban your brand/domain for a year if you get caught
| breaking the rules would get Pinterest into compliance from
| day 1 for example.
|
| Using ads/analytics/affiliate links as a negative ranking
| signal would make a lot of blogspam/listicles/clickbait
| disappear if their only funding method immediately makes them
| rank much lower below where they are no longer profitable.
| sshumaker wrote:
| This would be easily exploitable by a competitor. For
| example, search engines (used to) rank back links - that is
| other domains pointing to your domain. Some bad actors took
| advantage of this by creating rings of sites that voted
| each other up. Google responded by punishing the behavior.
| Then, competitors started taking advantage of this
| punishment by creating a network of sites that backlinked
| to a competitor, so they would get punished instead.
|
| This isn't a hypothetical example - Google actually
| includes in their webmaster tools a "disavow links"
| capability so sites can avoid getting punished for bad
| actors trying to make them look bad. But you can imagine if
| the penalties were even more severe other folks may get
| caught up in an unforgiving dragnet with no judge or jury
| and no way to appeal.
|
| My main point is that people will find ways to game the
| system, and usually sharp edges ("harsh punishments") on
| any system will be taken advantage of by actors, and
| unfairly penalize others.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Agreed, I'm not saying this is the end-game or that it
| will be perfect. But a simple rule (that's actually
| enforced) saying that you are forbidden to serve a
| different experience to the Google bot vs a normal
| visitor would take care of Pinterest for example, and
| they're not even doing _that_ despite it being a major
| complaint especially in tech-circles where Googlers no
| doubt lurk.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Average users may not pay, but specialized users may pay and
| pay more than enough to subsidize some sort of free tier.
|
| Not to mention, if free search engines keep devolving into an
| endless sea of spam, people may have no choice but to start
| paying. There's plenty of things out there people pay for not
| necessarily by choice but because there's nothing else out
| there that would accomplish the task at hand.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I would pay for an app that searches my stuff and provides some
| kind of intelligent agent for web knowledge.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Seems the first of these can be solved by reducing the scope.
| Do you really need a data center to run a search engine?
|
| Overall it seems very rare anyone ever considers this an
| engineering problem. Really, what's stopping you from running a
| search engine?
| sdoering wrote:
| Really? Or are you the one I should have refrained from
| feeding.
|
| But if you must know:
|
| First you need to collect a lot of content from the internet.
| From many different sites. With very different types of code
| structure. Broken html. More often than not behind some SPA
| JS code. Behind robots.txt files and bot protection efforts.
|
| So the first problem to solve would be building a crawler at
| scale. That is able to crawl anything your users might want
| to visit but don't know of yet.
|
| Then storage and retrieval. You need to store and update all
| this content your crawler collected. You need to enrich it
| with meta data and organize it for efficient retrieval. So
| that you can surface it to your users when they use your
| search engine. Indexing, structure, build g connections
| between content pieces. A lot of interesting things to think
| about.
|
| Then there is the front end. Make it easy to search, to
| refine. Surface relevant content for search queries.
|
| OH maybe I forgot, but you probably need to do a bit of
| engineering to make your system understand the users' search
| intent.
|
| This is relatively straightforward for a limited search and
| document space up to a few million entries in your DB. A few
| million documents should be doable with off the shelf parts.
|
| Bigger than that. I would applaud you if done with orders of
| magnitude lower than Google. Anyone would.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| All of this is a long series of solvable problems. I should
| know, I've dabbled in solving most of them. This is why I
| suggest actually taking a stab at it before you dismiss it
| as impossible.
|
| There are some problems that aren't as big as they seem.
| Parts of an SPA can't be reliably linked to anyway even if
| you find interesting text there, so you can just leave them
| out of the index.
|
| Likewise, there isn't as great of a need to keep a fresh
| index as it may seem. The odds of a document changing is
| proportional to how frequently it changes. This is a bit of
| a paradox, where even if you crawl really aggressively, the
| most frequently changing documents will still always be out
| of date. Most documents are relatively stable over time.
| You can actually use how often you see changes to a
| document or website to modulate how often you crawl it.
|
| The bad HTML is quite manageable. You really just need to
| flatten the document to get at the visible text. Even with
| really broken formatting, that's manageable.
|
| The storage demands are also not as bad as you might think
| (most documents are tiny, sub 10 Kb), there are ways to
| lessen the blow on top of that. Both text and indexes can
| compress extremely well. Since you're paying for disk
| access by the block, you might as well cram more stuff into
| a block.
|
| Most of the crawling concerns, in general, can be gotten
| around by starting off with Common Crawl (even if I do my
| own crawling, which also is finnicky but manageable).
|
| > This is relatively straightforward for a limited search
| and document space up to a few million entries in your DB.
| A few million documents should be doable with off the shelf
| parts.
|
| Right, so shouldn't the question be how to find the
| documents that are even candidates for being search
| results? Most documents are not ever going to be relevant
| to any query ever. Get rid of that noise and your hardware
| goes a lot longer.
|
| I'm running a search engine on consumer hardware out of my
| living room that can index 100 million documents. Go a bit
| higher budget than a consumer PC, and you've got 5 billion.
| That goes a long way.
| sdoering wrote:
| > Get rid of that noise and your hardware goes a lot
| longer.
|
| What qualifies? What defines signal, what noise? I agree,
| that a lot (probably nearly all) pages will receive very,
| very little traffic/search requests. But are these
| therefore not relevant?
|
| > I'm running a search engine on consumer hardware out of
| my living room that can index 100 million documents.
|
| That's extremely cool. I would love to know more. To me
| an impressive feat already.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think I was editing the comment while you were
| replying. Sorry about that. I was just adding to it
| though, didn't really rug pull on your response so I
| think it's fine.
|
| > What qualifies? What defines signal, what noise? I
| agree, that a lot (probably nearly all) pages will
| receive very, very little traffic/search requests. But
| are these therefore not relevant?
|
| Now this is a proper difficult problem with (probably)
| fairly subjective answers. I do however think it's
| something that warrants serious investigation. It's
| _probably_ a decent candidate for a machine learning
| model combined with some manual tweaking for sites
| similar to wikipedia or github that have absurd amounts
| of parallel historical content.
|
| Developing heuristics for this is a bit of a hobby horse
| of mine. It feels tantalizingly almost doable with just a
| little bit more resources and time than I have.
|
| > That's extremely cool. I would love to know more. To me
| an impressive feat already.
|
| Yeah it's at <https://search.marginalia.nu/>. I've built
| all the software myself from scratch in Java[1], and I'm
| doing my own crawling and indexing. The machine it's on
| is a Ryzen 3900X with 128 Gb RAM. Most of the index is on
| a single 1 Tb consumer grade SSD.
|
| I do use a MariaDB database for some metadata, but I
| think it will have to go as its hardware demands is
| becoming a serious bottleneck.
|
| [1] Despite using Java, I should say regarding the index.
| This is approaches sunk cost at this point. Building a
| search engine index is not something Java is at all
| suitable for, its limited low-level I/O capabilities is
| incredibly handicapping.
| nojs wrote:
| > Building a search engine index is not something Java is
| at all suitable for
|
| Worth pointing out that Lucene/Solr, the biggest open
| source player, is also Java!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| This is some of the nonsense you are dealing with
| implementing a search index in Java:
|
| * You can only allocate on-heap arrays of 2 billion
| items.
|
| * On-heap arrays have a massive size overhead in terms of
| GC book-keeping.
|
| * You can only allocate off-heap memory map 2 Gb at a
| time.
|
| * This also goes for memory mapped areas.
|
| * You have no control over the lifecycle of mapped memory
| and off-heap memory. They get cleared if and when the GC
| feels like it.
|
| * You have no madvise capabilities
|
| * The language _barely_ acknowledges unsigned types
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how much disk space does your index
| currently use, and what's the storage hardware (SSD or
| spinning rust)?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The reverse index is 180 Gb, on an SSD. I do think using
| SSDs are a major part of why this is possible on consumer
| hardware. I'd need _a lot_ of spinning rust to get the
| sub-100ms response times I can get it to when the index
| is warmed up.
|
| Should be said I do wear through this SSD at a pretty
| alarming rate. I'm at 193 TBW on this disk since I
| started using it as an index less than a year ago.
|
| I do have a bunch of mechanical drives I use for
| archiving and as intermediate working areas as well, but
| the index itself is on an SSD.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Thanks - I'd be keen to try this at some point, if
| anything just for personal usage. I've got more than
| enough hardware CPU & RAM-wise, if all it takes is
| getting a few TBs worth of solid-state storage it seems
| like a no-brainer.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Since you didn't seem to notice the username: you are
| replying to a person who developed a search engine alone.
| (So be prepared to applaud.)
| paulpauper wrote:
| The future search engine will look for content that is produced
| by humans . We don't need more info for the sake of having info.
| we need info that we can assume has been produced by an actual
| sentient being.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Since it's difficult to determine whether a human produced a
| particular piece of content, a good alternative would be to
| determine whether there's any incentive for a bot to produce
| such content, and target _that_ instead. Ads, analytics,
| affiliate links, etc.
|
| Sure, you could still make a bot that auto-generates blogspam
| without the aforementioned things and rank as high as before,
| but what's the point if you removed the very things that get
| you paid?
|
| There's plenty of things out there that are trivially spammable
| but outside of isolated cases (where the objective is to cause
| damage/annoyance rather than profit) nobody is spamming them
| because there's no profit to be made by doing so.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads
| are not an option.
|
| This is a red flag to me. I would like if this were true for a
| next gen anything, but in my experience truly next gen
| experiences - the kind that spread like wildfire and displace
| incumbents - have no reason to make promises about privacy or
| ads. Why would they, if they have a product that consumers want
| to use?
| chakkepolja wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| The person who asked 'is HN becoming an echo chamber?'
|
| would've got their answer by now.
| giberson wrote:
| IMO the next Google needs to use AI to classify results as
| fact/fiction and supposition/exposition etc. It will identify
| bias and even classify it (religious, political, cultural etc).
| With the abundant sources of information (and misinformation)
| ever growing, the job of a search engine will be to inform you
| about the information you are viewing and alert you to key
| factors that may be coloring the information.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| Google won because they started early and had a right algorithm.
| They then had the scale to grow with the internet. It would be
| very hard to start a new general-purpose search engine now
| (capital, monopoly, tech)
|
| Nobody seems to have The Next Big Idea for a better search engine
| yet.
| thwayunion wrote:
| LMMs are the next big idea for search.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| What's an LMM?
| thwayunion wrote:
| Sorry, a typo of LLM. gpt-3 et al.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Oh AI is the future of search? Maybe.
|
| I think the bigger reason why search isn't getting much
| better is that incremental technical improvements are
| being offset by Google trading their dominance for
| greater shareholder value. A safe business can take away
| or buy-and-bury features that are better for the customer
| but worse for the business's top line. Things like the
| Power Search API, or search that integrates with other
| platforms that hurt Alphabet owned businesses.
|
| Traditionally big innovation breaks some socio-political
| constraint on market participation. I don't see how AI
| will do that yet.
| thwayunion wrote:
| NLP generative models that you can interrogate with
| natural language prompts, and which generate coherent
| responses together with citations for sources, is
| definitely the future of search.
|
| I don't know anything about AI or the relationship
| between market participation and innovation. All I know
| is that LLMs are a useful tool that is already displacing
| search in many parts of my life.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I see. These sound like two different products, Google
| Search vs Google Scholar. I can imagine AI + natural
| language processing is dramatically changing search
| performance of dense-detailed text.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Yup ML is definitely the future of search and google is on
| the cutting edge of that so I expect they will continue to
| dominate
| notadoc wrote:
| None of these seem like the next Google. Too complicated.
|
| The earlier Google, when Google was at its best in both
| performance and results, was incredibly simple. It indexed the
| entire web. It returned keyword matched results based on
| relevancy. There was no customization required. No editorialized
| results. No Big Brothering the user against thoughtcrime or
| wrongthink. No promotion of The Current Thing. Just information,
| whether good or bad, true or false, as a search engine should be.
|
| Something that can replicate that will have a good chance of
| success, but I think the longstanding challenge to both Google
| and competitors is how to rank material in an increasingly siloed
| and ideological web filled with agendas, astroturfing, SEO
| optimization, and spam.
| sytelus wrote:
| Next Google isn't going to be index based search engine. Imagine
| a massive distributed neutral model which has digested billions
| of pages. The query isn't going to be keyword-ish like "kids
| cough medicine" but rather question with all details like "what
| is least problematic over the counter good cough medicine for a 9
| year old with asthma". The results aren't going to be bunch of
| links but rather aggregation, summary and organized composed
| information from various sources with citations. Imagine if a
| human had read all the pages and you asked him the same question.
|
| I would also predict search to be much more compute intensive and
| therefore more expensive. The ad model is likely not going to be
| sufficient to pay for compute resources.
| code2life wrote:
| This article is great, but you.com is just much better for my
| work (software engineer), it's also free. I'd not pay for a
| search engine
| polote wrote:
| None of the examples explained here impress me (with maybe the
| exception of Goggles by brave search).
|
| - The first example is not much more than Google with a styling
| chrome extension
|
| - The second doesnt bring anything more than Google when you are
| searching about webcontent. Some ideas on filters are interesting
| but this is not user friendly
|
| - You is powered by AI, so it is basicaly giving not what you
| want except when you ask for the general case (the case Google
| works pretty well for)
|
| - Andi is a chatbot. Which is basically Google + only the first
| answer
|
| Brave Search Goggles, (what most people call collections, what
| Pinterest calls a board, what Twitter call List) is for me what
| is going to be the real innovation of search Engine. They are a
| way to bring collaboration to enrich content, but nobody has
| cracked the UX to make it work yet
| dannywarner wrote:
| Did you try Andi search? It returns full search results
| alongside the answer and has full preview content for many of
| the websites, and the content is from the websites not Google
| or Bing's snippets. It's completely different to the way you
| described it.
|
| My biggest problem with it is that the alpha version still has
| errors and is weak for searches like local businesses. Also,
| big problem is I'm in Australia and everything is in imperial
| units. Having said that, however, I've been using it since it
| became available a few weeks ago and it has already improved a
| surprising amount. And the question answering if you ask
| specific-enough questions can blow your mind.
| polote wrote:
| It feels like the engine understand well the query, but for
| test searches it didnt show better results than Google, it
| actually gave me almost the same answers. So if they use
| their own index thats pretty good. But not the Next Google
| dannywarner wrote:
| You might be missing the point. Try a difficult question
| instead of a regular web search. Something like this. "Why
| did Twitter add Elon Musk to its board of directors, and
| what impact did that have on twitter's share price?"
|
| Then click on "View in Reader" on the results. This is not
| like Google dude.
|
| People on the Discord are trying crazy questions like that
| and reporting what it does good or bad on. It screws some
| up but it is cool. It finds stuff Google doesn't.
| polote wrote:
| I tested "What impact adding Elon Musk to Twitter board
| of directors had on twitter's share price" and I agree
| with you the result is much better that when you search
| the same thing on Google.
|
| To be honest that's impressive for complex queries
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| Search is the wrong way to look at it. It needs to answer
| questions, like an oracle.
|
| Anyway, Google is getting less relevant because the technology is
| getting better than "good enough", and any additional tech that
| Google adds is not really all that useful. It's like PCs. You
| don't need a faster one because your old one can do word
| processing just fine.
| zarzavat wrote:
| An oracle is how Google sees itself. However, their quest to be
| an oracle has come at the expense of losing their edge at
| searching the web. So now there is an opening for another
| service to be better at search than Google.
| rmah wrote:
| I think this was called AskJeeves. Google rolled over them
| without breaking a sweat.
| vasco wrote:
| This depends on user preference and query. Some users want
| answers to a question, other users genuinely want to find
| websites.
|
| If I search for "what's the weather now" I probably want to get
| an answer "like an oracle" as you say. But if I search for
| "riaa vs napster" I don't want an "oracle answer", I want a
| list of several websites so that I can learn more about the
| case. I'd like a search result for court documents, but also
| commentary from news websites and blogs, and maybe wikipedia. I
| want to open those tabs and come out the other way with more
| information, but there was no "oracle answer" to be provided.
| masswerk wrote:
| I'd like my search engine to be not too intelligent. Sometimes,
| humans suppose to know what they are meaning.
|
| So
|
| - optional verbatim and prioritized terms (like Google once did
| it)
|
| - optional logical operators (and, or)
|
| - a separate input box for context (either, specific terms like
| "product", "shopping", "legal", or some assorted terms to
| indicate a field of meaning and/or associated concepts, time
| span, etc)
|
| It's the latter, where the search engine may shine and users may
| evoke its sophisticated intelligence, but, please, don't
| reinterpret the principal search terms to concepts that maybe
| just related. I do understand that this may not be for everyone,
| nor may it be the sole interface, but there should be a niche for
| this.
|
| Example, wanting to find something about the early press coverage
| of System/360:
|
| - Search term: (IBM || "big blue") && System/360
|
| - Context: news 1965,1966 computer
| wppick wrote:
| If there is any next Google (or Google Search competitor) it
| would be, in my mind, something like Wolfram Alpha. I can search
| for things like today + 160 days and get much more rich results
| (as a simple example). Google does have some features like this
| already such as weather/climate, calculator, translate, etc. This
| area however is much weaker than I would like it to be. Wolfram
| can tell me how long it will take me to get a sunburn in my
| current location, and all kinds of stuff like that. Virtual
| assistants like Siri and "OK Google" might be heading in this
| direction, but why can't I ask "Ok Google, I will take a photo,
| then can you compress it and send it as an email attachment to
| Dave from work." Or something along those lines...
| garbagetime wrote:
| I thought 21e8 was the next Google.
| microtherion wrote:
| Buying the kagi.com domain for a search engine might be
| suboptimal SEO for people with some longer memories:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and
| infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi
| has done a great job of solving some of the UX and privacy
| problems endemic in online search these days, but at the end of
| the day they could be snuffed out at the whim of the big search
| providers (Google, Bing) if they decide to kick them off until
| they can get their own indexing solution off the ground. If an
| alternative search engine reached Bing's level of popularity,
| this would undoubtedly happen.
|
| The same goes for DuckDuckGo and others. All of the above use the
| Bing search API for the majority of their web results which for
| most use cases is not economically sustainable.
|
| I do think there is a large swath of users who will pay a
| subscription for a truly great search engine offering, but
| indexing has to be at the core of this offering, at least for me.
| If users realized this is just Bing results with a few
| enhancements and additional result sources mixed in, they might
| not be as willing to pay for what they could technically get for
| free elsewhere, albeit with significantly less privacy.
|
| That said I wish Kagi all the luck in the world. As the original
| dev who planned out and built the initial backend implementation
| in Crystal and put together their early engineering team, I can
| at least say they are building on rock-solid, very fast and
| privacy-oriented foundations, and this is a truly web-scale
| product in terms of the infrastructure design.
| guntars wrote:
| Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the
| infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier
| now than it was in the early 2000s. It's the ranking that's the
| hard part. PageRank helped put Google on the map and they've
| battled the hordes of low-ethics SEO practitioners ever since.
| I think it's generally agreed that PageRank wouldn't cut it
| today.
|
| I tried Kagi as the default search engine for a few days and
| realized just how many little things Google does that I prefer,
| but never noticed until now. Not strictly related to search
| results, but things like converting units (Kagi has this, but
| it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same),
| shopping results, the QA answers, etc. It's a ton of work to
| implement all that. For now I switched back, but I'll keep an
| eye out.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Know how you'll find the next Google? Same way those of us over
| 45 found this one.
|
| A respected friend or colleague will tell you that the next
| Google just works better. That's what made Google search win: it
| just worked better. It's now I found out about it and probably
| how you did if you're pushing 50.
|
| We didn't care about pagerank or know what it is. That came after
| we used it and wanted to know why it worked better - or we wanted
| to manipulate he results.
|
| We didn't read a blog post telling us what's good.
|
| We were using another search engine and Google arrived on the
| scene and it was just WAY better. I was using alltheweb. Friends
| were using other engines. In weeks, everyone smart and productive
| was using Google.
|
| Google/Alphabet may be a large company now, but never forget how
| they started. They were just so good we couldn't ignore them.
|
| That's how good the next Google will need to be.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The problem with going up against Google isn't competing with
| features, or even relevance. No one cares about features beyond
| basic relevance, and relevance isn't enough to get people to
| switch.
|
| You have to provide an excuse, or perhaps an experience, that
| gets people to come back. Just one niche, is all you need.
|
| You're not competing with Google the search engine, or even
| Google company. You're competing against google the verb.
| legohead wrote:
| I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how
| nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple
| advice. I did a bunch of online research before I booked things,
| but man was it painful. There are so many copy-cat blogs who just
| throw together a bunch of basic information with no real research
| done in order to get those clicks/adwords.
|
| For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple enough.
| Circus Circus actually has a waterslide, but if you dive deeper
| (read a hundred reviews manually) you find out parts are often
| shut down, and the hotel itself is quite trashy and smells bad
| and has bad service (explains the really cheap room rate). But do
| you find that information on blogs? No way, they just include all
| the hotels with pools and copy in the verbiage directly from the
| hotel websites or other blogs.
|
| There's probably an actual traveler blog out there that tells you
| all this and has great information, but it's hidden by all the
| SEO optimized trash blogs.
|
| And this example can be applied to so many things we do all the
| time. Try to find a product you want on Amazon without spending
| half a day sorting through reviews and trash blogs.
|
| So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service.
| I'd pay a few bucks to call up a service to answer these
| questions definitively for me.
| amelius wrote:
| The future is trust networks. Where you trust a number of
| friends, who trust other people, etc. and you can use a matrix
| of trust to retrieve review scores, etc.
|
| Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the
| reviews from other HN users ...
| ip26 wrote:
| Isn't that called a travel agent?
| trh0awayman wrote:
| There used to be a search engine in the mid 2000s that was just
| like this.
|
| It was called ChaCha:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)
| smlacy wrote:
| See also Aardvark:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)
|
| Acquired by Google in 2010 and ...
| pooper wrote:
| Fifty million dollars would change my life. I would take a
| guaranteed fifty million dollars payout over one in ten
| chance to get a billion dollars.
|
| What are the chances that I cumbents will stand by idly as
| the "next Google" just takes over? Best case I can think of
| is the incumbent imitates the upstart and becomes better.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| Yep. That was the idea. 'voice assistants' came along, smart
| phones took off, and cell speeds became fast enough to make
| ChaCha untenable.
|
| Source: worked at ChaCha.
| sizzle wrote:
| Wow where did you go after! AskJeeves?
| SahAssar wrote:
| > For example: best hotel pool in vegas.
|
| I get what you're saying but, does anyone really need the
| "best" here? why not "good" or "great"?
| [deleted]
| anticristi wrote:
| When I visited my mom in Romania, I was amazed that hair
| dressers filled *exactly this purpose*. It almost felt like you
| were "Googling" for 30 minutes and getting a haircut as a side-
| effect.
|
| Customer: How is the newly opened Spa?
|
| Hair dresser: Other customers said the water was cold.
| zie wrote:
| Not limited to Romania. Librarians are also pretty fabulous
| for local information and free.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Amex has a really good concierge that handles this. And it's
| free with most cards. Absolutely underrated, especially when
| you're traveling internationally
| KerryJones wrote:
| Exact same experience except with Iceland. Google "top
| attractions in Iceland" and you get a bunch of garbage posts
| telling you about the Blue Lagoon. I ended up reading an entire
| book on iceland tourism and perusing many blogs and reaching
| out to many friends, and the Blue Lagoon is definitely not one
| of the top spots.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| "best x in vegas" + reddit
|
| Duh.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > So, personally, I think the future will be actual human
| service.
|
| I love the idea. However...
|
| You have invented an influencer hellscape. Not to mention the
| complete subjectiveness of so many things.
| [deleted]
| hackernewds wrote:
| Imagine all these humans will be paid / corrupted by the
| destinations if they hold outsize influence
| telchior wrote:
| A paper was posted here a few days ago about how to use
| individual tasks on crowdsourcing marketplaces to put together
| articles on complex topics:
| https://joe.cat/images/papers/knowledge-accelorator.pdf
|
| I can imagine the first two steps of their process working for
| a human-assisted search machine. Specifically, the "finding
| sources of information" and "filtering information" steps. But,
| I'd imagine the human workers would still need more complex /
| configurable search tools than Google (which is probably what
| the workers in the study used to find their sources).
| adventured wrote:
| I agree with everything you said about the spam blog problem.
|
| And yet Travelocity (and others) would have told you how
| terrible Circus Circus is in five minutes or less.
|
| 22,000 reviews, 3.2 stars out of 5, among the worst in Vegas
| (among major hotels) with a gigantic number of reviews. Its
| room rate alone helps you to begin immediately forming a good
| conclusion about its quality. This isn't a subtle thing.
|
| Oh, but that's not realiable, one might say. Yes it is. It does
| a great job of approximating the quality of the hotel in
| question, and it's an exceptionally easy and fast means to
| narrow with. It isn't a perfect approach (is it really a 3.1 or
| 3.3 star quality?!?) and doesn't need to be, it just needs to
| let you know that Circus Circus is garbage, and it does exactly
| that.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great
| _actionable_ recommendations within an hour or two for:
|
| - good coffeeshops
|
| - tacos
|
| - Korean grocery stores
|
| - places that have traditional style al pastor tacos
|
| - finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store
|
| - finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe)
|
| - hot chicken
|
| - canolis
|
| and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you posted to
| the /r/vegas subreddit asking about the coolest hotel pool in
| vegas, you'd get a bunch of up to date info.
| ggpsv wrote:
| This tends to work for me as well but signal vs noise ratio
| has worsened over time. Despite Reddit's questionable
| decisions in the past years it still has useful information
| for all sorts of things.
|
| Reddit's own search has become less reliable so I search via
| DDG like `<query> 'site:reddit.com'`, falling back to `!g
| <query> 'site:reddit.com'` if the former doesn't get me
| anywhere.
| airstrike wrote:
| > Reddit's own search has become less reliable
|
| Not sure what you mean... It's always been an absolute pile
| of shit
| wormer wrote:
| Yea I always just put in the question I want into DDG and
| then just add reddit in the end. It's so much better than
| any blog or anything because at least it gives the
| semblance of real users giving their opinion.
| hackernewds wrote:
| What is DDG?
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| DuckDuckGo
| nostromo wrote:
| That's because Reddit is one of the few places left on the
| web that is open (aka: not a walled-garden like Facebook) and
| has people talking to people without financial incentive. HN
| is another.
|
| Reddit is changing fast though. It's becoming more walled-off
| every day as they push to become the next Pinterest, and it's
| increasingly plagued with spam and bad actors.
|
| Google brought this upon us by lifting SEO spam websites to
| the front page while pushing down helpful websites written by
| humans without incentive, like Ask MetaFilter.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| I have found that this only works if you take recommendations
| with the understanding that you're almost always getting "the
| reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning
| might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated
| thing, and have bonded over that to the point that other
| recommendations between each other are heavily weighted and
| rapidly creates a "go to" response.
|
| Example: check r/sandiego for [insert type of taco]
| suggestions. There should be thousands of options if you're
| actually from San Diego but you'll get 5 or 6 at most that
| stand out a lot, and 1 or 2 that get the most up votes or
| responses.
|
| Now that may in fact be the "best" (depending on your and
| their definition) but you might also find that it's just the
| restaurant that has the most interesting social media
| presence, or the one you go to in order to signal that you're
| "one of us". Maybe that's exactly what you want, maybe it's
| what you want to avoid, but either way it's important to know
| the mood and trends of the subreddit as well as general
| reddit culture (and don't tell me it doesn't exist).
| Nition wrote:
| I think this is a really good observation, and "bonded
| over" is a good term. At the extremes, people will even
| recommend the thing and disparage other options when they
| haven't tried either one themselves. They're just trying to
| be part of the group.
| Youden wrote:
| You need to be careful about reading the subreddit rules when
| you do this though. In my for-locals subreddit tourists
| asking questions like this were a plague, even when there was
| a very clear and prominent rule forbidding any kind of
| tourism content.
|
| Also important to at least try searching at first. So many
| people thought they had a super original question but it'd
| really been asked and answered to death already.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| > So, personally, I think the future will be actual human
| service.
|
| So...a travel agent? Nothing beats talking to a person one on
| one who is actually trained to do this stuff and personalize it
| to their client.
|
| We've come full circle.
| system2 wrote:
| Tell me this engine can serve millions of queries per second with
| all of these features.
|
| Will the search take 15 seconds or 1.5?
| kegi wrote:
| I personally think this new search engine sucks. There's 1000
| good reasons to create a new search engine to fight Google but
| they don't get it, they don't have vision and their features just
| sucks.
|
| "[...]We do not log or associate searches with an account.[...]"
| why would I trust that and why would a create an account in the
| first place ?
| luckydata wrote:
| Good luck with that. The approach is all wrong.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these
| alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this
| persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering,
| because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with
| having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps
| is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful.
| There's no login, no user chosen social graph, everything's
| abstracted away.
|
| And that's by the way why Google is still successful as well.
| Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a
| question in and it gives you answers without needing to do
| anything else. The only way to beat that is to make it even
| better while not making it more complicated which is very hard to
| do.
| nate wrote:
| There's a book I love to send people:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001REFRZG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect
| (old school. no kindle. just hardcover. :) ) "Something Really
| New" How innovation works. First question in the book is: you
| need to come up with a new idea for a faucet company. Customer
| research says: Users want lots of variety in their faucets.
| Everyone then immediately comes up with the same exact ideas:
| faucets that are easily customizable. Faucets that have skins.
| Etc.
|
| When really innovative stuff is just about removing steps. If a
| process has 10 steps, remove as many as you can, and now you
| have something truly innovative on your hands.
|
| I feel like Google did exactly that. Pre Google steps: search
| for XYZ, wait, check first link, second link, spam, spam, check
| next page. Post Google: search for XYZ, get XYZ.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| eh... except google is now basically just the pre-google
| product: Search for XYZ, wait, skip promoted link, skip
| second promoted link, third promoted link is actually the
| direct competitor to what I fucking searched, click result
| that was on top ten years ago, but is now almost below the
| fold.
|
| Or worse - Search for exact term: get a page full of "Missing
| X - must include X" links hidden in tiny text below a result,
| click "Must include X" get the SAME FUCKING RESULTS again,
| click tools, click the dropdown, select verbatim, finally see
| decent results
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Of course blog and SEO spam is such a problem on Google now
| that it looks more similar to your Pre Google steps.
|
| I don't know how to easily fix that though. Simply "crawling
| the entire internet" is still not a simple problem, let alone
| doing something more useful with the result than google can.
| Ahrefs is an interesting business but not what people mean
| when they say the next google. "Machine learning" but I think
| google is all over this already (and has been for years).
|
| Google does a bad job at getting user feedback about results
| while reddit does better so people search reddit, maybe a
| hybrid is an opportunity.
| theiz wrote:
| Google has these options, but these are solved by AI. So with
| that you come in a catch22: people want personalised content,
| but rather not have their data given away. If you open YouTube
| without login, you get all kind of rubbish so you want to
| login. Probably this is by design: you want what google wants:
| results based on your data. Both happy. Now if there was a
| privacy friendly way of doing this, I am all for using that. I
| just don't see how, and I don't see who wants not to gain a
| profit if you would have that data. So the next google probably
| is another google.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| If Google has these options, why can't I search for any image
| and have it not return any Pinterest results? If I search
| with -site:pinterest.com, I get Pinterest's million alternate
| tlds, if I just search for -pinterest, Google decides, in
| their infinite wisdom, that I didn't actually mean that and
| ignores it.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a
| question in and it gives you answers without needing to do
| anything else.
|
| And that's great if it works! The problem is that once it fails
| (and, at least in my use-case, it does so quite often), working
| with it becomes an absolute pain.
|
| I, too, would prefer an omniscient box perfectly answering my
| questions. But it clearly doesn't exist. And a box with screws
| to adjust so that I can eventually find what I'm looking for is
| the second best thing.
| rdiddly wrote:
| All you have to do to improve on Google at this point is to do
| less, make it less bad, i.e. a process of removals, not
| additions. Just do the same thing, but without all the shitty
| extra stuff. But then what's the business model? (Since that is
| in fact most of the shitty stuff. Oh sure there's still the SEO
| spam, and you're in that arms-race, like it or not, even if
| you're not a _successful_ search engine, so you do the best you
| can with that.)
|
| Speaking of doing less, I would love to see the web be more
| hierarchical or semantic (but not necessarily "the semantic
| web" as it's currently conceived). Google itself is what made
| the world reorganize itself. A world where that kind of search
| exists will reorganize itself around search, maybe not always
| for the better.
|
| Concrete example of going from a hierarchical/semantic world to
| a search-based one: Instead of finding your socks in the sock
| area, which is inside your clothes area, which is inside your
| "do private things" area, let's say now every sock has a
| trackable chip in it similar to an AirTag and you just say
| "Alexa where's the nearest pair of socks?"
|
| Pros:
|
| No effort spent on putting your socks in the sock place. Just
| throw them anywhere.
|
| Instant access to socks.
|
| Cons:
|
| Big Tech, with all its limitations and machinations, now
| mediates and controls the relationship between you and your
| socks.
|
| You succumbed to the temptation to slack off, and now there are
| socks everywhere. The Roomba doesn't even work right.
| distrill wrote:
| > just do the same thing as google
|
| i know what you're saying, but this isn't exactly a
| triviality
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 100% agree. Want a search engine that is better in every way
| than Google? Give me Google from 2010 or so:
|
| 1. Much clearer delineations between ads and organic search
| results.
|
| 2. For anything remotely commercial it wasn't the case that
| literally the first 4 or 5 results were ads, pushing organic
| results below the fold.
|
| 3. No AMP carousel
|
| 4. There wasn't a vomitous amount of those "tidbit" sections
| - there were only a couple and they were usually helpful.
| planb wrote:
| Those 4 points can be solved by ad blockers or other
| browser extensions. The real problem is that the results
| below the ads are also ads, seo spam and clickbaity stuff.
| simion314 wrote:
| >I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people
| love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't.
|
| People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to
| do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster
| or better people want the customization. At my job we have
| paying users that requests features that indeed are work
| related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded people
| will disagree and they prefer to bend their work to fit a
| guru-s vision.,
|
| Now my turn to ask, why do people like you think there is a
| generic and basic solution that works at the same time for the
| casual user and for the user that has a lot of tasks to
| accomplish? Is there some theorem that shows this, like "The
| GNOME theoreme of product design, keep removing features until
| the shit convergence to the local minimum where you find the
| minimum product and the minimum set of users possible.
| notriddle wrote:
| The biggest problem with GNOME, and with Mozilla, and with
| almost everyone who's commenting on their choices, is that
| all of them are shuffling deck chairs around on the Titanic.
|
| The Titanic didn't sink because of the arrangement of deck
| chairs, and Mozilla didn't sink because of any features they
| did or didn't provide (and GNOME didn't fail to achieve
| significant market share in the first place because of
| features either). The actual problem doesn't have anything to
| do with the stuff on the deck at all.
|
| It's the one-two combination of vendor-lock in and bottomless
| marketing budgets. Since most of the value of the Windows
| platform and the Web is the immense amount of stuff that's
| built on top of it, there's a huge lock-in effect that
| prevents you from even reaching parity, much less exceeding
| it. And in order to overcome the marketing budget and pure
| inertia, you need to be ten times better, not just on par.
|
| If GNOME becomes as usable as Windows, it won't have anything
| to do with what they actually do in the desktop environment
| itself one way or the other, whether it's continuing on the
| road they take now, or reverting everything back to the way
| GNOME 2 was, it's totally irrelevant. _GNOME becoming usable
| will be entirely because of Valve investing in Wine, combined
| with a whole bunch of other apps moving to Electron and
| shipping Linux versions because heck why not?_
|
| Unfortunately, while they are probably already on par with
| Windows, they aren't ten times better than the Mac:
|
| * The Mac has a bottomless marketing budget. Good luck
| competing with that, GNOME.
|
| * They've shown a lot more restraint than Microsoft has,
| probably because macOS is considered a niche product to round
| out their catalog rather than being their one and only
| operating system like Windows is for Microsoft. They have
| even reversed course on a few anti-features, like adding back
| USB-A ports to the Macbook Pro even though it made the laptop
| slightly thicker. And unlike Windows RT, they didn't lock
| down the ARM Macs.
|
| * Those tectonic shifts I mentioned that made Linux usable?
| They also make the Mac usable, because Wine is open source
| and Electron is basically its own operating system. Anything
| truly good that GNOME does, Apple can copy it just like
| Chrome copied all the really good stuff from Firefox.
| simion314 wrote:
| The issue in open source is with projects with not a strong
| leader ship , then you get some wanna be designer copying
| Apple because they read some book and now he thinks that
| shit needs to look and feel different. Then you have
| developers that want to work on new cool stuff and not
| maintain existing code, so every few years you get a full
| reset but because of inexperience or incompetence the new
| version is buggy for a few years, it gets fixed but then
| the developers are bored and want to rewrite it using some
| new ideas/tech.
|
| What would work IMO is someone with money paying the
| developers and the designer but force them do do customer
| support, you don't play with the new shit until most
| tickets are resolved and customers waiting for response are
| satisfied. maybe a paid support would help too.
| notriddle wrote:
| Did you reply to the wrong comment? Because nothing you
| said has anything to do with any of what I wrote. It's
| not even a counterargument. It just reiterates the
| original point, which I don't entirely disagree with, but
| don't think has anything to do with GNOME's lack of
| market success.
|
| Market success has almost nothing to do with product
| quality. Well, okay, it does, but only in the sense that
| you need to not actually be a total fraud. You can get
| away with dismal quality as long as your marketing is
| good [1]. In formal terms, software development is a
| loser's game [2].
|
| [1]: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26660679
|
| This implies that the churn you're complaining about has
| nothing to do with market success. You might not like it,
| but that doesn't mean the failure of Linux on the desktop
| is actually caused by it.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| MacOS is the perfect example: it's both easy to use and the
| preferred choice by many professionals.
|
| "Hold on", you say, "professionals want _options_ , like
| user-expandable RAM etc". No, that's the misconception about
| the concept of a "professional". Unless you are a hardware
| engineer, tinkering with your notebook's internals is the
| absolute opposite of professionalism, its either a completely
| misguided waste of time and money, or a perfectly fine hobby.
|
| Real professionals get work done. Customizing their workspace
| is something they feel ashamed to do, because it's
| procrastination at best.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Because most users would rather not have to customize
| anything. It's funny that your example is gnome, as most
| users are not tinkerers and would never use Linux on the
| desktop unless it were made so simple that (again) they would
| not have to customize anything.
|
| Obviously there are exceptions, and some tools are so
| advanced that it's necessary to be able to customize them. No
| argument from me there. But for most tools, and most users,
| there's just no hunger for customization. Almost nobody wants
| to have to manage an array of options to do a web search.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Being forced to manage an array of options is very
| different from being able to if the need arises.
| simion314 wrote:
| I agree, there are users that don't use customization for X
| but they use it for Y, so you get the idiotic philosophy
| that removes customization from X and Y. So you get GNOME
| fanboys that love that 10 features they personally don't
| use are removed but when the ones they use is removed their
| brain finally realize that not all people use the exact
| same options, the exact same workflows etc.
|
| What is even more shitty is when soem feature is removed
| like the System Tray and first they pretend they do not
| understand what you mean when you say this feature is very
| important, then after someone wastes his time to explain a
| n=th time again how working people use the System Tray
| features at work or at home the GNOME dude finally admits
| the issue and offers some workarounds that are not
| equivalent but are "possible to do but with lot more work".
|
| On short, some people do work on the computer, some people
| use search engines for work to find relevant stuff, this
| people do not ask features like "please use the exact same
| padding everywhere because I am OCD" or "please make those
| buttons/corners or edges smoother so I don't cut my tongue
| when I lick my screen", this people want the customization
| to do a task.
|
| I am not sure why simple people have a SEGFAULT if they
| randomly end up in the Advanced section of a settings
| section, what do they expect when they open Advanced?
| Google main page has a small link for Advanced search see
| https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 how
| many GNOME users got hurt by this link existing?
| guelo wrote:
| It's a dead end if you are an ads business obsessed with
| reaching billions of eyeballs that don't want to spend any of
| their attention.
|
| It is not a dead end if you're building a tool.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| It never fails to amaze me how many people, apparently
| triggered by these omens, come out and say this as if there was
| never such a thing as a default configuration. "But you MUST
| configure!" Um, no.
|
| Google has preferences also.
| nicce wrote:
| > That's why TikTok is so successful.
|
| More likely, it exploits human's cognitive weaknesses
| successfully with a simple way. It learns how how people get
| their dopamine dose. And there is no going back. You need more
| and more, more extreme content. More polarization. All you need
| to do is to open app and get that dose. Is it the same for
| search engine?
|
| And people make more crazy stuff to get views. How this ends?
| Not well, probably.
| drusepth wrote:
| >You need more and more, more extreme content. More
| polarization.
|
| This seems a little sensational. Many people (myself and most
| of my friends included) don't see _any_ "extreme" content or
| polarization. A quick scroll through my feed is largely
| nothing but magnet fishing, frog tracking, cats, DIY
| projects, and geologists talking about rocks. It's enjoyable
| and arguably a dopamine dose on-demand, but not necessarily a
| road down more "extreme content and polarization".
| nicce wrote:
| I agree that it is a little sensational, as it happens
| mostly when you like only limited groups of things. It gets
| harder for algorithms to polarize if you "mess up" with the
| algorithm and like many different kind of things.
|
| To clarify, I don't mean with "extreme" necessarily a bad
| things, just content which gives you "extreme" emotions.
| Budged wrote:
| I don't think it is fair when we frame products as being
| objectively and consciously nefarious in this way. Conjuring
| images of executives rubbing their hands together, giddy with
| enjoyment that the war is leading to more exciting content.
|
| These are firms that are meeting a legitimate need- and
| that's the need to feel connected. Tik-tok provides that, and
| very effectively. Plenty of people get genuine enjoyment out
| of their product, and meaningful connections do happen thanks
| to Tik-tok
| nicce wrote:
| Maybe it is not fair, but that is what happens and
| eventually it is acknowledged by executives, which leads
| for new design decisions based on that on TikTok and other
| platforms to get more money and users.
|
| I don't think they fulfill some gap of the need of feeling
| of connected in a real way. More like a bandage. We have
| seen the development of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram.
| Their audience is fading on countries who have used them
| longer time, what went wrong? How is TikTok so good that
| they try to adapt it on their platforms as well? No way to
| connect?
|
| Short video clips which might or might not lead for a real
| conversation. They might offer escape from reality in your
| lunch break at work.
|
| I understand the perspective of "feeling connected". It
| brings people together with similar mindsets on
| entertaining way. Or at least people who seems to enjoy
| similar things.
|
| On the contrary, is it different than some oldschool cults
| or religions? Cults which are using psychology writings as
| base for feeling mutual understanding of themselves. Or
| religions which share same ideologies and use it as a
| solution for their problems?
|
| Technology is advancing, is TikTok a modern solution for
| finding your role and place in the world when it does not
| make sense and you feel you are alone with your thoughts?
| Maybe it is, maybe it then fills some gap.
|
| I agree that TikTok is providing entertainment (well, that
| is what dopamine usually is). It is easier to hook people
| on short videos which are done by global audience versus
| Netflix where there is a limited amount of material and
| they cost a lot to make, when audience on TikTok is mostly
| making them free and you just pick suitable ones with your
| algorithms for showing the other audience.
|
| However, there are many problems in this. How it can be
| abused and how it creates people living on their own
| bubble, like people on some extreme Facebook groups. When a
| narrative includes only content that boosts your own
| thoughts, a reality can be lost. We need some research on
| this matter, but for some reason social media companies are
| doing their best to prevent that.
|
| Someone people also really get addicted on the
| entertainment and cannot stop using it. Well, same thing
| can apply also for alcohol, but is addiction risk closer to
| opiates for example?
|
| I don't really believe that executives are thinking for the
| best of the people, so optimizing platforms to hook users
| is a quite dangerous play.
| ip26 wrote:
| And do you have to carefully configure it for the ideal
| dopamine hit? Do you have to configure a switchboard to get
| the extreme content you crave?
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| There are plenty of profiles for "people".
|
| This is the thing. I'm the power user in my circle. People
| comes to me for suggestions about pretty much anything
| involving tech. Sometimes just because they see me with
| different stuff.
|
| So if I'm not the average user I may look for other options, as
| other people like me may do. If I find such options reasonable
| for the average user, that will be my recommendation to them.
| melony wrote:
| Tiktok didn't dominate by appealing to niche tech power
| users.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| TikTok's purpose and use-case is completely different from
| that of a search engine.
| airstrike wrote:
| Tech power users are still a niche in virtually every use
| case except maybe HN
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Tech power users (and power users in general I would say)
| might have more money to throw at the problem.
| "Nicheness" isn't necessarily a bad thing if your niche
| is profitable. I heard somewhere that power-grid-scale
| transformers are have insanely long lead times so the
| industry most be pretty niche (when's the last time _you_
| needed one of those?) and yet I think we can all agree
| that the equipment is valuable and I bet those
| manufacturers are making bank.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Tiktok optimizes for momentary engagement and fast-paced
| social content. It turns out that's a niche that people
| want filled, and the rapid bouncing of ideas between users
| has created some very fun content which sometimes escapes
| containment so I can watch it. But not everything is going
| for the same goal, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if
| more than a few players could really get in on that space.
| For other use cases, customization may well win out over a
| totally frictionless experience. A search engine is a tool,
| and benefits from more options much more than Tiktok does.
| Nition wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for a little while. The customisation
| isn't really necessary - the defaults work fine - but it's
| quite nice to have when you want it. I've banned Pinterest from
| the search results.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Where did this idea come from that all viable products have to
| appeal to the widest possible audience?
| abhinavsharma wrote:
| While generally true, this isn't necessarily true if the
| customization is well-layered and the user is at a dead end in
| their search journey.
|
| Too many products equate frictionless == featureless these days
| and there should be more power when the user needs it.
|
| That's why we built a search extension that improves upon
| Google specifically in ways that it's weak
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933
| http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives
| bko wrote:
| I agree with this, however it could be used as a platform for
| others to provide their own config and you can piggyback off
| the work of others.
|
| It's kind of like ad-blockers where you don't have to maintain
| a list of domains to block. Others do that for you. And then
| people could create hosted version of their simple box with all
| the infra taken care of.
| plutonorm wrote:
| I agree, none of these are the next google. Except perhaps
| YouWrite which taken to the limit is asking an AI for the
| answer rather than searching the internet.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| > a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you
| answers
|
| Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_
| want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the
| web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want
| better than I do.
|
| Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious
| to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google.
|
| I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum
| communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search
| results no longer actually returning real web results.
| jader201 wrote:
| > but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next
| Google"
|
| You're in the small minority. You're a power user that thinks
| like a software engineer, and likes to deal with data in
| lists.
|
| Most users are completely happy that Google tries to answer
| their questions and (usually) provides the right answer front
| and center.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The death of the web is because most people don't want what
| you want. They don't mind walled gardens, so long as they are
| easy to use and have the content and connections that they
| want to see.
|
| The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring
| systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market
| wants.
| ouid wrote:
| What the market has produced is not ipso facto what the
| people want. The market is simultaneously optimizing many
| things. Walled gardens are much better explained by
| companies benefitting from not having to allow their
| competitors access to their customers than by "being what
| the people want".
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The market can trivially get stuck in a local maximum.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| People don't mind walled gardens because for a while
| they've been good enough if not better than the previous
| status-quo. However, those walled gardens are decaying such
| that there might actually be demand for something better if
| it existed.
| airstrike wrote:
| Or there just may be demand for walled gardens that are
| better kept
| rapind wrote:
| I think you're conflating "tinkering" with simply desiring
| a different feature set. In my case I actually want "less"
| from Google in terms of number of features. I don't want to
| tinker either, but we naturally reach for toggles as a way
| to tell the system we want different (not necessarily more)
| features.
|
| Most of my search results at this point look like a spam
| ridden inbox from the mid-2000s.
| baxtr wrote:
| This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist.
| Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said,
| most people simply don't care about the stuff we care
| about.
|
| That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad."
| They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're
| good enough.
| simulate-me wrote:
| Desiring choice isn't elitist. Early web adopters were
| passionate and willing to put in more work. Nothing wrong
| with that, and nothing wrong with liking simple default
| settings either.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Wondering if, by "elitist", GP meant more like "out of
| reach to many laypeople because of learning curve." Is
| there a good single word for that? "Difficult" and
| "complex" aren't quite right.
|
| Anyway - you're right, nothing at all wrong with wanting
| choice. I think the point being made here though is that
| "layperson gravity" / mass market appeals / lowest common
| denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search
| will be a niche product, forever. Even if we'd both like
| that niche.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Er, isn't the whole point of Google tracking you and
| knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you
| better search results tailored to you ?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Er, isn't the whole point of Google tracking you and
| knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you
| better search results tailored to you ?
|
| AFAICT, quality personalized search results isn't the
| goal for Google here.
|
| I think the point of all that is generating revenue via
| advertising sales.
|
| And while providing high quality search results might
| _once upon a time_ have been a goal, both as a goal in
| itself and a tool to drive user adoption /engagement,
| that's no longer necessary as they have a (relatively)
| captive audience and a (relatively) captive customer base
| (advertisers). As such, quality search results are no
| longer all that important.
|
| I'm not a Googler, IMHO, YMMV, etc.
| chewz wrote:
| > Give me links to websites.
|
| There are no more websites worth linking to anymore... If you
| filter out all SEO spam there is barely few webpages left...
|
| Google is desperately trying to hide that fact. Most of the
| web 1.0 can nowadays fit into small town telephone
| directory... You do not need mulitibilion dolar business to
| run web directory...
| eitland wrote:
| Try search.marginalia.nu (especially
| https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random but try some
| searches for git commands or history too, just remember it
| is a search engine, not a conversation partner so only
| include words that should be in the article you search for)
| and come back to me afterwards.
|
| I thought like you that if even Google couldn't find
| anything it was not there, but after discovering marginalia
| I now know it is just Google that has become unusably bad.
|
| For day to day searching I now use Kagi and for me it is
| easily worth 10 or maybe 20 dollars a month since it "just
| works" unlike Google and has a larger index than
| Marginalia.
|
| For now though Marginalia gets the money since Kagi is
| still in beta.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Just searched for "linux users" in marginalia and google.
| Google's first answer seemed spot on. (users command
| usage); Marginalia provided me with in comparison
| _marginal_ results. Maybe it is because google knows me
| better then i am aware of. I really don't notice google
| results getting worse, while i read so several times in
| HN comments...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah it's not a search engine for answering questions,
| but for finding documents. You'll get along with it
| better if you see it as something like grep for the web.
| This is something I'm very intentionally trying to
| accomplish, as it's something I feel Google has gotten
| worse at.
| emsixteen wrote:
| > search.marginalia.nu
|
| This is just retrieving articles when I search, not
| actual websites. Interesting if you're looking for
| article related to search keywords I guess, but genuinely
| unusable for actually finding something specific.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Gave it another try with "ssh scp". Google's first result
| explains me how to use scp (ssh provides a hint about the
| context), which was what i would be looking for.
| Marganilla... not so much it seems
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scp&profile=yol
| o&j... tho
| jtbayly wrote:
| If so, then where can I search this small place? I'd love
| to.
| politician wrote:
| I think this is exactly correct.
| jfoster wrote:
| Google used to be this. It was great back then.
|
| The "we answer your question" thing could be useful, but:
|
| 1. It should be in addition to (not instead of) the web
| search results.
|
| 2. The answers can't be wrong. Google often gives such a low
| quality answer that I no longer want to use it for this,
| besides asking about the weather and sunset/sunrise.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Google still searches forums pretty decently - I think what
| you are describing are two separate phenomena
|
| 1. Yes Google search has gone to shit - even putting stuff in
| quotes now does not do an exact search (there is another
| checkbox you ALSO need to use for that). It tries to be too
| smart even when no user is logged in.
|
| 2. Giant mega forums like Reddit have really taken over.
| Instead of a dedicated forum people just go to subreddits.
| Personally I think it is good and bad and I still try to
| actively participate in both.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I'd spend more time in reddit if they had better search.
| Animats wrote:
| _I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of
| these alternatives is a fundamental dead end._
|
| I tend to agree. It's an attempt to deal with bad design by
| putting in switches, options, and knobs to tweak. That's
| because 1) it's easier than focus groups, A/B testing, and
| taking video of users using the thing, 2) design takes some
| artistic talent, and 3) it lets the programmer blame the users
| for the problem.
|
| This is a vice of open source people. It's why Linux on the
| desktop has never taken off. "Just edit
| /etc/conf/foo/bar/prefs.txt" is not a design. Nor is "On the
| visual side, you can modify everything about the way things
| look, even being able to write your own custom CSS."
|
| I'm critical of Google's search, but this is not the way to fix
| it.
|
| Consider just few more search options, alongside "News", such
| as "Scholar" and "Noncommercial", for when you're overwhelmed
| by crap. And "Popular", for when you want the crap. Don't add
| another interacting dimension of tweaking.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Possibly, but being able to add in your email and private
| services is interesting.
|
| Crazy from a privacy perspective, but potentially very
| seductive in terms of convenience.
| mullr wrote:
| For Kagi, at least, there's a very well integrated search
| customization method that they didn't bother to show here. For
| any search result, you can add a ranking adjustment for the
| site it came from. This is directly in the results, so it's
| very accessible, and quite easy. One of the choices is 'pin',
| which is fantastic for technical work: 'sqlite.org' is now
| boosted over everything else, for me, and it's exactly what I
| want. I could just as easily take it out, if it becomes a
| problem.
| notatoad wrote:
| There's a certain type of person who loves buttons and knobs.
| They're also the same sort of person who might decide to make a
| new search engine. But yeah, more knobs is definitely not
| something the market is asking for.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I remember when the same thing was said about Apple's
| reductionist philosophy: "The market doesn't demand stuff you
| can't configure to your needs".
|
| Turns out the market doesn't know what it wants until market
| participants see what is being offered.
| drozycki wrote:
| Most people don't want to tinker if they can avoid it, but many
| will come to appreciate the power of the advanced tab if and
| when they need it. These startups should take the "people are
| lazy" line of thinking to heart and make customization profiles
| easy to share, whether by direct link posted to Slack or a
| public customization "store" a la Chrome Web Store.
| dannywarner wrote:
| Google is anything but a simple box that gives you answers now.
| It hasn't been that for a very long time. I wish it was.
|
| It is a box that gives you a screenfull of ads, some spam
| copycat sites I wish I could remove, and a lot of clutter. As
| many people on here have said before, it only gets away with it
| because it owns the web browser through Chrome, Android and its
| Apple deal for Safari.
| hans1729 wrote:
| >it only gets away with it because it owns the web browser
| through Chrome, Android and its Apple deal for Safari.
|
| From someone who tried the switch to duckduckgo and uses ddg
| as the default engine: I can't remember the last query I
| typed without adding "!g". Google doesn't get my queries
| because the service is shoved down my throat, it gets them
| because the alternatives I tried are _worse_ wrt the total
| scope of my queries.
| richardsocher wrote:
| Would love your feedback on https://you.com - actually has
| most capabilities that G has and also has the same bangs as
| DDG.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| What counts as customization? I might agree that most people
| don't care to change font sizes or colors or even themes but
| they might want to be able to tell Google to never return
| results from a particular site. Is hiding results from a site
| customization? Is it the sort of customization that would
| overwhelm a user if they saw it as an option?
| richardsocher wrote:
| At https://you.com we believe in choice but not force it. It
| will just work out of the box, but as folks shop or get really
| into something like coding - we have heard from many users that
| they like or dislike certain sources or apps. Like w3school -
| it's in every search engine but some folks hate it so they can
| downvote it.
|
| I personally benefitted a lot from the ability to like the
| reddit app once and then see more real reddit results?
| b8 wrote:
| Kagi requires for an account to be registered and will charge a
| monthly rate when it's out of beta, so I don't really think that
| it'll be a threat to Google.
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