[HN Gopher] The future of search is boutique
___________________________________________________________________
The future of search is boutique
Author : prostoalex
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-05-18 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (future.a16z.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (future.a16z.com)
| polote wrote:
| Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29130017
| mikkergp wrote:
| The reddit hack for reviews succeeds at being a good source for
| "reviews", _because_ that's not what it's for. As soon as you
| create a search engine, someone will figure out how manipulate
| the results. Even reddit search results can be pretty spammy as I
| think some people have figured this out.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > As soon as you create a search engine, someone will figure
| out how manipulate the results.
|
| I see this sentiment a lot. Are there any actual examples of
| this happening, or does it merely propagate on the basis of
| sounding true?
| dflock wrote:
| The example is the way that the dominance of Google changed
| the web.
|
| It's "manipulate the results", by way of "be careful what you
| wish for" - if there's money to be made in pandering to a
| search engines whims, then that will happen at scale and that
| content will swamp the good stuff that you wanted in the
| first place.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Google is arguable exceptional, in that they are in a
| position to shape a significant amount of web traffic.
| Their largest competitor doesn't even have 1% market share.
| dflock wrote:
| I agree with this - Google is so dominant and so large,
| that it distorts the entire web. But I think this is
| probably just a historical accident, more or less. This
| is just [Goodharts
| Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)
| write large:
|
| > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure.
|
| So, when you try to measure content quality in some way,
| that becomes a target, and starts to distort the quality
| of the content.
|
| I think this applies equally in any niche, at any scale
| where people find it worthwhile.
|
| If you have a niche search engine that has different
| content requirements, and it becomes worthwhile to SEO
| niche content for that engine, then it will happen,
| eventually.
|
| I think it just has to become worthwhile (and then for
| this fact to become known) - but that threshold is going
| to vary a lot, in different niches, times, places, etc...
|
| There are plenty of people (~everyone?) gaming/SEO'ing
| the search on Amazon, Etsy, Ebay, etc... for example, by
| doing niche & platform specific SEO on their listings on
| those platforms.
|
| I also think that people's definition of "worthwhile"
| differs too. For the broad SEO industry, it monetary. For
| people making posts on HN or Reddit, it's Karma, or
| Discussion or something - and people will optimize their
| content towards that, just for "fun".
|
| Actually, I think this applies pretty boardly to making
| _anything_, more or less, once you have someone or
| something evaluating/measuring your output?
|
| How _harmful_ this is, depends on what's being optimized
| for; scale & rewards probably change how "hard" the
| optimization arms race gets - as well as how many people
| are affected.
| rchaud wrote:
| The Panda update Google made in 2010 or so removed enormous
| volumes of spam websites that contained entirely machine-
| generated content, usually linking to shops selling
| counterfeit goods like Prada bags and Jordan sneakers.
|
| And that was when Google was over 12 years old.
|
| There was a time I only saw listicles on Cracked.com. Now
| most of Page 1 content on Google is structured like that, and
| most are low quality blogspam.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't think these types of conclusions can be drawn based
| on Google, as they are in an exceptional position, with
| nearly complete market dominance as well as an economic
| incentive against cracking down too hard on ads.
| danenania wrote:
| I find Reddit to be the best source not only for reviews, but
| for any topic that has even a whiff of commercial relevance.
|
| On Reddit you have a very good chance of seeing multiple high
| quality, well-informed posts on whatever topic you're
| interested in, written by real people who genuinely want to
| offer help in an area they're knowledgeable about.
|
| On Google these days, even once you scroll past the wall of
| actual ads, you'll usually just see a bunch more defacto ads
| masquerading as "organic" results.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > On Reddit you have a very good chance of seeing multiple
| high quality, well-informed posts on whatever topic you're
| interested in, written by real people who genuinely want to
| offer help in an area they're knowledgeable about.
|
| The pervasiveness of fake, shill, and/or paid reviews across
| the rest of the web makes it difficult for me to escape the
| suspicion that there is pervasive review fraud on Reddit as
| well.
| simplehuman wrote:
| But are those comments highly upvoted?
| danenania wrote:
| Exactly. Reddit's culture acts as an anti-spam, anti-
| shill immune system. That's not to say it's perfect, but
| it's quite a bit better than the typical search engine or
| social network at weeding out content-spam and other bs.
| reggieband wrote:
| The amount of money a reseller is willing to pay for his goods to
| appear in a curated list is likely to always be higher than the
| amount of money a consumer is willing to pay for access to a
| curated list.
|
| That suggests that a platform that aligns with the needs of the
| advertiser is likely to earn more revenue than a platform that
| aligns with the consumer.
|
| For this reason I find it hard to see a dominant "boutique
| search" company that is funded by anything other than
| advertisers.
| gopher_space wrote:
| This is something that makes more sense as a business ran out
| of your garage than as an investment opportunity. Someone hand-
| pruning stack overflow search results wouldn't need much to
| keep the lights on and could just sign up a certain number of
| clients.
|
| "Boutique" to me means high end tradespeople focusing on a
| specific point of view over growth. I can't imagine a search
| service fitting that category and allowing advertisements.
| That's not what either party involved is there for.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Incorruptibility is only possible (and not necessarily
| guaranteed even) if money is taken out of the equation.
|
| We need an open big-list-of-URLs exchange standard, then one
| can use some sort of app to create/rewview, upload/download and
| import/export lists of favorites/URLs.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Money is an instrument, it's not the source of corruption.
|
| I prefer the auditors skepticism; anything that can be
| corrupted, given enough time, will be corrupted.
| elamje wrote:
| This is true for consumers, but not B2B
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I find the framing of the discussion errant and interestingly,
| errant due to the perspective of someone who clearly was not
| there at the time, let alone has any real context for when and
| where Google emerged. The problem Google had was not at all that
| the answers one would seek did not exist, it actually solve that
| problem better than all the other search engines that existed by
| finding more relevant and accurate answers.
|
| What is often missed even by those who were around and paying
| attention in that context back then, is that most people were
| blinded by the "good enough" factor that rather mindlessly simply
| assumed that Google served up if not nearly, approaching perfect
| results ... that there was simply no better results available. A
| clear fallacy, as one could and especially today can prove on
| their own by simply taking some site and page with the most
| important or even niche information on a topic, and then trying
| to search Google for it. You will likely find that there is
| approaching no string of basic search terms that you can use to
| find that resource. Even if it is a page that is part of a major,
| mainstream site, it is immensely difficult to find information
| using general terms.
|
| I would argue that all the censorship and corporatizing and
| centralizing of information and data has only amplified that
| problem even beyond the early days. As a life long user of Google
| search, even long before there were public discussions of what a
| google is and people still thought AOL is the internet, I feel
| like the peak of Google and search in general occurred some time
| around the mid aughts, so, 2003-2008.
|
| I would love to hear from anyone with similar direct contextual
| knowledge.
| rchaud wrote:
| The article is written by someone who's founded such a search
| engine, so they're of the opinion that Google is dead and
| [thing_im_doing] is the way of the future.
|
| > Sari Azout is a founder of startupy.world, a search engine
| for tech and culture insights.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > The stated mission of a company worth almost two trillion
| dollars is to "organize the world's information"
|
| Wikipedia, millions of volunteers and bloggers organise the
| world's information. Google just leaches off them, they cant even
| organise Youtube
|
| Does youtube prioritise videos that have the most informational
| value, news that are most objective? No, they financially reward
| those that produce misinformation and conspiracy theories. You
| could argue 'well, thats what sells', but then you can't claim
| any higher purpose or mission - its just peddling whatever is
| popular, like fast fashion.
|
| Or do an experiment, search for a government service like 'open a
| company in UK' or 'apply for a driving lisence', queries where
| there is only a single government service per country - and
| google will return a page full of scams.
|
| During the pandemic i tried to find COVID related rules for
| entering moldova- the result was on like page 7. If failing to
| find official public information is not 'ublnderperforming', i
| dont know what is.
|
| The premice of this thesis is wrong - no-one is seruously trying
| to make the search engine that produces the best answers because
| the competition is basically gone, and because the web has been
| balcanised from open system into feudal kindgdoms.
| Method-X wrote:
| This is an interesting paper by the Brave search team:
|
| https://brave.com/goggles/
|
| Essentially "goggles" allow anyone to create their own algorithm
| and share it. It's a really interesting concept. Definitely worth
| reading the paper.
| rc_mob wrote:
| Kagi.com has a search feature option that focuses on stuff
| programmers want to see such as results from stackoverflow.
|
| i love it and yeah I'm at the point now where i do want my search
| to be boutique. me searching for something and my grandma
| searching for something are two completely different animals.
| rambambram wrote:
| Question: Is it normal to be redirected to some page called
| 'vladimir245' at typeform.com when trying to sign-up for Kagi
| beta?
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Kagi has been a game changer for my SO and I. She's been using
| it for research for her doctorates program the last month or
| so, and frequently says how it has become an indispensable
| tool.
| tlb wrote:
| One obstacle is that we've all been trained that domain-specific
| search engines suck. Like Wikipedia search gives bad results
| unless you know the exact name of the article, so I just use DDG
| adding the word wikipedia.
|
| Another obstacle is that the searches Google does worst on are
| for heavily promoted topics. What company would give you an
| unbiased answer to "are NFTs good?"
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer,
| like "# of billionaires in the world" or "What is the population
| of Iceland?" It's pretty bad at answering questions that require
| judgment and context like "What do NFT collectors think about
| NFTs?"_
|
| _The stated mission of a company worth almost two trillion
| dollars is to "organize the world's information" and yet the
| Internet remains poorly organized._
|
| The first examples are information. The last example is not
| really information.
|
| I get that search is so convenient and good at the things it's
| good at that you want it to be good at other things, but you
| shouldn't expect a search engine to make judgements on your
| behalf or put things into your context. The searcher _has_ to do
| some legwork of their own there. Maybe I 'm a control freak in
| this regard, but I trust myself more than any website in this
| regard.
|
| Wire cutter is one of the curators they bring up. I _don 't_
| trust that wire cutter manually curates top products. I trust
| that it only curates products it can make affiliate links to.
| Maybe these products are good enough, but maybe not. For that
| reason, I don't know what the value _really_ is, since their
| incentives don 't necessarily line up with mine.
| fierro wrote:
| agreed, this is a false dichotomy. I wouldn't look to any
| search engine to "answer" questions like "What do NFT
| collectors think about NFTs?" Answer != Organize
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't think even the author expects the search engine to
| actually "answer" the question but that the results of such a
| query ought to be articles, social media posts, blogs, videos
| of NFT collectors talking about various NFTs.
|
| Outside of Google's attempts to summarize information in the
| answer box "questions" posed to a search engine are really
| "find me documents which discuss the subject I'm querying
| about and might contain my answer."
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| > Maybe I'm a control freak in this regard, but I trust myself
| more than any website in this regard.
|
| You are not. Sometimes you need a search engine, not an answer
| engine. Google/AI can be a force for good, but often it is not;
| some examples & views of others covered in a thread [0].
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/ColinHayhurst/status/1420698145898520579
| kristianc wrote:
| In fairness if the best example of a question that proponents
| for this can come up with is "What do NFT collectors think
| about NFTs?" it's not obvious it's worth solving for in the
| first place.
| [deleted]
| mikkergp wrote:
| "What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?" Sounds like the kind
| of thing you pay consultants for. I mean, it does sound like
| exactly the kind of question a VC might ask, but it would be
| really hard for the average person to know what to do with this
| information. I guess if you could disrupt nuanced cultural
| mastery, that would be great, but also, impossible to get an
| objectively answer. Also, talk about an entrypoint for
| algorithmic bias.
| [deleted]
| ninth_ant wrote:
| I think the point is not that you'd get an objectively "best
| answer" from that type of query. NFTs are an odd example
| here, so let's use 3D printers instead for the boutique
| search example.
|
| I found a lot more value when looking at 3D printing forum
| discussions from passionate hobbyists to see their opinions
| about the best printers on the market for various needs,
| compared to a search engine. In this case, the curators would
| be the forum moderators who would need to do the work weeding
| out obvious shills and misinformation. Presumably this
| moderation would be increasingly difficult if more people
| make their purchasing decisions like this and businesses
| respond with more astroturfing.
|
| For something like NFT (or investing in stocks or real estate
| or anything), I'm not sure there will ever be a good answer
| for that because the super obvious conflict of interest. "It
| just so happens that the NFT/Stock I hold is the best
| investment" is not really interesting or useful and would be
| terribly difficult or impossible to weed out.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The issue is that {total available revenue}<<{cost of
| curation time} for most niche search space. It's the
| Consumer Reports problem: if people need your service
| rarely, and it's only worth a modest amount of money, then
| it's impossible to balance the books.
|
| And we're just talking different flavors of Ponzi schemes
| if we're trying to design a system where available revenue
| doesn't cover costs.
|
| I remember pre-Google, when it was an open question as to
| whether curated directories or search engines would be the
| dominant form. Turns out, the former when signal>>noise
| (early web) and the latter when signal<<noise (current
| web).
|
| Reddit is a gamified answer to a fundamental imbalancing of
| profit: convince people to do valuable work for free, pay
| them in karma/gold stars/Monopoly money, and then sell that
| work (without having to pay its fair market value).
|
| And for profitable search curation niches, there are
| already solutions. F.ex. Bloomberg makes $10B of revenue
| off one.
| xmprt wrote:
| > you shouldn't expect a search engine to make judgements on
| your behalf
|
| This is true but it Google still tries to despite the fact that
| they can't. If Google returned completely unbiased results and
| let the reader filter the results then I think people would
| have fewer results.
| ninkendo wrote:
| What's wrong with fewer results? I don't want thousands or
| millions of results for my query, give me 10 good ones. I'd
| imagine most people are similar here.
| rchaud wrote:
| If you want unbiased results, you are looking for a directory
| like the Yellow Pages, not a search engine.
|
| And then when you need to search inside the Yellow Pages,
| you'll ask yourself why YP doesn't do something about the
| misleading descriptions provided by the companies in their
| index.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| an opinion is a type of information
|
| google's mission statement is not "to organize the world's
| facts" but maybe you'd like it to be
| hash872 wrote:
| Random topical question I've been meaning to ask the HN
| community- has anyone gotten any solid value out of Google's
| Custom/Programmable Search Engines? They can supposedly be
| scripted to be much more precise or targeted. Curious if anyone's
| ever played around with them- I know a couple people in my
| industry are into them
| jsat wrote:
| That first paragraph nearly made me spit my coffee. Self-parody
| even if you believe in crypto.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Only if Google allows us to submit a list of websites to exclude
| from search results, it will resolve, if not all, most of our
| Google search detoriation complains.
|
| This might even help Google know which sites people exclude most
| and down rank them.
| rchaud wrote:
| That's an online public vote which can be gamed. I'm reminded
| of when 4chan mass-voted on a poll for where Pitbull should
| perform, and he ended up somewhere in Alaska. This was back
| when 4chan was known more for generally harmless trolling
| instead of the dumpster fire it is now.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I'm really curious to know whether this view is at all reflected
| in the wider population outside of tech. For myself, being a
| tech-y person in SF, Google is good enough 99.9% of the time. I
| have a hard time believing there is a significant percentage of
| 'normal' people who think Google is a paint point in their daily
| lives, and good luck to any company who tries to break the "just
| Google it" habit that we've all developed over the past ~20yrs...
| mrkramer wrote:
| >I have a hard time believing there is a significant percentage
| of 'normal' people who think Google is a paint point in their
| daily lives, and good luck to any company who tries to break
| the "just Google it" habit that we've all developed over the
| past ~20yrs...
|
| To 'normal' people Google is the synonym for internet search
| and yea you are right nobody will be breaking the habit of
| "just Google it" anytime soon.
|
| Google's lack of awareness regarding the power users is
| astonishing but a change needs to come from within Google not
| from outside because Google's top management just doesn't care
| what power users think.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| All it takes for Joe User to change is one click to set the
| browser's default search engine - this is why google pays so
| much to Mozilla. There is not much that google offers that
| captures the user besides the trust that they are getting the
| best search results.
|
| By now, Joe User has developed a healthy distrust/dislike of
| Facebook, but they stay there due to the network effect.
| Google has no such snares.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > All it takes for Joe User to change is one click to set
| the browser's default search engine
|
| I'm pretty sure that takes a bunch of clicks and is
| confusing.
|
| > this is why google pays so much to Mozilla.
|
| Google pays Mozilla to fend off antitrust.
|
| edit: Could Google disappear in a day? Maybe. People are
| still Xeroxing things but nobody is using a Xerox. Google
| have so much cash that they can pour into marketing that
| people would gradually drift back after any stumble,
| though. At the least they could get regulation passed that
| would be too expensive for newcomers to comply with, or
| that requires that Google be used as a middleman for some
| processing.
| mrkramer wrote:
| They have their family of apps tied to Google e.g. Gmail,
| Google Maps, Google Translate, Google News etc. That could
| be a drawback if you wanted to switch to a new search
| engine.
| code51 wrote:
| For non-English locales, Google sucks 99.9% of the time for
| popular queries since they allow spamming from big media
| outlets. A top result is literally composed of spammy SEO
| keyword content filled with a chain of questions in the
| article. So (I think) it sucks for 'normal' people in non-
| English.
| llaolleh wrote:
| That's one of the biggest problems. You have to build something
| that is better than Google, at least to a certain subset of
| users that makes them ecstatic about the alternative.
|
| So far all I've seen is shittier versions with terrible
| UI(you.com), or exact low-risk copycats going at it with the
| privacy angle.
| georgehill wrote:
| Google is a great search engine! However, from time to time I
| am still enjoying other search engines when I am getting good
| search results for some queries, just as someone who has been
| in prison for 20 years enjoys the fresh air once released.
| annagrigoryan2 wrote:
| I"m an engineer, but also a writer, so as my writer self i
| totally feel the inability of Google to find quality
| information.
|
| Just from performance perspective I can see that the listicles
| and how to's are doing better then any other niche topics.
| foobarian wrote:
| It's interesting how books somehow retained a certain
| "quality" to them. For example each book has an ISBN ID.
| Maybe it's because of the publishing cost?
|
| What if there was a premium Web where each website had an
| ISBN-equivalent, and the dates during which it was "in
| print?" And to get one published you'd pay a fee to a central
| register, such as $100.
| cypress66 wrote:
| To the SEO listicle sites those 100 bucks are pocket
| change. To the high quality blog, it's maybe a deal
| breaker.
| foobarian wrote:
| I'm wondering why SEO listicle books are not as big of a
| problem, and how to replicate that.
|
| I guess there is no Google for books, and no
| ads/affiliate links. And there are libraries where books
| are manually curated using the Dewey hierarchy.
| rchaud wrote:
| Books have gatekeepers, publishing houses that put in work
| to market the book as widely as possible, get it reviewed
| in newspapers, arrange media appearances.
|
| How many Kindle direct releases are going to get that kind
| of backing?
| manachar wrote:
| I've started hearing from non-tech people complaining about the
| spammy results in google results.
|
| Feels like "trust" that they're actually seeing the best
| results are going down.
|
| That said, many of these same people rarely actually google
| things outside of simple factual information that Google does
| okay at (e.g. height of the eiffel tower). Their experience of
| the internet is mostly through various social media filters
| (e.g. Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit,
| etc.)
|
| I also suspect this is part of the reason Google is giving
| worse results. Most of the actual content being generated on
| the internet is now occurring in various walled gardens that
| either pollute search results (Pinterest!) or don't show up
| (Facebook).
|
| It's a tough problem for a company built on the open web that
| web mostly resembles a late-game Risk map with just a few big
| players.
| foobarian wrote:
| Sounds like the internet has interpreted the parasitic value
| exploitation as damage and routed around it. By cutting off
| its nose.
| pshc wrote:
| Neal Stephenson in his book _Fall_ riffed on a near-future like
| this, in which young people no longer rely on the recommendations
| of social media and news aggregators. Instead, they outsource
| their feeds to a mix of human and AI curators.
| hguant wrote:
| This was also a (secondary) feature in Stephenson's _Anathem_;
| their equivalent of the Web was so full of viruses,
| artificially intelligent spam, and what we'd now call
| disinformation (and network effects of that disinformation)
| that it was impossible to discern any information of value by
| accessing it directly. Only by using a sophisticated program
| that was constantly filtering data could the characters
| determine what was _probably_ happening in the world.
| bambax wrote:
| > _The problem, now so drastically different from a decade ago,
| is not what to read /buy/eat/watch/etc., but figuring out the
| best thing to read/buy/eat/watch/etc. with my limited time and
| attention._ (...)
|
| > _Someone who wants to find the best freelance designer, or the
| best sushi restaurant, or the best NFT to buy will not find the
| answer on Google._
|
| This is a poor article IMHO. The reasoning is as follows:
|
| 1/ We are looking for things to consume, and we can only accept
| the very best of anything -- because we are busy (and, let's face
| it, exceptional geniuses, contrary to people from a decade ago
| who had all the time in the world and were far less bright);
|
| 2/ Generalist search engines can't help us, because they lack
| category knowledge necessary to "rank" things
|
| 3/ Only curators can help us get there.
|
| None of those points are obvious, and they don't follow from one
| another. Not everyone is looking for things to consume, all of
| the time. We don't need the very best of everything. There's no
| such a thing as an absolute intrinsic quality, independent of
| other dimensions such as availability, durability, cost,
| suitability for a specific purpose, etc.
|
| Mostly, it's extremely naive to think about "curators" as
| infallible sources of truth. Curators can be incompetent, and
| they can be bought -- usually for very cheap.
|
| Eventually, the article asks:
|
| > _Who curates the curators?_
|
| That's an excellent question! And the answer is: Google. Google
| points people to Wirecutter, or Booking.com (infinitely more
| successful than Expedia or Yelp, and not even mentioned).
|
| Google curates the curators.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| > We don't need the very best of everything.
|
| I think it's very human, when presented with an array of
| options, to desire the best. Just imagine you are presented
| with N options for a vacuum cleaner. Would you really just pick
| randomly? 10 years ago (or maybe more like 20 years ago), there
| was not nearly as much choice. You couldn't find hundreds of
| different iterations on the same item. Now that you can, many
| people spend a lot of time agonizing over the options. I agree
| that points 2 and 3 don't logically follow from desiring the
| best though.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I deliberately go to the closest dentist to my house because
| I don't have tooth problems and it makes no sense to look for
| a dentist that does a better than adequate job until/unless I
| do.
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| unless... multiple inadequate cleanings build up over time
| to a dental problem that could have avoided in the first
| place by going to a better dentist
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| How do you know the dentist is closest to your house unless
| you considered multiple options and ranked them by
| distance? In your case, "best" includes time convenience
| and you did compare options without even being aware of it.
| awinter-py wrote:
| 'how do you scale signal' is a great frame for verticalization
|
| I was in camp 'google search is dead' until I was actually
| shopping for something and then light dawned
|
| google is an ecommerce search engine; all their product decisions
| make sense if you think of them as amazon without the warehouse,
| shopify without the checkout
|
| (unfortunately it also puts them in 'more ads, lower margins'
| spiral that degrades to infinity times infinitesimal)
| llaolleh wrote:
| *Google is an ad search engine.
| simplehuman wrote:
| Whoa! Something lit up in my head. Still processing what it
| means
| elamje wrote:
| We are building this right now for a niche. In our world the
| hardest thing is good, clean, indexable data. Google can crawl
| the web just following links and index web text, but for niche
| search a lot of the relevant material to index is private.
|
| If you are working on niche search, I'd love to hear how you are
| being creative about aggregating and cleaning data to index on.
| It's a fun, challenging problem and there are going to be a lot
| of winners on the other side of this!
| telchior wrote:
| It's interesting that most of the responses here so far are
| criticizing the article and positing that Google is, more or
| less, the best we can expect. Yet numerous other front page posts
| on HN have been very unanimously critical of Google, e.g.:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702
|
| My own anecdata is that non-tech people are beginning to really
| dislike Google's results. Take a very normal-person kind of
| search: looking for almost any mainstream recipe. The vast
| majority of results ramble on for pages about the author's
| childhood experience and Italian grandmother and how the dog
| liked the recipe so much, painstakingly repeating the SEO phrases
| in the currently-most-effective combination. Most people despise
| this stuff.
|
| I think we all know why that is; SEO is unavoidable, gaming the
| system is unavoidable. But the important question would seem to
| be: is Google actually doing a bad job, such that someone could
| disrupt their model?
|
| I can't see that the answer is anything but "yes". Google is
| deeply addicted to search ad revenue. That ad revenue comes from
| the exact same people gaming SEO and producing reams of poor
| quality content. Google is dependent on its abusers; they are
| more valuable than its users. How can that end in anything other
| than a general degradation in quality? And as a public company,
| Google can't exactly back off from its ad revenue focus for a
| while and fix its business.
|
| At the same time, nothing I've seen yet could disrupt Google.
| DuckDuckGo et al are largely just copies, and their differences
| are too minor to get users to switch.
|
| But it's very odd to say that because disruption hasn't happened,
| it cannot or will not. That seems like a failure of imagination.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's very odd to say that because disruption hasn't
| happened, it cannot or will not_
|
| Nobody is saying that. People are upset with Google. They're
| just recognizing that the arguments made in this article don't
| make sense. That nonsensicality is heightened by this being, in
| essence, a venture capitalist's PR statement.
| telchior wrote:
| I think the arguments in the article made as much sense as
| you'd expect. Nobody has yet produced anything that really
| counters Google. So the best you can do is cast around to all
| the different quadrants that look like they might produce
| something and ramble about what could be.
|
| Also, the blog post is republished from somewhere else, not
| written by a16z.
| boringg wrote:
| Is A16z just capitalizing on what we hackernews commentary whine
| about and then posits a theory about the future of the market
| based on that? I mean thats a great secret sauce we as a
| collective are very on the pulse ...
| [deleted]
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Then bakes in NFTs to turn the conversation on to something
| more edgy. Thus allowing them to tie back to their long push
| into "Web 3.0" which I would imagine is starting to look a bit
| bleak nowadays.
| msoad wrote:
| My thoughts as well! I've never seen anyone complaining, or
| even talking about their Google Search experience outside of
| Hacker News.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I work on alternative search engines, my first was something
| called Whize which flared for a bit, hit the front page of
| product hunt and then died after a few months of trying to
| support a search experience that we've all become used to ala
| Google.
|
| We had thousands of users stopping through over the months but
| that's not enough for an AD supported model and ultimately
| indexing the web with a significant enough amount of coverage so
| that results weren't lacking and then working on a novel enough
| ranking methodology that combined vector search signals with
| classical search signals is a massive undertaking that was
| running us thousands of dollars a month.
|
| It's possible but you need to basically be prepared to burn a lot
| of money, more than I and my friend were willing to support.
| That's why most of these alternative search engines serve custom
| Google results combined with other aggregator content or license
| Bing and they produce good results but at the end of the day your
| still beholden to the index and to some degree the ranking
| signals of the engines your building over.
|
| So far in the landscape Kagi is doing a good job on establishing
| itself with it's use of lens and subscriber based support for
| it's boutique engine. Neeva and You.com are also both in that
| space and have the benefit of being supported by gobs of funding
| (Neeva in particular due to the background of the founding team.)
|
| All of these engines are attempting to provide the curated
| experience this article talks about in the form of programmatic
| boutique like searches over Google and Bing's existing index.
| From a technical standpoint this makes obvious sense.
|
| But.
|
| From the year+ of working on that search engine and my continued
| interest in alternative search engines here's the thing. Google
| and Bing index web pages, but there are so many alternative forms
| of curated information we've created over the last decade and a
| lot of that information is in _semi-public_ spaces like slack,
| discord, whatsapp, telegram, facebook groups, newsletters etc.
|
| As more and more spam has propagated over the internet real
| useful information and discourse has retreated into these semi
| guarded spaces that the existing incumbents do not index and do
| not serve which means all of these respective engines are missing
| that information which means in turn you're missing that
| information regardless of where you search.
|
| Want to buy a car? The best review of what car to buy is probably
| happening in a car enthusiast discord or slack maybe an e-mail
| newsletter. But you won't see that. So my opinion? I think the
| next real killer search application is going to figure out how to
| index and make that content searchable not an alternative take on
| searching web pages.
| freediver wrote:
| > Want to buy a car? The best review of what car to buy is
| probably happening in a car enthusiast discord or slack maybe
| an e-mail newsletter.
|
| I thought about this and I disagree. Indexing discord/slack
| (even if would be possible) would probably just add a lot more
| noise. Yes there might be an occasional gem in a discord
| channel discussion, but vast majority of time it would be low
| quality content/chatter. There is another problem - how do you
| rank it? If someone says on Discord that earth is flat how do
| you know they are right or wrong? What signal can you use -
| emoji like count? How do you rank this result vs a wikipedia
| result?
|
| It is still more likely that the best review of a car will come
| from a specialized car review site (that is not ad-ridden).
| ianbutler wrote:
| I don't think you'd search discord for "is the earth flat".
| Existing search engines have that as a solved problem, fact
| based queries are low hanging fruit for them.
|
| You'd search it for opinion content and I think for that it'd
| be up to you to discern the quality the same way it works
| when you stumble on a reddit post with relevant content but
| since it's a niche question you don't have a flood of up
| votes to legitimize it which is how a lot of my reddit like
| searches go. I've found perfectly valid answers to questions
| I have on reddit posts that have no or few < 5 upvotes,
| something like 60% of the time I wind up on a reddit post. So
| to bring it back to discord maybe positive emojis are a
| signal in that case.
|
| In the case of cars to continue my example, If I see a
| discord message in a search that is like "I own a 2021 Toyota
| Corolla Hybrid and I have x y z concerns with it." it's an
| opinion you can choose to value based on ownership.
|
| But I think asking a search engine, even a search engine like
| google, to make a value judgement on an opinion is asking a
| lot and not something they really should do. A user has to
| have some culpability in the information they consume.
|
| It'd be pretty trivial to negatively downrank though after a
| user interacts with a result and finds it lacking.
|
| There are proxies for quality of opinion but I think even now
| with google it's largely up to us as users to discern that
| especially on places like reddit which are ranked highly by
| google because it's reddit but don't qualify anything beyond
| that except in all but the most crowded of subreddits.
| freediver wrote:
| Ok we had a different view of searching. I think you
| propose 'vertical' search as a search engine feature where
| you could chose to search discord or some other index. I
| was thinking in the context of general web search results
| where ranking discord results among others would be hard.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Yeah I think that like opinion or review type content is
| probably a big enough area of information that google
| fails to really serve these days that going after it is a
| smart idea both because of how much better it can be for
| users but also because I think it's a large and
| potentially profitable niche.
|
| I think general fact based search is super solved and
| competing there is a waste.
|
| Edit: And when I say general fact based I mean like "Who
| is the president of the US right now?"
|
| For individual areas of knowledge (programming being an
| obvious one for me) there's still improvement to be had
| for sure.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Indexing discord/slack (even if would be possible) would
| probably just add a lot more noise. Yes there might be an
| occasional gem in a discord channel discussion, but vast
| majority of time it would be low quality content/chatter.
| There is another problem - how do you rank it?
|
| This is where a savvy entrepreneur would thrown in "AI-
| augmented search technology" to really get VCs salivating.
| fumar wrote:
| I agree with your last point. How would a search engine crawl
| closed spaces like discord or subscription newsletters? I find
| most of the reviews generated by bloggers, journalists, or
| influencers less valuable than an aggregate review on an HN
| post. I can read through a hundred comments before making a
| judgement.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Well remember, discord isn't entirely closed. The benefit of
| these communities wanting grow is that they're for the most
| part a simple as finding the link to the discord and joining
| it to get your information.
|
| I have a lot of thoughts on how to capitalize on that and
| especially after the latest HiQ ruling and consulting with a
| lawyer who specializes in this type of thing on how to go
| about indexing that type of information.
|
| Happy to talk more over e-mail if that piques your interest.
| One of the e-mails I check is in my profile.
| foobarian wrote:
| > I think the next real killer search application is going to
| figure out how to index and make that content searchable not an
| alternative take on searching web pages.
|
| IMO Google got lucky that they were able to profit from this
| kind of valuable information being out in the open in the early
| days, before content producers wised up to it. I think the
| gates are increasingly closing shut, and TBH I hope it stays
| that way. No one should have the right to just take this kind
| of value without giving back equally. Ostensibly Google has
| been giving back by being an excellent search engine but this
| seems to be on the decline.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Google and Bing index web pages, but there are so many
| alternative forms of curated information we've created over the
| last decade and a lot of that information is in semi-public
| spaces like slack, discord, whatsapp, telegram, facebook
| groups, newsletters etc.
|
| That's called Deep Web("semi-public spaces like slack, discord,
| whatsapp, telegram, facebook groups, newsletters etc.") and you
| can't crawl and index it unless you partner with them and they
| allow you to do it.
|
| But the biggest question that keeps haunting me is Does the
| world need another internet search engine? Casual users just
| don't care if your new internet search engine is 10 or 20%
| better than Google, what I'm trying to say it needs to be
| something totally different and significantly better in order
| to catch the attention and the engagement of the users.
| ianbutler wrote:
| So to the question of does the world need another search
| engine? I mean I think the fact that so many people think yes
| enough to both create new search engines and in some cases
| fund them, especially when google for a lot of people myself
| included really doesn't produce useful results outside of
| basic questions, is yes.
|
| It also makes more sense if users aren't the product and you
| can have a business doing 10's-100's of millions in revenue
| based on serving some niche without having the be
| exploitative via subscription or some b2b offering you make.
| Google is so big it's almost a certainly they are more than
| suboptimal at a profitable enough niche. DuckDuckGo proved
| that with it's focus on privacy which is most certainly a
| niche and the 100million in revenue they do.
|
| Personally I think there's a lot of B2B opportunity for a lot
| of this information where the search can be a multi billion
| dollar business just not on the backs of consumers.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Here's what I want in a search engine (and I would pay for it!):
|
| A combo of curation and filtered google/bing results.
|
| For curation, pay people who are into whatever niche topic and
| have a review process that spots and eliminates collusion and
| corruption.
|
| And where you don't provide curated links give me google/bing
| results with the crap sites filtered out. Also, upsell me on
| research librarian services that then feed the curation lists.
| rchaud wrote:
| Seeing as how this is VC thought leadership piece, how will a
| boutique search engine work? Deliver pre-2004 style Google
| results on a free basis while coasting on VC money, then switch
| to aggressive monetization, advertising and tracking once the
| SPAC IPO takes place?
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