[HN Gopher] Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on...
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Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google
Author : marban
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-11-12 12:27 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| spamdotlol wrote:
| Google isn't even a competitor in the search space anymore.
| They've been completely unusable for a decade.
| wslh wrote:
| It remains a competitor as long as it continues to capture
| attention (eye-balls), even if its usability has diminished.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| It remains a conmpetitor as long as it continues to be the
| default search engine in at least two of the most important
| mainsteam web browsers.
| wslh wrote:
| I believe your answer is a subset of what I just said?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| A cursory glance at their market share in the search space
| clearly says that's not true.
|
| For a big site I help run, we're getting about 8.2x the
| impressions on Google compared to Bing.
| eitland wrote:
| To interpret GP charitably I think they mean that Google is
| there not because they are a good search engine these days
| but because of inertia.
|
| For you as a site owner, Google is the best: it delivers the
| impressions.
|
| For a user who wants to search, Google has gone downhill
| since around 2009 and the only thing that confuse me is why
| DDG - who initially felt better - chose to run after Google
| down the path of insisting to give me results for things I
| didn't ask for.
|
| (The usual answer is: "It is so much harder than in 2009 and
| SEO is so crazy these days, that nobody can do it, not even
| Google", to which I have to point out that even marginalia -
| run by one Swede - manages to do it in the niches it
| prioritizes.)
| rurp wrote:
| > the only thing that confuse me is why DDG - who initially
| felt better - chose to run after Google down the path of
| insisting to give me results for things I didn't ask for.
|
| I have the same frustration. The killer feature that got me
| to switch from Google to DDG was that DDG would reliably
| return results for the search query I entered, long after
| Google had stopped doing so. Now that they've taken the
| same path the benefit is much less. Although I suspect this
| is more due to a change on the part of Bing than a
| conscious decision from DDG.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Every new search engine I've seen was a Bing wrapper with
| sometimes light reranking.
|
| I understand that competing with Google was borderline impossible
| a decade ago. But in 2024, we have cheap compute, great OSS
| distributed DBs, powerful new vector search tech. Amateur search
| engines like Marginalia even run on consumer hardware.
| CommonCrawl text-only is ~100TB, and can fit on my home server.
|
| Why is no company building their _own_ search engine from
| scratch?
| stephantul wrote:
| Because it is super expensive and difficult to keep an index up
| to date. People expect to be able to get current events, and
| expect search results to be updated in minutes/seconds.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Some sources update faster than others, you could index news
| sources hourly and low velocity sites weekly. Google does
| that. CommonCrawl gets 7TB/month, indexing and vectorizing
| that is quite manageable.
| stephantul wrote:
| I think it is more complex than that. Common crawl does not
| index the whole web every month. So even if you use common
| crawl and just index it every month, which you could do
| pretty cheaply admittedly, I don't think that would lead to
| a good search index.
|
| Running an index is an extremely profitable business, from
| multiple points of view (you can literally earn money, but
| also run ads, you get information you can sell, you can buy
| mindshare). Everybody is looking for indexes beyond Google
| and Bing, but there are none. If it really is as easy as
| indexing common crawl, then I think we'd have more indexes.
| notyourwork wrote:
| This reads like the "I could build Dropbox in a weekend".
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Haha yes, but my argument is not about individuals, but
| about "tech" companies that externalize everything and do
| not develop tech internally.
| iterance wrote:
| It's just files, how hard could it be?
| marban wrote:
| For news-only there's https://littleberg.com
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| No search engine is refreshing every website every minute.
| Most websites don't update frequently, and if you poll them
| more than once every month, your crawler will get blocked
| incredibly fast.
|
| The problem of being able to provide fresh results is best
| solved by having different tiers of indices, one for
| frequently updating content, and one for slowly updating
| content with a weekly or monthly cadence.
|
| You can get a long way by driving he frequently updating
| index via RSS feeds and social media firehoses to provide
| singnals for when to fetch new URLs.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Big fan of your work Viktor, thanks for everything you
| build and how much you document it
| stephantul wrote:
| I meant this in response to the parent that Common Crawl
| only updates every month, which seemed to imply that this
| was sufficient.
|
| This is too slow for a lot of the purposes people tend to
| use search engines for. I agree that you don't need to
| crawl everything every minute. My previous employer also
| crawled a large portion of the internet every month, but
| most of it didn't update between crawls.
| eitland wrote:
| The Swede behind search.marginalia.nu has had a working
| search engine running at a single desktop class computer in a
| living room, all programmed and maintained on his spare time,
| that was so good that in its niches (history, programming,
| open source comes to mind) it would often outshine Google.
|
| Back before I found Kagi I used to use it everytime Google
| failed me.
|
| So, yes, given he is the only one I know who manages this it
| isn't trivial.
|
| But it clearly isn't impossible or _that_ expensive either to
| run an index of the most useful and interesting parts of
| internet.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think the problem with search is that while it's
| relatively doable to build something that is competitive in
| one or a few niches, Google's real sticking power is how
| broad their offering is.
|
| Google search has seamless integration with maps, with
| commercial directories, with translation, with their
| browser, with youtube, etc.
|
| Even though there's more than a few queries they leave
| something to desire, the breadth of queries they can answer
| is very difficult to approach.
| l72 wrote:
| This is one of those things that I think is interesting
| about how "normal" people use the Internet. I am guessing
| they just always start with google.
|
| But for me, if I want to look up local restaurants, I go
| straight to Maps/Yelp/FourSquare(RIP). If I want to look
| up releases of a band, I go straight to musicbrainz. Info
| about Metal Band, straight to the Encyclopeadia Metallum.
| History/Facts, straight to Wikipedia. Recipes, straight
| to yummly. And so on. I rarely start my search with a
| general search engine.
|
| And now with GPT, I doubt I even perform a single search
| on a general search engine (google, bind, DDG) even once
| a day.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| I'm my second year into Kagi and loving it. I actually just
| upgraded to get Kagi Assistant (basically, cloud access to
| every LLM out there). But the search alone is worth every
| penny, and it's built/operated fully in-house as far as I know.
|
| https://kagi.com
| malfist wrote:
| As much as I like kagi and wish it success, it's not a search
| engine from scratch. Kagi uses other search engines (Google
| and Bing) wraps them and does a light reranking
| chabad360 wrote:
| No they do not, they have their own indexes.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| rkangel wrote:
| That page includes the text "Our search results also
| include anonymized API calls to all major search result
| providers worldwide".
|
| They source results from lots of places including Google.
| One way that you can confirm this is to search for
| something that only appears in a _recent_ Reddit post.
| Google has done a deal with Reddit that they 're the only
| company allowed to index Reddit since the summer.
|
| DuckDuckGo gets no answers if you specify only results
| from the last week: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=caleb+willi
| ams+site%253Areddit.com...
|
| Kagi is fine if you do the same: https://kagi.com/search?
| q=caleb+williams+site%3Areddit.com&d...
|
| edit: I don't think this is a bad thing for Kagi. I'm a
| very happy subscriber, and it's nice for me that I still
| get results from Reddit. They're very useful!
| bayindirh wrote:
| Kagi is also building their own index at the background,
| and mixes these indexes as you search.
|
| When I search Kagi for "Hacker News", results start with
| this fine text: 65 relevant results in
| 1.09s. 47% unique Kagi results.
|
| So, other indexes are fillers for Kagi's own index. They
| can't target their bots to places, because they don't have
| the users' search history. They can only organically grow
| and process what they indexed.
| jfengel wrote:
| How is it possible that a search for "Hacker News"
| produces only 65 results? There are thousands of pages
| out there with that exact phrase on it (including many
| sub-pages of this site).
|
| The first result is almost assuredly the right one, but
| either they're ruling out a lot of pages as not-what-you-
| meant, or their index is really small.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| I loved kagi, but their cost is prohibitive for me.
|
| The only way there is a chance for me to afford Kagi might be
| to buy "search credit" without a subscription and without
| minimum consumption. And then it would only be good if they
| allowed more than 1000 domain rules and showed more results
| (when available)
| rurp wrote:
| They are highly dependent on outside search engines. Someone
| from Kagi gave an explanation on HN of their search costs and
| why they can't go lower, and calling the Google API on many
| (most?) search queries was a major driver of their costs.
|
| It's great that they are developing their own index, but I'm
| skeptical that it makes up more than a tiny fraction of what
| they can get from Google/Bing. DDG has been making similar
| claims for years but are still heavily reliant on Bing.
|
| This isn't to knock on upstart search engines. I think that
| Google Search has declined massively over the past 5-10 years
| and I rarely use it. More competition is sorely needed, but
| we should be be clear eyed about the landscape.
| onli wrote:
| Brave search is doing it properly. Bought tech, but still.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| > Bought tech
|
| Could you please elaborate?
| onli wrote:
| Brave search is a continuation of cliqz. A German company
| that developed a proper search engine, with an independent
| index. They shut down, but the tech got sold off.
|
| Cliqz was the first time for me that a Google alternative
| actually worked really well - and it, or now brave search,
| is what parent was asking for :)
| prophesi wrote:
| Yet we're still back to Larry Page and Sergey Brin's
| conclusion in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
| Hypertextual Web Search Engine" research paper[0]:
|
| > We expect that advertising funded search engines will
| be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away
| from the needs of the consumers.
|
| Brave Search Premium hasn't been around nearly as long as
| their free tier serving ads, and I'm not confident this
| conflict of interest is gone.
|
| Having independent indexes is a win regardless though.
|
| [0] https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin9
| 8Anatom...
| miyuru wrote:
| very recently found about brave goggles. amazing way to give
| control to users, for ex: blocking pinterest or searching
| domains popular with HN or own list.
|
| https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover
| unionpivo wrote:
| Because nowdays more than ever content you need is in silos.
|
| Your facebooks/twiters/instagram/stack overflow/reddit ... And
| they all have limited expensive api's, and have bulk scrapping
| detection. Sure you can clobber together something that will
| work for a while, but you can't runn a buissness on that.
|
| Aditionaly most paywalled sites (like news) explicitly whitlist
| google and bing, and if someone cretes new site, they do the
| same. As an upstart you would have to reach out to them to get
| them to whitelist you. and you would need to do it not only in
| USA but globaly.
|
| Anothe problem is cloudflare and other cdns/web firewalls, so
| even trying to index mom and pops blog site could be
| problematic. An d most of the mom and pop blogs are nowdays on
| som ploging platform that is just another silo.
|
| Now that i think about it, cloudflare might be in a good
| position to do it.
|
| The AI hype and scraping for content to feed the models have
| increased dificulty for anyone new to start new index.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| This is the best (and saddest) answer. LLMs break the social
| contract of the internet, we're in a feudalisation process.
|
| The decentralized nature of the internet was amazing for
| businesses, and monopolization could ruin the space and slow
| innovation down significantly.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| > LLMs break the social contract of the internet
|
| The legal concept of fair usage has and is being
| challenged, and will best tested in court. Is the Golden
| Age of Fair Use Over? Maybe [0].
|
| [0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2024/05/is-the-golden-age-of-
| fair-us...
| tensor wrote:
| While LLMs have accelerated, it, it was already the case
| that silos were blocking non-Google and non-Bing results
| before LLMs. LLMs have only made existing problems of the
| web worse, but they were problems before LLMs too and
| banning LLMs won't fix the core issues of silos and
| misinformation.
| nijave wrote:
| And JavaScript/dynamic content. Entrenched search engines
| have had a long time to optimize scraping for complex sites
| jasode wrote:
| _> competing with Google was borderline impossible a decade
| ago. But in 2024, we have cheap compute, great OSS distributed
| DBs, powerful new vector search tech. [...] CommonCrawl text-
| only is ~100TB,_
|
| Those example 3 bullet points of today's improved 2024
| computing power you list isn't even enough to process Google's
| scale 14 years ago in 2010 when the search index was _100+
| petabytes_ : https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-
| search-index...
|
| A modest homegrown tech stack of 2024 can maybe compete with a
| smaller Google circa ~1998 but that thought experiment is
| handicapping Google's _current_ state-of-the-art. Instead, we
| have to compare OSS-today vs Google- _today_. There 's still a
| big delta gap between the 2024 OSS tech stack and Google's
| internal 2024 tech stack.
|
| E.g. for all the billions Microsoft spent on Bing, there are
| still some queries that I noticed Google was better at. Google
| found more pages of obscure people I was researching
| (obituaries, etc). But Bing had the edge when I was looking up
| various court cases with docket #s. The internet is now so big
| that even billion dollar search engines can't get to all of it.
| Each has blindspots. I have to use both search engines every
| single day.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I was talking about text-only, filtered and deduped content.
|
| Most of Google's 100PB is picture and video. Filtering the
| spam and deduping the content helped Google reduce the ~50B
| page index in 2012 to ~<10B today.
| the-rc wrote:
| Where are these figures coming from?
| mapt wrote:
| You don't have to match Google's technical prowess if that
| capability is being superceded by MBAs doing aggressive
| enshittification.
| munk-a wrote:
| You'd be surprised how long it takes to enshittify a piece
| of tech as well established as Google. The MBAs may be
| trying but there are still a lot of dedicated folks deep in
| the org holding out.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| We are @mojeek
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Mostly because Google bought, developed, acquired or
| effectively control all the major distribution points with
| default placement deals: eg Apple, Samsung, Chrome, Android,
| Firefox. In time remedies are coming though, in the antitrust
| case lost versus DoJ.
|
| Another major factor is that building a search index and
| algorithms that searches across billions of pages with good
| enough latency is very hard. Easy enough for 10s of millions
| scale search but a different challenge for billions.
|
| Some claim(ed) click-query data is needed at scale, and are
| hoping for that remedy. Our take is what is the point of
| replicating Google. Anyway, will this data be free or low cost?
| You know the answer.
|
| Cloud infrastructure is very expensive. We save massively on
| costs by building our own servers, but that means capital
| outlay.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Remember that MS lost the anti-trust too, and after the
| presidential transfer in 2000, they pretty much dropped it
| with few consequences for MS.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "CommonCrawl [being] text-only is only ~100TB, and can fit on
| my home server."
|
| Are any individual users downloading CC for potential use in
| the future?
|
| It may seem like a non-trivial task to process ~100TB at home
| today but in the future processing this amount of data will
| likely seem trivial. CC data is available for download to
| anyone but, to me, it appears only so-called "tech" companies
| and "researchers" are grabbing a copy.
|
| Many years ago I began storing copies of the publicly-available
| com. and net. zonefiles from Verisign. At the time it was
| infeasible for me to try to serve multi-GB zonefiles on the
| local network at home. Today, it's feasible. And in the future
| it will be even easier.
|
| NB. I am not employed by a so-called "tech" company. I store
| this data for personal, non-commercial use.
| 1024core wrote:
| Is Common Crawl updated frequently?
| astonex wrote:
| They do monthly-ish releases https://index.commoncrawl.org/
| nijave wrote:
| I'm guessing there's no money in it unless you glue an ad
| machine to the side and use search to drive advertising.
| readingnews wrote:
| How things change... I recall having a subscription (had one of
| those friends who always seemed to know what was coming out right
| before it came out) right when they started publishing, what was
| that, 1994? It was so cool.
|
| I just viewed the front page, looks like the definition of
| "internet chum".
|
| But seriously, to upend Google, you are going to need to be the
| default on what people use, which I think for now is phones.
|
| Another barrier, maybe they need to get away from this: "will
| require succeeding at home and growing revenue, which largely
| comes from running ads." So what do you do when everyone runs
| some ublock-origin thing? We need to figure out a search
| monetization beyond "feed me weird things I do not want" on the
| sidebar. Should websites pay? No, wait, then only those with real
| money are on the web. Should we pay? Now, wait, we have had it
| for "free" for too long (could be wrong, I might at this stage in
| the game pay to have an actual search engine, like say google
| circa-internet 2004, of course the net was a different place, but
| still).
| FredPret wrote:
| This is somehow not about Perplexity.
|
| Like many, I tried many other search engines, starting with
| DuckDuckGo way back when. I always ended up Googling (or !g...
| -ing).
|
| Perplexity is the first one that consistently works for both code
| questions (what's this error message) and local questions
| (where's my nearest store X and when do they close). Now they
| just need to speed it up a bit - Google queries are effectively
| instant.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I would strongly prefer a search engine that searches and
| doesn't attempt to proactively answer questions.
| FredPret wrote:
| I like that too but the benefit of the answer model is near-
| zero spam. Perplexity gives an answer with references,
| effectively combining search with the answer.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'd rather hear the word from the horse's mouth rather than a
| hallucinating parrot which paraphrases stuff as it
| "understands/thinks it knows".
| elashri wrote:
| http://archive.today/qEyTJ
| bilekas wrote:
| It shouldn't be too hard to achieve what Google were good at
| before. Their recent search results for me (last 6-12 months)
| have been so far removed from what I'm searching it felt like a
| meme.
|
| Even after rephrasing things, more details, special quotations
| etc that everyone knows as the 'search tricks' the results are
| terrible.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm using Kagi for quite some time. It's invisible to me. I
| search, get 30ish high quality results per search, and I'm a
| happy camper. No ads, no seo grafting, nothing.
|
| Moreover, I can block sites and customize my own search
| results. This feels good.
|
| When I first started using Kagi, it felt like leaving a closed
| building and stepping out to open air.
| eitland wrote:
| Almost same here:
|
| One of the few software tools I care to pay for except
| Jetbrains.
|
| Only in practice I almost never use filter or block features,
| because Kagi does out-of-the-box what we always wanted to do
| our selves in Google: block spam sites.
|
| The ranking also seems to be better for some reason somehow.
|
| The funny thing is it doesn't feel like a step forward, but
| rather like a step back to Google ca 2009 - 2012 somewhere.
| bilekas wrote:
| I've heard good things about it actually I must go check it
| out now. Thanks for reminding me. I don't mind paying for
| things that save me time.
| beAbU wrote:
| I moved to DDG a couple of years ago, and initially, I found
| myself often using the `!g` switch, but I honestly can't recall
| the last time I needed to do that. Only when I'm shopping do I
| find the goog to be a slightly better tool for finding products
| sold by niche suppliers.
|
| I honestly think google's monopoly on search at this time is
| 100% powered by momentum, there is almost no other reason to
| use it over something like DDG or hell, even Bing!
| Voultapher wrote:
| Basically exactly the same thing here. It used to be that
| google had the better results, but DDG got a little better
| and google a lot more shit, so here we are I'm pre-filtering
| what I look for.
| miyuru wrote:
| every new search engine i have tried so far, failed to do
| regional searches properly. for some queries i need regional
| index without adding my country to the query.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Bing and Google do have the benefit of websites defining their
| market via their webmaster tools sections. And a critical mass
| of click through metrics, etc.
| keyboardJones wrote:
| I found this article much more informative:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/11/ecosia-and-qwant-two-europ...
| ohstopitu wrote:
| > Ask the search engine Ecosia about "Paris to Prague" and flight
| booking websites dominate the results. Ecosia's CEO Christian
| Kroll would prefer to present more train options, which he
| considers better for the environment. But because its results are
| licensed from Google and Microsoft's Bing, Ecosia has little
| control over what's shown. Kroll is ready for that to change.
|
| While I think Google sucks right now and we need something new,
| this specific reason is so dumb. Unless I add the word "train" or
| "air" etc. I would much rather be shown either all options or the
| one that I care about most (if it's flying, then so be it - the
| search engine can't and shouldn't try to filter out options FOR
| me without my consent)
| crestfallen wrote:
| Respectfully, the search engine is "allowed" to do what it
| wants to for its business purpose. In Ecosia's case, that is to
| prefer environmentally sound modes of travel, sites, or
| businesses. And that's fine! What it means is that it might not
| be the search engine for you or for me. And that's fine too!
| cphoover wrote:
| Why isn't there a distributed, decentralized or open index that
| all of these startups can utilize? I understand that these
| startups are all are focusing in on different problem areas, but
| doesn't it make sense to have something like open street maps so
| that all of these companies can share their compute resources in
| order to maintain something competitive with the big guys? Or
| even if it's not fully decentralized these startups teaming up to
| build a bigger index for themselves makes a lot of sense to me.
|
| I have no knowledge of this field but something like that would
| seem seem to make sense.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Yacy is still around. While I wouldn't want to disrupt it's
| decentralized/p2p nature, I think there's a case to be made for
| a community-managed central aggregation server to help seed the
| index at various snapshots. I might even be interested in
| helping run such a thing.
| lexlambda wrote:
| > "We could de-rank results from unethical or unsustainable
| companies and rank good companies higher," Kroll says of the eco-
| minded Ecosia.
|
| Understandable knowing Ecosias goals, but I find it rather
| concerning their vision of a better search involves deciding what
| is good and bad.
|
| Ranking by quality (against spam & SEO sites) is fine, but it
| should be applied equally to all Websites, and not target
| specific companies.
| iterance wrote:
| The measure of success of a search engine is how quickly I
| leave it with the info I want in hand.
|
| I too find this a bit strange. Downranking results that would
| otherwise be naturally highly ranked seems only to inhibit the
| operation of the search engine.
| bananapub wrote:
| > I find it rather concerning their vision of a better search
| involves deciding what is good and bad
|
| the entire purpose of a search engine is to do this, you've
| been grossly confused about the entire space if you think this
| isn't exactly what everyone is trying to do.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Yes, but it usually isn't "good or bad" in the moral
| judgement sense. Not to mention the many logical flaws
| involved with trying to make such prioritization. If I'm
| searching for say desert eagles refusing to return any gun
| related content and only giving me birds isn't helping
| anything or anyone.
|
| Although come to think of it I'm surprised that I haven't
| heard of any attempts of fundamentalists to make "moral"
| search engines that do things like exclude evolution.
| TreetopPlace wrote:
| Yes, people aren't going to use a search engine that
| politically skews the results. It will end up as a tiny website
| for a very narrow niche of person, similar to eg Mastodon.
| daft_pink wrote:
| Until they actually produce results, does any one actually
| believe them. I tried a lot of search engines to replace google
| until finally settling on Kagi.
| pixxel wrote:
| >"We could de-rank results from unethical or unsustainable
| companies and rank good companies higher," Kroll says of the eco-
| minded Ecosia.
|
| Censorship...for reasons. How's this any better.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Shoutout for Mojeek. Highlights:
|
| - Has its own index
|
| - Had a pro-privacy privacy policy well before DDG existed
|
| - No conflated marketing (DDG wrt it passing on 3 octets of an IP
| to Bing for local searches, Ecosia for not including Bing's
| carbon footprint as a meta search engine)
|
| - Has an API
|
| It's a smaller index and has more limited resources, but pretty
| much the best genuine alternative, and great for finding older
| resources that have long since been buried by G/B.
| mxuribe wrote:
| This is quite welcomed! I like seeing more competition in such
| spaces. What would be really interesting is if DDG got
| involved...and those 3 entities (DDG, Ecosia, and Qwant) worked
| together. I know DDG is simply a wrapper around Bing...but i
| think one of these others has a similar Bing back-end...so if
| someoine who has the mindshare of DDG got into that, i think
| woul;d make it even more interesting. I know Google is quite the
| behemoth, but still, would be great to see some shake-ups
| (assuming of course that the results are good and provide value,
| etc.).
| bionsystem wrote:
| qwant had bing as a backend a few years back iirc.
| myflash13 wrote:
| Is it just me or does it feel like a lot of Big Tech empires are
| immovable? There are no winner takes all markets now. Massive
| incumbents are not replaced by another even more massive startup
| that gobbles up the market, but rather a collection of
| specialized alternatives. So Google is not being replaced, but is
| slowly losing bits and pieces to ChatGPT, Kagi, Perplexity, and
| others. Facebook/X lose a little to BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads
| and Telegram. Netflix by a dozen streamers. Etc. The age of
| massive upheavals is over? I can't remember a single Big Tech
| company that went under completely in the last decade, just
| slowly became "not the only one".
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It went on for far longer than the last decade. The thing is
| that it takes a long time for a very big company of any sort to
| die, so it can zombie along for years. Even when private equity
| notorious is pretty much trying to kill the company.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I really hope they can make it work.
|
| We all hate how shitty the big sites have gotten in the name of
| maximizing profit, but I think it's more insidious than that. It
| would be one thing if running (say) a news site with decency and
| integrity was merely less profitable; there would still be people
| doing it. But I fear that it's actually become _impossible_ to
| sustain a business like that. The ones that try either die or
| sell out to survive. (Or are so limited in scope that one person
| 's unpaid part-time labor can sustain them.)
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| For me, it seems the direction for search is going towards AI
| sites. (Gemini, ChatGPT)
|
| Trying to reinvent Google/ Search in 2024 seems a bit like
| jumping the shark
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| The thing is, often I _want_ articles, opinion pieces, and
| interesting reading. Sure, sometimes I 'm searching for facts
| or answers to programming questions, but most of the time LLMs
| are not going to give me what I'm looking for.
| hengheng wrote:
| Quite the opposite. The part of the crowd that has
| site:old.reddit.com in their muscle memory has to be the
| premium end of the search market.
|
| Sure, garbage tier searches will be done LLM style. But few
| smart people might be bored with that, and pay for something
| better.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| I was hoping this will be about Kagi. A lot of companies that
| make bold promises of taking on Google end up in the drain 2
| years later.
| disqard wrote:
| I'm a paying customer of Kagi.
|
| Kagi itself runs on top of Google. It's certainly worth paying
| for (IMO), but let's not kid ourselves -- it is *not* a
| competitor (as in, can replace Google). Without Google, there
| is no Kagi.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| yandex!!!
| netcan wrote:
| If Google search ad business dwindled, the remaining ad-supported
| tech will all be targeting based.
|
| The adtech parts of ai are going to be weird.
| madrox wrote:
| My hot take on this new era of search engines is that "search is
| a bug" and even trying to be a search engine is a fool's errand.
| Search solved a problem of the legacy internet where you wanted
| information and that information would be on one of a million
| websites.
|
| If someone is going to disrupt Google, it's because they've cut
| out the middleman that is search results and simply _give you
| what you 're asking for_. ChatGPT and Perplexity are doing the
| best here so far afaik
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