Ask HN: Will there be a better Google?

Maybe I'm at risk of being a fan, but the Google of tomorrow will likely be better than the Google of today. And while they have expanded and evolved I mean this relative to search specifically.

"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The universally part has a lot of room to grow, and the useful part changes everyday.

Not having read the book, but based on what you posted, the example is just one of the giant leaps forward and a way they differentiated themselves as a technology and a company. New leaps will present themselves through continuous improvement and reassessing what is useful.

some points:

Result quality has not really improved, all the while: more and more content is in silos that are not easily searchable. Spam/SEO/trust in content remain a problem, thus many people rely on social recommendations for content (which has its own problems). More and more content is in non-textual forms. Google (sometimes vastly) prioritizes content on their own platforms.

I consider search an essentially solved problem and I think most people agree with me. When I want to find something I can usually use Google or Bing to get to it within 10 seconds or convince myself it doesn't exist. Will search get better? Probably, but going from 99% to 99.5% isn't very exciting to me.

If anything, I see Google and others moving in a direction of using context to reduce the amount people search (e.g. google now). I think this pattern is going to get much bigger in the coming years with better AIs and more information about what the user is doing.

I agree with what you've said but I wanted to add that there is room for improvement on Google's model. For example, selling page 1 results is unfair, but that is something google does.

I think DuckDuckGo is an example of how Google's methodology can be refined and improved upon, specifically by not spying on users. It's a subtle improvement, but I find the results I receive are actually superior and more relevant than Google's, plus I don't have to worry about who is watching my traffic.

Imagine a search engine that not only gave you search results, it used advanced AI to tell you in brief how each result applied to the problem you are currently trying to solve. Currently, you have to waste time thinking about each result to classify the contents, as for example, entertainment, product marketing, opinions and rants, purely factual, legal, political, social networking, media, API/interface, et cetera.

It would also be useful if the search engine could verify statements made on pages and give an accuracy/honesty score for each result. This is particularly important when the author of a page has a serious conflict of interest. Perhaps the search engine could tell you what that conflict is -- to help protect you from deceptive or incomplete information.