151–160 of 221 posts
This type of business attracts a different class of talent and nearly all of the old guard has cashed in their stock and left.
I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…
It is like search is broken on all the major providers. Not sure if they are copying each other or if SEO spam has become a lot better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been coming to a similar conclusion. Increasingly I've had to use `site: ` syntax with DDG, but DDG has clearly become significantly worse in recent months. This was confirmed by others in another HN thread recently. Even if I use the site-syntax or use quotes to specify exact match (which DDG used to honor), I'll often get nonsense results whereas Yandex somehow manages to find results that aren't on DDG or Goo…
I think there's a market for sites that have optimized search around a specific category of information. For example, imagine you had a hybrid directory+search model, where you could drill down into the directory: Top -> Programming -> Lisp -> Scheme And from there, search a repertoire of Scheme related articles, tips, blogs, etc. This model already exists, somewhat, in the form of scholarly articles, medical journal…
on edit: I remember Carrot2 had the ability to derive categories from an index dynamically at one point, so when we put all the Danish laws into it and you searched for murder it generated categories such as Knife Murder etc. anyway here is the online Carrot2 with a search on Scheme https://search.carrot2.org/#/search/web/scheme/folders
on edit2: obviously this Carrot2 online thing is just a demo, they don't have a particularly big or up to date index. I'm also not sure how well Carrot2 would scale as it was, IIRC, an academic project to investigate different ways of searching / organizing search results. Check out the treemap.
I wonder how much this has to do with do not track and the search engines optimising towards people who don’t enable do not track / limit cookies.
Google's results for nearly every query are the pages that contain the most Adsense. That's how most results became "Best X in $CurrentYear" and top 10 listicles.
Google is going to slowly lose the powerusers first, and then like what happened to Metacrawler, Dogpile and Altavista, the decline will be RAPID as they convert their families and friends.
"Not growing is failing" is the most toxic principle of modern business. There is a finite amount of people, of money to be made. Ever-increasing income is fundamentally impossible. When you can't increase revenue by further improving your product, you increase revenue by making the same product more profitable, which generally means a worse product. In the eyes of the business major, the ideal business is one in which all of your customers hate you not quite enough to stop using you.
I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…
I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…
Not impossible, but given the proliferation of content on the web and the endless possibilities for competing organizing schemas and editorial choices, it would pretty much have to be a directory of directories.
So, each directory could be it's own self-organizing community, like a subreddit.
Weird I feel DDGs search quality has also gone down recently. I find myself jumping between google and DDG and sometimes to Bing when both are broken. It is like search is broken on all the major providers. Not sure if they are copying each other or if SEO spam has become a lot better.
Google is going in wrong way and just promoting spam sites and ads.