Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…
Newcomers might be better off approaching the challenge in a totally different way.
A newcomer can index, store, search and display data differently, but first they still have to get that data. Which means dealing with JavaScript, paywalls and other fun stuff like that.
Besides, regardless of what you do, you would need to have tons of storage, bandwidth, CPU power and a high-availability infrastructure.
A friend had to chance his product name, because Google wouldnt stop suggesting porn. You googled his product and instead you found porn. It was not really related, and the term was as innocent as possible in it self, but well google thought and still thinks you want porn.
Duckduckgo has a safe filter that blocks porn and a few other things from showing up in the search results that works pretty well, you can decide to take it off at any time too. They have the same kind of filter for looking for country specific results.
Google also has a safe filter. That doesn't help if most users have it off because sometimes they want porn.
This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assum…
I mean... Amazone should probably change their name.
There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…
I get Wikipedia as the top result. Maybe Google is making a guess about your preference based on your history? Try the search in incognito/private mode and see.
There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…
I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.c…
I just went there and the first "result" is a giant stock chart widget showing the 1-day chart with the options of viewing 5-day, month, etc. This chart takes up a full 1/3 of the vertical screen size. At the bottom of the chart there's 3 quick-links to: Google Finance, Yahoo finance, and MSN Money. The next result-ish thing is Google's "In the News" section that has an article about the broken Gigafactory promises. The first real result is yahoo finance, just as it is for you. I suspect it isn't so much that Google is promoting Yahoo over its own product, since that first chart is clearly a Google product, but that it doesn't bias the real search results in their favor. It's a legitimate organic search result. Most people probably just want the stock price from the first/simplest way possible, which is provided or they want the yahoo finance page.
There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…
You got unlucky. G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) is really popular slang at the moment for describing athletes, fashion, actors, etc. and people are undoubtedly searching for that term more than they are looking for the wikipedia page for the animal.
Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…
You are not correct. Apache Foundation, electron/chromium & elastic are the open source components of google. meme-explorer is the paradigm but was funded by drape/jpl_nasa so work was suspended on it.
heirarchical crawl index and DNS rebuild(or similar model) will lead to search platform and fix discovery, monopoly and monetization.
note that Google has solved a HUGE problem, but their task is now impossible. You can't simply use a textbook and some booleans and quotations(which I am not sure they even respect) to deliver results for a billion people.
Individuals and the market will calibrate their own results.
Yeah this bites me nearly every day. I can only assume that they have some data that this helps 60%-80% of their users in some way, and they are optimizing for the common case rather than the uncommon case. Not sure that it's the right decision, even if it helps the common case, but it may be. And I say this as somebody who's not particularly fond of Google as a company or its policies.
It could also just be that they [incorrectly] assume their users are dumb, their algorithms are smart, and have forgotten what made them big in the first place. IIRC, besides PageRank, one of their original usability improvements was AND-ing query terms by default instead of OR-ing by default like their competition.
I've long given up on Google outside of the anglosphere. I travel a lot. Location services are enabled on my phone and laptop yet Google still wants to serve up results from the US. I've had to be very careful with how I use Maps since the name of a dutch city or street just might share the same name as some bar in middle America.
I think someone is buying or gaming search results. When I'm in Paris some results take me back to a tour company in central Paris even if they have nothing to do with what I'm looking for.
This has forced me to go back to search aggregators like DDG. I miss the old Google. DDG can be a little too broad with the results and then I have to load it with filters where old Google would kind of get it right away.