Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#11

Post by rpedela » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Google beat the competition not so much that it has a better search engine but in that it has a much better ad platform and brings in much more revenue per search than Yahoo, Bing, etc. I would address the money issue first before thinking about how to make a better search for some market.

Google beat the other search engines in 1998 because of PageRank and a clean UI. Yes their monetization platform has allowed them to improve their product and dominate the market, but that isn't how they became the search leader initially.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#12

Post by elvirs » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

i think most of the social media content created recently is stored inside mobile apps and and for the most part is not available to be indexed by search engines. apple and google are in a unique position with access to all of that data. i think just like facebook does push its users to make more and more content public apple and google could put in similar efforts and if the right balance is found there could be a new search engine for all content created and stored inside mobile apps

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#13

Post by tommynicholas » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

Absolutely - Giphy is a great example. There will be plenty of search engines that will grow to prominence around either a niche content type (gifs => Giphy) or a niche feature privacy => Duck Duck Go).

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#14

Post by webwright » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Google beat the competition not so much that it has a better search engine but in that it has a much better ad platform and brings in much more revenue per search than Yahoo, Bing, etc. I would address the money issue first before thinking about how to make a better search for some market.

This isn't true.

Google existed and grew (rapidly) for quite a while before they launched Adwords, which they introduced in 2000. Their growth in '99 was pretty meteoric (prompting a $25M investment from KP and Sequoia) before it rolled out PPC monetization. The Adwords model wasn't new at all-- Goto.com was the first search engine to bet on that model.

Google won because it was a massively better search engine... Not just 10% better-- it was "holy crap" better on a mess of fronts (notably: serving up what you were looking for).

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#15

Post by bobosha » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

I think there is room for a horizontal search engine, by making it mobile-first. Even with Siri style conversation agents, mobile search still sucks real bad. If you design bottom-up for a mobile form factor you could have a winner.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#16

Post by DanBC » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

EmilStenstrom wrote: post #9

Google has the best search results cause it has the most people using its service. Its models learn every time you click on a result. There's no way to take that on directly. What you need is to find an angle that Google can't easily follow, as with DuckDuckGo and privacy. Are there areas where Google can't go?

> cause it has the most people using its service. Its models learn every time you click on a result.

That's why Google dropped the + operator. Lots of people using it hasn't always made it better.

EDIT: I mean, Matt Cutts has a blog post saying that Google dropped the + operator because most people didn't use it, and when they did use it they used it wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#17

Post by sergiotapia » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:25 PM UTC

sairamkunala wrote: post #6

Companies like Algolia which provide a site specific search engine has been doing really well especially with the speed and relevancy where Google currently is not concentrating on. https://www.algolia.com/

Algolia is a game-changer. They made it so incredibly simple to add search to your website. I'm not talking about their widgets, I'm talking about their server-side integrations and their javascript client-side lib.

It's like magic. See it in action here: https://stackshare.io/match

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#18

Post by h2hn » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

I don't see any problem here.

I've been using startpage for the last 5 years and I'm not looking back. I woudn't have any problem using any other search engine, nowdays any search engine works. The 3 or 4 times that I googled these years I found it pretty weird.

tl;dr: There's plenty of room, just not enough gray matter. :)

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#19

Post by alain94040 » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

Absolutely. I'm fairly confident that 20 years from now, we'll laugh at the notion that all Google could do was finding pages.

I don't know what will replace it. Chat bots could be one. Much better understanding of context. Or providing answers based on the knowledge that is spread on many separate web pages. or actually taking action (if you are searching, it's to do something, not to read a page).

But "finding a page" will sound really silly 20 years from now.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#20

Post by yitchelle » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 5:30 PM UTC

Yes. Google is too generic and that is great for the internet.

I would look forward to search engines that are topic specific. However, the blocker is having the information available in the first place, so I doubt if this will ever happen.