31–40 of 200 posts
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. :)
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
That's a good question, and something I've spent much time on. Cuil (2008-2010) tried. I knew some of those people. It cost them about $30 million to launch a full scale search engine. They had no revenue model. In retrospect, they were hoping to be acquired by somebody. It was some ex-Google people, trying to replicate older Google technology. They had a great launch, but the system wasn't very good and traffic rapi…
There are way more than two things that Google does wrong. Remapping my search terms into oblivion so it can pretend it's fast is the worst one. Especially when this happens to a query I've modified to quote "every" "single" "flipping" "term." I think Google is cheating, and that their usable index is much shallower than they'd have you believe. What's needed is a search engine with functional queries (as opposed to…
I mean, the modern idea of the internet is pretty much useless without a search engine, and we've been spoiled by the power we get through Google — the phrases on this very page get indexed within literally seconds; I just tried a literal search for a sentence from a 3-minute-old comment here — but it's really not a good idea for a single company to have so much authority.
This really isn't something to keep relying on a small handful of companies for, especially once we have interplanetary internet. :)
All successful companies that came out of nowhere and disrupted already stable industry never started out thinking "How do i build another X", "How do I disrupt X"? They all built something they thought was needed by the world and it went onto somehow "disrupt X".
So if you're starting out thinking "I want to build a search engine if there's room for another.", that will never work because you don't even know what you're solving, you will be frantically searching for the question throughout your "startup" life.
That's a good question, and something I've spent much time on. Cuil (2008-2010) tried. I knew some of those people. It cost them about $30 million to launch a full scale search engine. They had no revenue model. In retrospect, they were hoping to be acquired by somebody. It was some ex-Google people, trying to replicate older Google technology. They had a great launch, but the system wasn't very good and traffic rapi…
There are way more than two things that Google does wrong. Remapping my search terms into oblivion so it can pretend it's fast is the worst one. Especially when this happens to a query I've modified to quote "every" "single" "flipping" "term." I think Google is cheating, and that their usable index is much shallower than they'd have you believe. What's needed is a search engine with functional queries (as opposed to…
That's a good question, and something I've spent much time on. Cuil (2008-2010) tried. I knew some of those people. It cost them about $30 million to launch a full scale search engine. They had no revenue model. In retrospect, they were hoping to be acquired by somebody. It was some ex-Google people, trying to replicate older Google technology. They had a great launch, but the system wasn't very good and traffic rapi…
My experience with Google is the opposite of this. When people are searching google they are looking for information. When people go to Amazon they have their credit card in their hand.
Most of my google-ad clicks (85% last check) are clearly not interested in buying what they are looking for. They are only on my page for seconds. If I try to qualify my ads better I lose 'quality score,' which is a measure that is entirely, at least to a first-order approximation, about whether or not people will click the ad. That, if my ad say 'This site is X' I get a good quality score but shitty leads. If I say 'This site is X for $49.99' I get shitty quality score but the people who come to the site (the clicks I have to pay for) are ready to buy.
The profitability isn't because their initial hypothesis of Search Marketing (that people are searching what they want to purchase and will therefore purchase) was correct, but because they are far-and-away the search winners and if you want to be found at all you have to play it.
At least, in my experience and IMHO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are way more than two things that Google does wrong. Remapping my search terms into oblivion so it can pretend it's fast is the worst one. Especially when this happens to a query I've modified to quote "every" "single" "flipping" "term." I think Google is cheating, and that their usable index is much shallower than they'd have you believe. What's needed is a search engine with functional queries (as opposed to…
Any search crawler that ignores robots.txt is going to be blocked by site operators in a hurry.
That's a good question, and something I've spent much time on. Cuil (2008-2010) tried. I knew some of those people. It cost them about $30 million to launch a full scale search engine. They had no revenue model. In retrospect, they were hoping to be acquired by somebody. It was some ex-Google people, trying to replicate older Google technology. They had a great launch, but the system wasn't very good and traffic rapi…
(Also, how about DuckDuckGo? I've got the (admittedly gut) feeling that it should at least outperform Ask and Excite.)