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Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

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

#41

Post by dri_ft »

stupidcar wrote: post #25

For a general search engine, no, there isn't. The upfront capital investment, in terms of the data center capacity necessary to make a modern scraping and search infrastructure, is immense. And since the ad-word business model does not scale linearly with market share – e.g. the market leader collects a disproportionate share of the available profit – you will be losing additional money for a long time. Since the mar…

> the ad-word business model does not scale linearly with market share – e.g. the market leader collects a disproportionate share of the available profit

Why is this so?

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

#42

Post by greglindahl »

rgovind wrote: post #22

Yes. In today's search engines, I cannot give you a blacklist and say filter out these results. If I am looking for tutorials, I cannot say no video results. If I am looking for market research, I cannot filter out news websites from the links. For personalization, I cannot give google any suggestions on what I absolutely do not want to be included etc.

blekko had these features, and almost no one used them. The google guy who teaches advanced Google searching says that almost no one uses Google's advanced search, either. So if this is a viable niche, you'll have to figure out how to find these users...

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

#43

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #24

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…

Those are all things Google can already do but decide not to. Which means if any startup attempts and gets a moderate success, google will of course decide to do the same. Your startup will be nothing more than an R&D department Google uses for free.

Disruption happens by doing something completely different that happens to cannibalize the incumbent's business in a way that they can't change. All these little features mentioned are something Google can easily do so these are not really disruptive.

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

#44

Post by greglindahl »

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/

It's a crowded market, even though Google has basically withdrawn from it.

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

#45

Post by tvural »

Animats wrote: post #24

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…

"Fix those two problems, and a new search engine could be better than Google. Whether anyone would notice is questionable."

Yeah, I don't think many people will care about the difference between good and perfect. You might be able to find a niche in search that Google is ignoring, but you would have a hard time expanding from there into general search.

In that sense Google is a bet against technology - you would invest in Google if you believe the Web's going to stay the same for a long time and nothing will replace it.

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

#46

Post by greglindahl »

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?

Partly using human curation is an area that Google doesn't want to go into... that was blekko's sustained competitive advantage. Wasn't big enough for us, but maybe someone else could make a go of it.

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

#47

Post by thesmallestcat »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #43
thesmallestcat wrote: post #27

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…

Those are all things Google can already do but decide not to. Which means if any startup attempts and gets a moderate success, google will of course decide to do the same. Your startup will be nothing more than an R&D department Google uses for free. Disruption happens by doing something completely different that happens to cannibalize the incumbent's business in a way that they can't change. All these little feature…

Keep in mind that it's been 20 years since Google's differantiator (PageRank) was invented. It's been about 10 years since Google's last meaningful changes to its search UI (autocomplete and "instant" search). So, while I respect Google's omniscience and omnipotence, I disagree strongly that Google/Alphabet are in a position to respond to a serious upstart competitor. Their primary response, as you hinted would be to acquire/acquihire, which is unimaginative and not exactly how you remain on the cutting edge. That strategy falls on its face as soon as it meets that one damn company that doesn't want to be purchased.

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

#48

Post by bsilvereagle »

kapauldo wrote: post #32
sergiotapia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's bizarre that algolia is a thing. Elasticsearch is good and free.

Yes, but Elasticsearch requires a dedicated server, you may have to use a river, you may have to shard, etc. Some people (most people?) don't want to think about shards & rivers and just want something to work. Algolia seems to do that.

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

#49

Post by h2hn »

jplayer01 wrote: post #31
h2hn wrote: post #18

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. :)

But...Startpage uses other search engines, primarily Google.

Truuuue. :)

But my point is my searches usually end up in:

wikipedia, blogpost, *overflow, twitter, reddit, papers ...

So making a search engine for only those sites, could be a usable search engine indeed and I would use it if I had to. :)

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

#50

Post by icebraining »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #24

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…

Another issue is spam/false matches. Why does Google return illegitimate results? Because, let me tell you, any search for "some nifty computer book pdf" returns pages upon pages of bogus links leading to ad link mazes. A crawler should be able to trivially crawl such a page, determine that no PDF is linked, and blacklist the result, but this doesn't happen.

The problem is interesting, but I think you make it seem easier than it is. What if there's a CAPTCHA, as there often is? Should the engine still ignore it? That could lead to a whole lot of missed content.

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