61–70 of 200 posts
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 pa…
a.) storing more data about the sites (and doing something interesting with said data)
b.) improve the UI/UX for power users. The best part is that I can imagine that there would be quite a few people who would pay actual money for being able to use a better search engine. Note that the Bloomberg terminal, is, among others, a search engine. For example, you could make the link graph explicit, you would immediately see what sites link to what sites.
E.g. symbol search really leaves something to be desired on google. I also wish I could use regular expressions. I get it, they are expensive, but like even a little "expressiveness" goes far.
c.) i would pay A LOT for a good search engine for code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There are already many "serious upstarts" that are doing just fine but will never reach the status of Google, like duckduckgo, bing, etc. Some even say bing has better search quality than google. But that's not what matters. No matter how good the product is, if you can't get distribution it doesn't matter. Also, even if you do have distribution, it may not be the right context so it won't be effective. If anyone is…
Baidu and Yandex are serious but are comfortable in their respective positions. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Google challenger spring up from the other side of the world, where Google's position may not be seen as so unassailable.
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…
Edit: There should be a differentiator for new search engine, there is more room (problems to solve) in Q&A search and Discovery.
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?
If by "search engine", you mean something similar to Google/Bing then probably not. However, if we expand the concept of "search" to something beyond text on webpages and "engine" to something beyond a linear algebra pagerank problem that weighs url links, there's room for many more competitors. Let's say we want to search for "best restaurant": Method #1 might be searching millions of web pages, twitter posts, newsp…
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…
ActionCookBook accurately recreates my experience. https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/834439563032555521
ME: [views product online] Hmm. Nah.
[changes website]
PRODUCT: we meet again
ME: Sorry, no [changes again]
PRODUCT: bitch this ain't over
ME: FINE. FINE. I will buy this rug. Just leave me at peace.
REST OF INTERNET: this dude loves rugs, let's get him, boys