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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?

#81

Post by Animats »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #59
thesmallestcat wrote: post #47

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…

prepare to be the most patient person on earth, because it won't happen fast, and probably won't even happen

Maybe not. The Cuil experience is significant. The PR for the launch was good, there was a huge initial traffic spike, and then users discovered the product sucked and traffic dropped. The system at launch was terrible. Six months later it wasn't so bad, but nobody cared by then. They launched too early. But they did, briefly, have mindshare, lost through technical ineptitude.

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

#82

Post by mrweasel »

eatmyshorts wrote: post #56
Vinnl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7% for Bing? That's huge! (Also, how about DuckDuckGo? I've got the (admittedly gut) feeling that it should at least outperform Ask and Excite.)

DuckDuckGo doesn't crawl/index by itself--it partners with other companies to use their search indexing. Bing is one of their primary sources of indexing, actually, although Wikipedia tells me that DDG's indexing is a compilation of "about 50 sources". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo do have their own crawler: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot, but they are dependent on the indexes of others.

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

#83

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #64
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We can agree to disagree about Google's immortality, but I take issue with you treating DDG and Bing as serious challengers to Google. Obviously Microsoft has no chance, they're worse off than Google re: ossification and Bing is a hedge at best. DDG is one step above a lifestyle business and only innovates at the UI level, even their efforts there are forgettable. Their major differentiator (data privacy) is meaningl…

> We can agree to disagree about Google's immortality

Dude where did I say Google is immortal? I'm just saying it's a wrong approach to try to kill google this way. There are many good ways to do it and coming from "How do i disrupt Google" is the worst possible way.

> Obviously Microsoft has no chance, they're worse off than Google re: ossification and Bing is a hedge at best.

Nothing is obvious when we talk about disruption. Why does Microsoft have no chance? I am pretty sure they keep Bing alive because they are looking at the future where they finally gain control over the platform via VR/AR/or whatever, and then use Bing to power the experience on those platforms, which actually may be the case Google can't compete against. But this is Microsoft. If you're a small startup, you shouldn't be doing this.

> DDG is one step above a lifestyle business and only innovates at the UI level, even their efforts there are forgettable. Their major differentiator (data privacy) is meaningless to almost all users, and ironically torpedoes many interesting monetization strategies that are not ad-focused, as well as research initiatives.

Privacy is a great feature, especially in 2017, and I think DDG has the highest chance of getting any market share with this "let's make a search engine to disrupt google" approach (but again, this likely won't happen and is a foolish approach. It will stay down there as an "alternative" until the founder runs out of steam, OR if there's a huge shift in how people experience the Internet and somehow takes off completely independent from the company's effort)

> Baidu and Yandex are serious but are comfortable in their respective positions.

Baidu and Yandex will never work out side of their countries because of the cultural barrier. In fact it's not just those, every country with significant Internet penetration rate has their own dominant search engine. In those countries Google is nothing. Which means this cuts both ways. So No. Baidu and Yandex are NOT serious contenders just like Google is not a serious contender in Russia and China.

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

#84

Post by atemerev »

Some ideas:

1) a good sitewide search engine. Google's offer is laughable, and Algolia is too developer-centric (requires pushing the data through API). What I'd want is a single input field where I can put my site's main page URL — and get a working search in a few minutes.

2) subscriptions / monitoring. I want to monitor some event or topic, and I want the updates to be delivered to e.g. my WhatsApp/Telegram/Slack/whatever, with smart filtering, refining etc (in lieu of frantically Googling / redditing / refreshing Twitter feed)

3) context-preserving interactive search, that can ask me questions/ refine results.

4) Timeline search interface for news / events / company history etc. I want to be able to put the name of a person, or company, or TV series, and get a comprehensive timeline view of all things happened there.

I have a lot more ideas, and zero free time :(

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

#85

Post by greglindahl »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #64
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We can agree to disagree about Google's immortality, but I take issue with you treating DDG and Bing as serious challengers to Google. Obviously Microsoft has no chance, they're worse off than Google re: ossification and Bing is a hedge at best. DDG is one step above a lifestyle business and only innovates at the UI level, even their efforts there are forgettable. Their major differentiator (data privacy) is meaningl…

While google has a much stronger brand than bing, they give roughly equivalent results except for a few categories such as "paste the error message I just got into the search box" queries. Google's much better for those longer queries. HN readers are probably more likely than average to make them, too.

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

#86

Post by thesmallestcat »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #83
thesmallestcat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can agree to disagree about Google's immortality, but I take issue with you treating DDG and Bing as serious challengers to Google. Obviously Microsoft has no chance, they're worse off than Google re: ossification and Bing is a hedge at best. DDG is one step above a lifestyle business and only innovates at the UI level, even their efforts there are forgettable. Their major differentiator (data privacy) is meaningl…

> We can agree to disagree about Google's immortality Dude where did I say Google is immortal? I'm just saying it's a wrong approach to try to kill google this way. There are many good ways to do it and coming from "How do i disrupt Google" is the worst possible way. > Obviously Microsoft has no chance, they're worse off than Google re: ossification and Bing is a hedge at best. Nothing is obvious when we talk about d…

OK, I get it, you're itching for a debate, and we've now reached the quote/reply "fun zone." I could tell it's cloudy out and you'd say how you saw some blue sky earlier. Or that the sky isn't really blue.

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

#87

Post by eridius »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #48
kapauldo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know what a shard is, but what's a river? I've never heard anyone use that term in a technical context before.

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

#89

Post by eridius »

jasode wrote: post #53

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…

Method #3 would be for calculating popular restaurants, not best restaurants. For example, I bet McDonald's would rate pretty highly with that approach, but it's very nearly as far away as you can get from the idea of a "best restaurant".

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

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

kjhughes wrote: post #34
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…

To disable remapping of terms in Google, use verbatim search : On the search results page, choose "Search tools -> All results -> Verbatim"

There's no syntax of which I'm aware which tells Google to not "correct" or expand the results.

When I'm seeking specific matches, I'm seeking really fucking specific matches. Google annoy me to no end.

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