Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 200 posts

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

#101

Post by boto3 »

dhimes wrote: post #51

Here's what I want in a search engine: Charge me $15-25 dollars per year Let me decide what demographic information I wish to share- make it easy for me to control and help me protect my information. Because you are charging me money you can afford it and I trust you. Give me two search options: one, I'm only seeking information. two, I'm looking to buy. Do this for me as an advertiser: help me qualify the clicks I'm…

Google is making 50 USD per user, potentially an order of magnitude more from a US user from ads, so I am quite certain that your offer of $25 USD is a low baller :)

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

#102

Post by mark_l_watson »

Although I also use Google search and Microsoft Bing, probably more than 80% of my search is done with DuckDuckGo.

The fact that a lot of us DuckDuckGo, and I hope they are profitable, is evidence that there is room for other search engines.

I would like to find a good substitute for Facebook, but the fact that so many people I know use it, that I always need to check Facebook two or three times a week to not miss out on stuff since many friends and family don't use email anymore.

Attending the Decentralized Web Conference last year got me excited about using smaller and Decentralized services. Gnu Social is pretty good, but requires work to find interesting people to follow.

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

#103

Post by Vinnl »

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

Yeah but neither do some of the other mentioned search engines. Apparently DDG just is even smaller than I thought.

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

#104

Post by endymi0n »

arekkas wrote: post #95
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…

I was very young when Google became popular. Why did it become so popular? Was it just the technological advance of Google-Matrix (Page Rank) and Map-Reduce?

To understand that, you'd need to know just how bad search was before Google. Search wasn't even a "thing" on its own, it was usually merely a feature of large portals (AltaVista, AOL) which were large, slow, cumbersome and gave pretty irrelevant search results. At that time, search relied mostly on the meta tags of the pages themselves - which was easy to game and lead to a lot of spam in the search results back then already.

Google's clean interface (basically just a search box) was so revolutionary that it's hard to comprehend today - I still remember it took me a few days to even take it serious, it was so thin and lightweight. PageRank was a gigantic step forward in SERP relevancy and even though it was gamed eventually by link farms and paid backlinks, it took a lot of time and effort and the first few years saw few spammers.

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

#105

Post by bshimmin »

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…

I wonder, is DuckDuckGo's name a problem for adoption? I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it sounds very silly and I don't much enjoy recommending it to people in real life, at least in part for that reason. ("Google" was a silly name too, but at least it was just one syllable of silliness.)

Privacy is probably slowly growing into a big deal in the minds of regular people, but when the incumbent works, and works better (in my experience Google does just return better results than DDG - and I really did give it a try, in earnest, for a solid week a few months back...), privacy alone isn't going to be enough at this point.

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

#106

Post by bambax »

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…

Thanks for this excellent comment. I wonder if this is true though:

> Google is also bad at provenance - figuring out that site A is using text derived from site B, and thus B should be ranked higher.

The part I dispute is the last part. What matters is the user perspective. So of course a site that does nothing but scrape another one should rank lower, but many scrapers add value, if none other than UI-wise. So it's not obvious that the site of origin should rank higher.

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

#107

Post by bambax »

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…

> a query I've modified to quote "every" "single" "flipping" "term."

Use Tools > Verbatim, it's much faster than quoting every search term, and it works better.

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

#108

Post by jaredsohn »

bshimmin wrote: post #105
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wonder, is DuckDuckGo's name a problem for adoption? I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it sounds very silly and I don't much enjoy recommending it to people in real life, at least in part for that reason. ("Google" was a silly name too, but at least it was just one syllable of silliness.) Privacy is probably slowly growing into a big deal in the minds of regular people, but when the incumbent works, an…

>I have no idea what it's supposed to mean

I've understood it to be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose; the wikipedia article on duckduckgo confirms.

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

#109

Post by bsilvereagle »

eridius wrote: post #87
bsilvereagle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used ES a long time ago and rivers have since been deprecated: https://www.elastic.co/blog/deprecating-rivers

A river was just a mapping from a database to ES. For example, you could search CouchDB with ES with the proper river set up.

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

#110

Post by bambax »

Animats wrote: post #60
tvural wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 inve…

The next direction in search seems to be direct question-answering. Echo (Amazon) is interesting in that, being voice only, it can't punt to a screen of search results. It has to answer the question.

The question could be "find the page that has the following words".
Post reply on HN