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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?

#111

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

There is the problem of relevance - you must order your search results by relevance, Now you can have one global model of 'relevance' or you can have several models (i think the web is so big that one model is not good enough).

relevance can be relative to language/origin ; number of links away from a wikipedia article ; coolness (has it a link from a known twitter account/news aggregator) ; age group ; a link from HN frontpage or slashdot would make it 'nerdy', news - was it referenced by a news source etc. etc.

I think a differentiator would be to have a non intrusive and intuitive UI to select an available relevance model (instead of trying to profile the user based on his search history / browser history)

On the one hand the user profile is of great value for advertising, but on the other hand the explicit choice of relevance model can be used to match relevant adds.

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

#112

Post by greglindahl »

rocky1138 wrote: post #73
greglindahl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Who cares if a small subset of people use them? It doesn't make them worthless.

Oh, I think it has value. I was just reporting that I tried it at blekko, and think I completely failed. Maybe you'll be able to do better.

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

#113

Post by rgovind »

rocky1138 wrote: post #73
greglindahl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Who cares if a small subset of people use them? It doesn't make them worthless.

Since Greg was CXO at blekko, I would say for whoever is making search engine, its important!

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

#114

Post by riquito »

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?

> Was it just the technological advance of Google-Matrix (Page Rank) and Map-Reduce?

Well, yes, it was simply that. It was the difference between a search engine that works and one that doesn't. For example, most sites back then had tons of text with the same color of the background, with words that would get you an higher rank on the previous generation of search engines. Also, the search engines had very heavy pages, mostly with news, and they were known as "portals". Google was a blast in comparison.

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

#116

Post by smarx007 »

Vinnl wrote: post #103
eatmyshorts wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahrefs crawls actually more than any search engine other than Google: https://www.incapsula.com/blog/most-active-good-bots.html

And Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo have active crawlers.

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

#117

Post by bshimmin »

jaredsohn wrote: post #108
bshimmin wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this an American thing? I have never heard of it.

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

#118

Post by greglindahl »

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?

The day that I abandoned Altavista for Google was the day that several technical queries brought up porn -- AltaVista had been pwned by porn-pushing keyword stuffers.

At that point Google had a smaller index, which hurt their results, but I thought that was better than getting porn results while at work.

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

#119

Post by hashmal »

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.

there are lots of things like this. it's bizarre that i pay for email when there are good and free email services (and my privacy/security needs are pretty damn simple.) people don't mind paying for things they like, or for something that provides just a little detail that others do not.

Algolia provides things that elasticsearch do not, such as being hosted, being extremely simple to setup and having a default web interface for anyone to use.

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

#120

Post by sixdimensional »

How about some kind of machine learning algorithm that is regularly trained on user feedback and ratings of search results? The system has one mode that starts out feeding you approximate matches for your search criteria, ordered pseudo-randomly, and has a secondary mode of viewing results based solely on user feedback to order search results? Yeah, it probably wouldn't work but it would be fun to see what it produced.
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