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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?

#131

Post by sebst »

skdotdan wrote: post #115

I dream about a real time search engine. Also, there's room for improvement in personalizing and curating content.

I think so, too. A week ago, the biggest approach in curating web content - dmoz - closed its doors. What was a good idea in the 90s (title and short description) is obviously not sufficient in a modern web. And it's far from real time.

I try to build a curation platform with https://curlz.org - just at a planning stage at the moment, but did raise interest in some dmoz admins and editors.

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

#133

Post by amyjess »

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'm convinced that the only reason Microsoft is keeping Bing alive is to keep Windows 10 users from funneling money to Google by default.

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

#134

Post by amyjess »

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 dirt-simple UI and fast loading times helped.

Before Google, the dominant search engine was AltaVista, which was awful. The UI was so crowded that you had to search for the search bar, and it was so full of graphics that if you were on dialup, loading took forever unless you turned images off.

And, yeah, PageRank helped. It wasn't uncommon for you to find what you were looking for on page 3 or 4. Google had what you were looking for on page 1, always. In fact, pre-Google search was so bad that if you were looking for anything obscure, you had to use multiple search engines. When I'd get serious about finding something, I'd fire up AltaVista, Infoseek (Disney/ABC/Go.com), Hotbot, WebCrawler (AOL), etc. in separate browser windows and search on all of them. And for the lazy, there was MetaCrawler, which automated this; I didn't use it often, mostly because I kept forgetting about it, but when I remembered to use it, it was a godsend.

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

#135

Post by tyingq »

Google's market share is ~64%, while Bing is around ~22%.

Probably not great for consumers that the #2 offering is almost 1/3rd as popular as the leader.

Which says two things...

- Yes, there's room for a better number 2.

- But, if the best Microsoft can do is 1/3rd as popular, how well would a new entrant fare?

It seems like you would need some new feature that makes you significantly better than Google to stand a chance.

Also, the barrier to entry here is enormous. The spend to be at least as large an index, and as fresh an index, and as relevant results as...Google, is big.

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

#136

Post by user5994461 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #90
kjhughes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+word

It used to force to search the word exactly as written.

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

#137

Post by user5994461 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #37
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…

Any search crawler that ignores robots.txt is going to be blocked by site operators in a hurry.

And more importantly: It's illegal :D

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

#138

Post by user5994461 »

nostrademons wrote: post #130
hashmal wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are plenty of companies providing hosted ElasticSearch these days, starting with Elastic.co, the corporate sponsors of the open-source project. Amazon hosted ES is also a lot better than it was just a few months ago; they were stuck on 1.5 for the longest time, but now they've already got support for 5.1.1.

The database is just a building block for the search. You still have to implement a lot of logic and smartness on top.

algolia does that out of the box.

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

#139

Post by mtreis86 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #90
kjhughes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Boolean search would be wonderful

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

#140

Post by adamnemecek »

boto3 wrote: post #100
adamnemecek wrote: post #62

I think that definitely. Google lacks in quite a few areas, I think that 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…

What kind of code search are you thinking of? In my experience, code search could be useful when one works with a big and unfamiliar code base, but even then good architecture documentation and a good IDE would help more. And when one really needs string search, `git grep` is usually fast enough (for me on a 5GB code base).

It's not just current code search but like "auto complete". What if my IDE could recognize that I'm writing a bad implementation of binary search and could suggest a better one from the internet. What if I had an SQL like language that I could use to query and transform things. E.g. find all instances where a method starting with "set" that take an Int as an argument and do with these. I've been noticing that quite a bit of writing software would be a lot simpler if I could do this.
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