Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

Only large companies can afford to make browsers. They are insanely complicated beasts now. Google because ad and Android, Microsoft because windows and Bing, Apple because of ios. Firefox is facing struggles and Opera gave up to webkit.

Disrupting Google search is going to be very hard. Google invests more than anyone in AI. If someone were to disrupt Google, they have to have very strong models of the world, natural language parsing, image recognition, knowledge reasoning, troves of data and an ocean of servers and fibre.

Google hasn't been sitting idle, they've been disrupting themselves and pushing towards those fronts.

Basically google can't trust backlinks anymore because people game them and competitors try to destroy each other's sites by buying scummy links to their stuff.

So they mainly attempt to measure quality in a vacuum. This is using their machine learning stuff to look at the quality, confidence, and reading level of the writing style.

They do the same quality checks for the site. Checking for EV certs, clean markup, real email volume through Gmail, reputable DNS provider, physical address in G maps. A lot of their hundreds of quality metrics don't measure the site itself, but use Google's pervasive data trove from their other services. Most scammers don't bother doing any of this right.

The problem becomes people like me. I setup sites with all measures of quality for legitimate businesses. Have articles written by good writers with knowledge in the subject. Sounds great right?

The problem is that these articles are still done for money and quite biased sometimes. Google is slowly running into a need for a strong AI because all measures of quality can be emulated if enough money is on the line. It doesn't matter if something seems truthful in every way except the fact that it isn't.

This is the same reason "fake news" is invading google and Facebook. Smart spammers have upped their game to the point that it's impossible to know what's real anymore.

Need a wikipedia article changed? Good reviews on Yelp? A nice piece on a popular tech website? All of this can be openly bought with zero consequences.

IMHO, the other pieces of the picture, and what i see happening, is search engines or a service, will index entities and relationships ( in the ontology sense ), and return results enriched with that data through something like an extended microdata vocabulary. There will be an API where machine consumers can query entities and relationships, and see those attributed to their sources in the webpage. This prediction is nothing new and has been consistently foretold by ai and information retrieval augurs for decades. The difference is that I see this moving beyond the realm of expert systems in large corporations and into the realm of being an API generally accessible to anyone.

I think it's very possible that, as you say, a current incumbent search engine may not consider the provision of such a service its job. Which makes things very interesting for potential new entrants in the semantic search market.

Other business types could surely supply these entities and relationships however who better to be involved in the supply chain than search engines because they hold a hose containing nearly all the world's information, and in the other hand a market hungry for all the world's information.

But this type of service could be niche because most humans are not going to care about getting ontology data in their search results. So even though parsing out entities and relationships could improve the usefulness and accessibility of information there might not be enough universal demand for someone like Google to really care about it.

With these caveats, I think the trend from information, to knowledge, is a very natural and already apparent progression for search engines. The type of API described here is possible today given the right incentives.