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

191–200 of 200 posts

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

#191

Post by flukus »

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…

> 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.

I've had the opposite experience lately, DDG has been almost identical to the google results, to the point where the seem to be calibrating there own searches with google. Unfortunately it means it also suffers the same problems.

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

#192

Post by cassowary »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #102

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 ou…

Instead of Facebook, just talk to your friends and family semi-often. If one of them has a baby or goes to Europe a lot of them will know and someone will mention it. On occasion you will hear about something three years after the event but that's still okay. It worked perfectly well for thousands of years and it still works today.

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

#193

Post by tajen »

throwayedidqo wrote: post #176
cagenut wrote: post #7

This is more a feature than a different search engine, but I so so so wish I could de-prioritize blogspam. 300 - 1000 word text-heavy writeups of a couple of facts where a few bullet points, an image, a graph, a map, or a data table would be much much better. Google has been SEO'd to death because of its block-of-text lowest common denominator favoring.

I write blogspam. It's definitely a problem but I don't know what Google is going to do about it. 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 wr…

> pervasive data trove from other services

I would believe that, although there has to be several alternate ways to measure a site popularity, Google Analytics are a huge part of a site ranking. Do users stay long on your website? Do they come back to the search results after that? Do they click through to "Pricing", then back to "Features"? If so, that must be the right answer.

Alternate example: I would bet that shops where Google Maps geolocalises a lot of customers have a higher-ranked website than similar websites where their physical venues are empty.

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

#194

Post by vvoyer »

sergiotapia wrote: post #17
sairamkunala wrote: post #6

Companies like Algolia which provide a site specific search engine has been doing really well especially with the speed and relevancy where Google currently is not concentrating on. https://www.algolia.com/

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

Hi! Algolia employee here, thanks for the mention, did you encounter any issue using our widget based libraries or where you only willing to use the raw JavaScript client?

Thanks!

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

#195

Post by siddharthgdas »

Very specific and concentrated search and discovery sites eg., producthunt, zomato, yelp, quora (if they execute really well) will out do google as I think, leaving only discovery of these sites (and their content, like for almost every google search I end up going to SO or Quora) and contextual information as a problem for them to address.

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

#196

Post by aryamaan »

dopeboy wrote: post #189

Build a search interface on top of reddit. Make it way better than reddit's search engine. Produce an index on each comment that takes credibility into account on top of number of upvotes.

What's such important that Reddit provides?

And doesn't Google return better search results for Reddit already?

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

#197

Post by throwayedidqo »

tajen wrote: post #193
throwayedidqo wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write blogspam. It's definitely a problem but I don't know what Google is going to do about it. 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 wr…

> pervasive data trove from other services I would believe that, although there has to be several alternate ways to measure a site popularity, Google Analytics are a huge part of a site ranking. Do users stay long on your website? Do they come back to the search results after that? Do they click through to "Pricing", then back to "Features"? If so, that must be the right answer. Alternate example: I would bet that sh…

Even creepier... If Google knows all your physical locations they know how many employees you have at work on a given day

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

#198

Post by sgt101 »

greglindahl wrote: post #158
sgt101 wrote: post #145

Nope, but search is 20thC stuff... when do we live again?

80% of Google's ad revenue is search advertising, and ads overall are almost all of Google's revenue. This may be the 21st century, but...

I get your point - but to me it's a bit like "is there room for another voice operator" in 1983... we could artificially make them, then watch as they consolidate and then note that the real action is in something else which it would have been good to think about first.

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

#199

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

matt4077 wrote: post #125
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #111

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 H…

Google obviously already operates such profiles, at a rate of one profile per user - with AI in the background. Exposing options is rarely a good idea, as it only reaches a single-digit percentage of users. And they say profiles are oh-so-relevant, but as far as I can tell, Google's main product (search ads) is still tied almost exclusively to keyword, region, and language.

> but as far as I can tell, Google's main product (search ads) is still tied almost exclusively to keyword, region, and language

Don't know: try to do the same Google search from different accounts. I think the results will be quite different...

Post reply on HN