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I'm more than happy with DuckDuckGo. I would love more specialized search engines. Back in the day I've used several search engines depending the task i needed to perform, from Altavista to Yahoo to Google.
For me their mission is pretty clear: Google ate Burda's ad cookies and now they are trying to get their hands into the cookie jar again. Given that today we have widespread TLS adoption the war about the endpoint has begun. Cliqz, alias Burda Media, is just another combatant - the one who controls the browser controls the ads.
Previous thread with more info:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We shall see. It has thus far been in Google's best financial interests to make nice in the European markets because of the size of the user base that they would leave on the table if they responded to EU pressure by shutting down services. I'm unsure if that continues to be true if the EU siphons money off of them to build a direct competitor.
The EU represents close to 50% of potential/projected revenue to Google in the next 10 years, is my guess. That's what I meant when I wrote "loads of leverage".
What would a different search engine do to differentiate it from Google? If the answer is privacy, that’s a niche already occupied by DDG. What other ways could a web search engine differentiate itself to be worth customers using more than one?
These vertical search engines, at at least in the comparison shopping space, were never that good to begin with. Shopping (and possibly travel) is just the easiest vertical to monetize. All the sites were spammy, pages were optimized for clickouts, and results were optimized for yield, not relevancy, because everything was an ad. There's a reason none of them were recognizable brands and they all depended on Google for traffic.
So yes, not just what niche is there, but how can you make it profitable--or even break-even. Would you donate $10 per year to a non-profit search engine?
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/08/nextag-ceo-google-is-a-mon...
“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”
Google will not be replaced by another search engine. It will be something else. Something we can’t imagine yet.
It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page. I see two problems with their approach: 1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset. More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and…
One of the reasons for breaking up monopolies is that they make it harder for newcomers to build something better.
It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them…
What number of search engines is a good number, why? This line of thinking is subjective.
It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them…
It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game.
It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers? Hey, I work on Cliqz' adblocker (open-source here: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker ). Cliqz browser comes built-in with adblocking, anti-tracking, anti-phishing and private search built-in so that users are protected by default . You can also install another one if you prefer since all Firefox extension are also available from Cliqz! But the…
So how does cliqz makes money?
Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…
Google also censors some results in controversial categories, where Bing/Yahoo return what I am looking for. I don't trust a search engine that censors entire categories of results.
I am not an adwords user but anecdotes in another HN thread seems to affirm that Google is due to be disrupted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667484