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Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

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Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#11
post #2

This is how Private Search [1] works since it decouples the search from the user. This means nobody knows both who searched and what they searched for. This is a huge leap for privacy in search. [1] https://private.sh

Tried it but it just says: "Something went wrong. Please try again."

same here

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#12
Ha, yes, I've done that at https://gigablast.com/ . The biggest problems now are the following: 1) Too hard to spider the web. Gatekeeper companies like Cloudflare (owned in part by Google) and Cloudfront make it really difficult for upstart search engines to download web pages. 2) Hardware costs are too high. It's much more expensive now to build a large index (50B+ pages) to be competitive.

I believe my algorithms are decent, but the biggest problem for Gigablast is now the index size. You do a search on Gigablast and say, well, why didn't it get this result that Google got. And that's because the index isn't big enough because I don't have the cash for the hardware. btw, I've been working on this engine for over 20 years and have coded probably 1-2M lines of code on it.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#13
post #5

Because we're not having a 2005-Web anymore. More to the point, SEO & Google have evolved together. To have barely relevant results today you need to be good . That takes stellar talent which costs huge amounts of money. Thus, the Google of today, which is optimized to extract that money from us.

But shouldn't all the blogspam be so hyperoptimized for Google's algorithm that is should be straightforward to detect and ignore/downrank it?

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#14

The web has changed drastically. I’d imagine 2005-google engine today would be nothing but abandoned Wordpress blogs with comment spam.

And even more copy-pasted spam than already exists.

The early Google (and other even earlier search engines) were invented for an Internet world which, if not pristine and pure, was at least mostly fairly legit content. Today's Internet is probably 90% deliberate spammers and scammers.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#15
Yesterday there was a discussion[1] about it and someone suggested yandex.com. I'm using it since than and really love it. It's like going back to 2003 where everything was just plain and simple.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29393467

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#16
Early 2000s google index ran in a garage. The current google index has dedicated power stations.

It's a bit like the car industry - you could run a startup from your garage in the early days but you need titanic amounts of capital to compete now thanks to vertical integration.

Major governments and billionaires can compete but everybody else is locked out of the market (most "startups" use bings index).

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#17

Natural Language Processing is a pox on modern search engines. I suspect that Google et. al. wanted to transform their product into an answer engine that powers voice assistants like Siri and just assumed everyone would naturally like the new way better. I can't stand how Google is always trying to guess what I want, rather than simply returning non-personalized results solely based on exactly what I typed in the tex…

I think some NLP is strictly beneficial for a search engine. You may think "grep for the web" sounds like a good idea, but let me tell you, having tried this, manually going through every permutation of plural forms of words and manually iterating the order of words to find a result is a chore and a half.

Like, instead of trying

  PDP11 emulator
  PDP-11 emulator
  "PDP 11" emulator
  PDP11 emulators
  PDP-11 emulators
  "PDP 11" emulators
  PDP11 emulation
  PDP-11 emulation
  "PDP 11" emulation
Basic NLP can do that a lot faster without introducing a lot of problems.

I do think Google currently goes way overboard with the NLP. It often feels like the query parser is an adversary you need to outsmart to get to the good results, rather than something that's actually helpful. That's not a great vibe. However, I think the big problem isn't what they are doing, but how little control you have over the process.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#18
post #13
post #5

Because we're not having a 2005-Web anymore. More to the point, SEO & Google have evolved together. To have barely relevant results today you need to be good . That takes stellar talent which costs huge amounts of money. Thus, the Google of today, which is optimized to extract that money from us.

But shouldn't all the blogspam be so hyperoptimized for Google's algorithm that is should be straightforward to detect and ignore/downrank it?

It's not that easy, they are optimized for many metrics..

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#19
post #12

Ha, yes, I've done that at https://gigablast.com/ . The biggest problems now are the following: 1) Too hard to spider the web. Gatekeeper companies like Cloudflare (owned in part by Google) and Cloudfront make it really difficult for upstart search engines to download web pages. 2) Hardware costs are too high. It's much more expensive now to build a large index (50B+ pages) to be competitive. I believe my algorithms…

Regarding the Gatekeeper companies like Cloudflare, it sounds like anti-competitive behavior that could potentially be targeted with anti-trust legislation, correct?

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

#20
They do[0] but nobody cares anymore. Google controls web distribution through Google Chrome. I think we are at the point of no return. There won't be any competition anytime soon no matter what US government does. Only innovation can displace Google.

[0] https://search.marginalia.nu/

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