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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?

#21

Post by JPKab »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #17
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

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…

Semantic search requires NLP. So does the Q&A format the OP is complaining about. People conflate all things NLP to the latter, and forget about the former.

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

#23

Post by gbmatt »

rasengan wrote: 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

and i work with rasengan on private.sh so yes there's some issue there. one of the back end servers is returning a max capacity error of sorts... we are checking into it.

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

#24

Post by BitwiseFool »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #17
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

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…

Maybe I'm not using the right qualifiers around the term NLP. The kind of NLP I was referring to is something like "Hey google, what is natural language processing?" and orienting the search around people asking questions in standard(ish) English like they would to another person.

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

#25

Post by beingflo »

ginko wrote: post #13
nickpp wrote: 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?

No because google's algorithm is not well known publicly. Also, if it was straightforward to detect then google could downrank it as well.

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

#26

Post by BbzzbB »

mrkramer wrote: post #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/

Marginalia is great to find blog posts, personal sites and other long form content, but it's not a replacement for Google nor intends to.

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

#27

Post by rovingEngine »

I think Google was “better” from a users point of view in 2005 because it wasn’t that good at selling ads yet. I still remember the epiphany of the first time I used Google in 1999. It was amazing.

I’ve thought the same about pre-ad Twitter and Facebook.

Early on, startups with free services look a lot like non-profits and just maximize user benefit to grow. The problem is they’re not non-profits, and have to make money at some point. That has tended to mean ads.

I’d easily pay, say, $9/mo to have access to an ad-free search engine that made me feel the way 1999 Google did.

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

#28

Post by nickpp »

ginko wrote: post #13
nickpp wrote: 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?

I read auto-generated pages almost to the end before realizing it was SEO spam. (I am not a native English speaker though)

With content copying, shuffling and AI generating, I am afraid we are on the cusp of auto content generators passing some restricted Turing test where readers really think it's an actual human that wrote it.

As for me, I leant that for certain "hot topics", simply doing a generic search on Google is not a good idea anymore.

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

#29

Post by mrkramer »

gbmatt wrote: 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…

I'm sorry to say but your project is 20 years old and it had no impact at all. You are doing something wrong. Innovation and initiative is needed ala Bitcoin and DeFi not hobby projects which are not picking up in popularity and utility.

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

#30

Post by ginko »

beingflo wrote: post #25
ginko wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No because google's algorithm is not well known publicly. Also, if it was straightforward to detect then google could downrank it as well.

The point is that SEO would just immediately adapt to Google's changes. If a smaller search engine filtered these out then it would likely stay under the radar.
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