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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?

#61

Post by JohnHaugeland »

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…

"Basic NLP can do that a lot faster without introducing a lot of problems."

This is called "stemming" and is not sensibly approached with machine learning.

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

#63

Post by marginalia_nu »

swframe2 wrote: post #50

Have a look at gpt-3 if you want to see what the future dominant search engine will be. It will not find relevant results, it will write it on the fly customized for exactly what you want to read. (Maybe products will just ship to your door and be auto paid because the future ad targeting AIs will know you so well.)

What if you are looking for something written by a human?

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

#64

Post by dragonwriter »

erhk wrote: post #38
thoughtstheseus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps trolling the entire web is not useful today? I’d love a search engine where I can whitelist sites or take an existing whitelist from trusted curators.

Trusted curators is a dangerous dependency

Plus, it scales less well than pure algorithmic search. This fight already happened, with a much smaller internet.

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

#65

Post by karmanyaahm »

shashashasha___ wrote: post #39
JPKab wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i would assume its mostly anti scraping protection which is mostly for privacy. you don't want to allow everyone scrap your website, pull and use your info. for example from fb, ig, LinkedIn, github, .... you can build a really big profiling db on people that way. so websites need to know you are a legit search engine first

people can still be targeted if that information is public. anti scraping sounds like security by obscurity

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

#67

Post by mrkramer »

ErrrNoMate wrote: post #44
mrkramer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin and DeFi don't have utility outside of gambling and pump and dumps. Not everything (tbh not really anything) needs crypto.

Read Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin was meant to decentralize trust and to eradicate fraud through transparent decentralized database called Blockchain. It is certainly more impactful than hobby search engines taking in consideration Bitcoin was also hobby project but really revolutionary one.

Go search what Larry Page said 20 years ago: If innovation is commercially successful it can have more widespread impact.

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

#68

Post by marginalia_nu »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #61
marginalia_nu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Basic NLP can do that a lot faster without introducing a lot of problems." This is called "stemming" and is not sensibly approached with machine learning.

Of course, but stemming is a fairly basic technique in NLP, as is POS-tagging. NLP is not machine learning.

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

#69

Post by travisgriggs »

indymike wrote: post #43

Brave's new search engine seems to work pretty well. Have been using it as my primary for about 10 days, and so far, I've only had to revert to Google once, and when I did the results were chock full of spam.

Can echo this. About 30 days going all devices. I’d say about once a day I do a !g, and rarely do I actually find something there, it usually just ends up being a confirmation search.

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

#70

Post by 1cvmask »

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…

Why do you have a user account with a login?
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