I've been using kagi.com for a month or so now, and it consistently beats DDG and Ecosia for result quality. I'd guess it beats Google too, since last time I used Google it was nothing but ads and spam which is why I stopped.
Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
191–200 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#192Ha, 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…
Nice.
I'd pay 5-10$/mo for a search engine that didn't just funnel me into the revenue-extracting regions of the web like Google does.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#193Please do it! Google is now complete trash.
Also gmail, used to have the best spam filters out there, now it's utter crap. Emails from my google analytics account, for whatever reason and disregarding how many times I have clicked on "Not Spam", go to spam, and it's their own service; while messages who are textbook spam ("Hi, I just got some inheritance ...") go to my inbox.
AI (in its current state) is crap, when is the industry going to accept these are the emperor's new clothes.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#194Ha, 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…
What we need is a net neutrality doctrine on the server side. Bandwidth is hardly scarce outside of AWS's business model. Ban the crawler user-agent dominance by the big search engine players. "Good behaviour" should be enforced via rate limiting that equally applies to all crawlers, without exemption for certain big players.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
you know that legitimate sites perform SEO as well, right?
SEO often seems to be a compensation for the fact that a site doesn't have particularly worthwhile content. So punishing SEO surprisingly does promote higher quality of search results.
Yes and no. A lot of those sites are small local businesses trying to get found. A front page listing can be the difference between surviving and going under. Much of the time the blog spam is what floats hours, contact info, and services provided to the first page.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#196Can you also create a web comparable to the 2005 web?
Well, it's wikipedia. So just create a search engine for that, since their search sucks rocks.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a lot more low-quality content I wish there was an easy way to filter ALL search results, by permanently excluding specific websites, and/or keywords. Surely there has to be some browser extension that does this...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29404860 Not got round to trying it yet though.
Great and it even supports iOS…!
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#1981) Google is better at AI, for example let's take this sloppy search: "some joke where you can't tell if it is serious or joke" It is called Poe's law, and Google returned it at #4. Bing or Duckduckgo don't have a clue... 2) They have a years of user's data, like for specific term, they see what users clicked most, so they see which results were perceived as most relevant. It is hard to catch up if you dont have such…
> 1) Google is better at AI, for example let's take this sloppy search: "some joke where you can't tell if it is serious or joke"
> It is called Poe's law, and Google returned it at #4. Bing or Duckduckgo don't have a clue...
Interesting, I was looking for a good benchmark like this. For me Google returned it at #5 with an image/related terms carousel before it which places it physically more around #7 on the page. Brave Search (never tried it before today) puts Poe's Law at #8. So Google is still better.
But the other results are mostly worse (IMO) on Google. Here are the first 8 results:
- 175 Bad Jokes That You Can't Help But Laugh At - Reader's (rd.com)
- 57 Hilarious, Silly Jokes No One Is Too Old to Laugh At (bestlifeonline.com)
- 145 Best Dad Jokes That Will Have the Whole Family Laughing (countryliving.com)
- Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User's Guide (hbr.org)
- Poe's law - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Managing Conflict with Humor - HelpGuide.org (helpguide.org)
- 175 Bad Jokes That Are So Cringeworthy, You Can't ... - Parade (parade.com)
- Encouraging Your Child's Sense of Humor (for Parents) - Kids ... (kidshealth.org)
And here are the first 8 results from Brave Search:
- phrase requests - Is there a word for "pretending to joke when ... (english.stackexchange.com)
- Joke - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- “Are you joking or serious?” – The Caffeinated Autistic (thecaffeinatedautistic.wordpress.com)
- How do I tell when people are joking or being serious? (reddit.com/r/socialskills)
- be a joke | meaning of be a joke in Longman Dictionary of (ldoceonline.com)
- Quote by Ricky Gervais: “If you can't joke about the most (goodreads.com)
- How can you tell if someone is joking with you or not? (quora.com)
- Poe's law - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
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edit: I did not count to 8 correctly the first time. Fixed that.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#199I 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 mo…
$9/mo is not going to cut it. Google's domestic annual revenue per user in 2019 was $256. [0] That's $21.33 per month. Not all of Google's revenue is from Ads, of course, but the vast majority is. (Let's ignore for now the valid counterpoint that Ads are increasingly served on other Google properties than Search.) But even charging users $21.33/mo for an ad-free search experience most likely wouldn't be enough. By pr…
Let’s say ads will always make more money (I have no reason to believe they won’t), and that’s required to be the dominant search engine because the web is big and expensive to organize.
I’d bet there’s some way to characterize what I and others liked about the earlier web and create a search engine that just worries about that stuff. I’d pay $9/mo for whatever 1/3 of Google’s spend per user would get me. That’s not to say this thing would “beat” Google, but it could profitably exist.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, but stemming is a fairly basic technique in NLP, as is POS-tagging. NLP is not machine learning.
Stemming is not meaningfully a natural language processing technique, any more than arithmetic is a technique of linear equations.
At the very least, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing seems to disagree.
(So do I: NLP does not have to be machine learning/AI based)