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> If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it?
If Vladimir Putin sucks, why is everyone letting him be in charge over there? If Donald Trump sucks why did we ele-- If Barack Obama sucks-- The FBI sucks. Facebook sucks. C sucks. The WWW sucks. Fiat currency sucks. Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…
Democracy would be best replaced with cashless society. Society based on everyone value of doing what they love doing most (aka hobbyist), and virtually everything else replaced by robots and technology we already have. This is what's coming eventually, but its not something that can be installed on the top of your "operating system"; you will have to format the whole hard-drive (civil war)
I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi.
If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results.
It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.
Also, many folks (outside the hackernews crowd) never change their defaults and Google pays Apple 15B per year, as well as Samsung and many others, to be that default.
Disclaimer: I work at you.com
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating
the difficulty of a good search engine
Boutique search engines pop up all the time here on HN, but they can't compete fairly against Google, without the resources to crawl a billion webpages day after day.
The moat is worse than we think. New search engines are not only hobbled by the bandwidth and processing power and storage required to spider the web, but by the websites who will preemptively disallow them because they're not Google. I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search engines.
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…
However, I think Google has severely degenerated from just two years ago, when most of the problems were fully in effect.
Google is a bit of a product of the situation of scams being the easiest way anyone makes online.
I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.
How, exactly, does Google keep users hostage for money?
[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-le...
I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.
Amazon did build one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com