121–130 of 471 posts
- It's free - It's better than most alternatives, and in many cases there isn't even an alternative - People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high - People don't care
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.
Can't you just set your user agent to Google bot?
The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it. I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on
The competitor website is not a slightly suboptimal result for the query: it's literally the wrong result if I'm not adding "alternative" to the search query. I'm sorry.
Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…
> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.
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 I suspect that is not difficult so much as expensive. 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.
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3) ban abusive data providers?
How would that even work? Define the border between SEO and abuse.
Perhaps there is no border to be defined since nearly all SEO is abuse?!
The only acceptable SEO should be "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer".
Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…
Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.
It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.
I use DDG most of the time, then when I cant find technical stuff I g!. And let's be honest, bing is the king for porn.
> bing is the king for porn. I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.
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The progression that people almost always forget: 1) New system comes out that indexes/controls/regulates a naively created dataset 2) Data consumers adopt that system and experience benefits 3) Data suppliers learn rules of system and take advantage of it to improve the positioning of their data, thus breaking the intent of a system built on the assumption of naive creation 4) Users complain about the broken system…
3) ban abusive data providers?