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Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

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Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#71

Post by Ivoirians »

junon wrote: post #46
charcircuit wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when they took away the ability to search for exact terms You can still do this. Put quotes around the terms.

This doesn't work like it used to.

It does work. In the past when I mentioned it, someone provided an apparent counterexample, a search with a term in quotes that wasn't found on the page. When I reported it to the search team, they found that the quoted term was actually in a hidden submenu on the site. So the term was still on the page, but not findable with ctrl-f, except in the source. Try it out and if you find a counterexample, let us all know.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#73

Post by JKCalhoun »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #32
jasode wrote: post #14

>, what would a competitor need to defy Google? One thing a competitor needs is a new and innovative technical algorithm . Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting back links instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This created a noticeable improvement in quality of results. Nobody seems to have The Next Big Ide…

There’s a potential technical improvement with Vector Search. Specially for the type of queries that are more “human” (“how do I…”, “where can I…”. At least for me, I find myself adding “site:Reddit.com” all the time I need a good answer and not just a SEO-tricked ad page. Vector Search could be a technical solution for this. Although it’s fairly new and there is still a lot of research to do.

I like the idea of "crowd sourcing". When the SEO-tricked ad pages come up and I either scroll past them or, if I do click on them but come right back to the search results and continue scrolling/clicking ... rank downward those brief or passed-over links.

Seems like with enough actual humans I should never have to see another geeksforgeeks page come up in my search results.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#75

Post by polote »

jasode wrote: post #14

>, what would a competitor need to defy Google? One thing a competitor needs is a new and innovative technical algorithm . Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting back links instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This created a noticeable improvement in quality of results. Nobody seems to have The Next Big Ide…

> What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good signal from all the noise of a trillion web pages?

To me this is going to be manual ranking, but the biggest issue with manual ranking is not that you have to do it manually, but how do you know if you can trust users who rank pages. The Wikipedia system is a good start but not enough, and the second issue is how do you prevent its business model to kill its quality

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#76

Post by togaen »

Everyone complaining about google’s “declining quality” is living in some fantasy world where there’s something better to compare google to. Its results are significantly better than any competitor, check for yourself. If you think you can do better, go for it.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#77

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

pxue wrote: post #72

Here's a thought, if Reddit fixes their terrible search engine, they would steal a large chunk of my search. I've been attaching url:reddit.com to my Google searches to bypass all the blog spam thats taking over Google.

The realist in me knows google would likely not be allowed to just buy reddit for anti-trust reasons.

I guess the, pragmatist(?) in me thinks, "google kind of legitimately provides a solution to a problem that reddit has had like, forever. And reddit provides an organic source of knowledge that I feel google is at least trying to get back in the mix. Why should that combination not be allowed to exist?

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#78

Post by faitswulff »

celdon25 wrote: post #69
faitswulff wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 99.9% of users would hate to have to configure their search results.

From parent comment: > This configuration would also need to be sharable, maybe something akin to an App Store, because not all users can be asked to be technical enough to configure everything.

That's still configuration. Sharing a config? Asking a friend for the best search algorithm? Most users are accustomed to just typing in their search query into random input fields and getting perfectly serviceable results.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#79

Post by quitit »

jasode wrote: post #14

>, what would a competitor need to defy Google? One thing a competitor needs is a new and innovative technical algorithm . Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting back links instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This created a noticeable improvement in quality of results. Nobody seems to have The Next Big Ide…

It seems the problem of "search" is mostly well solved. What isn't well solved is the problem of "SEO gaming". Perhaps the advancement in search isn't by having an AI that chooses a better page, but rather an AI that is really good at identifying a good result from a gamed result.

However as for Google, I feel like even merely surfacing a range of relevant filter options can help their search engine, since it's what informed users are already doing by structuring a query when the first one produces crappy results. E.g. These results mostly contain links to Pinterest.com, would you like to repeat the search with these omitted? (or even just being able to collapse these site-by-site.)

Additionally I think modern search could be broken down into a range of sub-tools that exist beyond google or even online. One such example is searching our web history, perhaps browsers could produce a privacy-preserving way of storing information about each webpage and its images that the user can then search later (by either terms or images.)

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

#80

Post by Beltiras »

jasode wrote: post #14

>, what would a competitor need to defy Google? One thing a competitor needs is a new and innovative technical algorithm . Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting back links instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This created a noticeable improvement in quality of results. Nobody seems to have The Next Big Ide…

Read an article which mentioned that Google degraded the search service because good results no longer made financial sense, perverse incentive is that it benefits them better for a customer to pay money for ads than provide a good search (meaning that competition for keywords is now the algorithm). The next innovation in search then necessarily must be to find a different funding model for the engine besides ads, otherwise the same perverse incentive will arise.
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