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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?

#91

Post by zo1 »

Ivoirians wrote: post #71
junon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, I had this issue today and looked it up. Sure enough the term I had to quote and add a plus sign infront of was in the linked page after clicking through.

But that's it, it was just "there" near the bottom. They put in all this fancy AI understanding and ML and NLP effort but when I go out of my way to tell the search that "this word right here is super important and critical", they just go ahead and append "page.includes(word)" as a filter to their super algorithm. Instead of using that signal to drive the search. No better than when sites used to stuff their html pages with keywords to trick search engines.

#grumpy

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

#92

Post by gyulai »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #36

I vaguely recall part of an interview with Warren Buffett, where he was talking about tech investments. At the time he was interested in cloud providers and not interested in search. He said that "search is winner-takes-all," while infrastructure-as-a-service is not. Maybe that's part of it.

Actually, I don't think that search is winner-takes-all. Rather the piece that is winner-takes-all is monetization of search through advertising. Because advertising networks are winner-takes-all. ...so the path forward leads through monetizing search in a way other than through advertising. And this is precisely what the next generation of challengers like Neeva and Kagi are doing. Another alternative might be public funding.

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

#94

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

faitswulff wrote: post #66
p1esk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the ranking algorithm is going to need to be decentralized (aka user-configurable) in some way What do you mean? What configuration options would you like?

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

The Google hate is so thick that people don't even think about what a Google competitor or replacement (that isn't Google rebranded) looks like. No user is looking to pass around configuration file, or have discoverability issues because they haven't joined the right community that has what they are looking for. People want an omnibox that takes them to what they are looking for, even if they don't know what that is, full stop. Needing to essentially have a Makefile to find out "Who is the main actor in Spider-Man" is dead on arrival.

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

#96

Post by ck2 »

Google has a TWENTY year head-start of building server farms all over the world and hiring PhDs to develop the complex algorithms and software to do the indexing.

Can't just buy time on someone else's cloud network and hire a couple of coders to compete with that.

You could throw a lot of money at it but not compete on years of investment.

My brain is swiss-cheese these days, I wish I could remember the name of that one-man startup a decade ago that actually had a lightweight high-speed crawler and was making a serious attempt at competition. Was covered around here several times. But obviously they didn't succeed if I can't remember the name.

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

#98

Post by telesilla »

julialaroche wrote: post #93

You.com is one new entrant to the search engine space. It's ad-free, private, and customizable with preferred sources.

I've been a happy kagi.com user a couple of months now. It's like lo-fi Google, less results, no ads anywhere and similar to duck duck go bang commands if you want to use other search engines to check different results.

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

#99

Post by jpalomaki »

festive-minsky wrote: post #82
togaen wrote: post #76

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.

“declining quality” means current google vs past google, not other search engines

This is also not a fair comparison, because Internet is changing constantly.

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

#100

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

samwillis wrote: post #89

Ultimately I think it’s because the internet is just too big! Google were only able to do it because they had the right algorithm early in the age of the internet. They were then able to grow with it to achieve the scale required. Starting from scratch now on a general internet search engine would be close to impossible without 10s, if not 100s, billions of investment. And you would need that to build the index befor…

I think your post is key. I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google. Pretty much the one company that has done it at scale (Microsoft) isn't exactly eating Google's lunch (though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better).

It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to challenge Google at generic Internet search, and the few organizations with that capital are pretty clear they don't think it's a good bet. For example, Amazon is quite content just being the place you want to go to first for the things you want to buy, as that is obviously the most lucrative area.

Even in niche areas, I think it's still an enormous task to challenge Google. Despite the fact that 90% of my searches for "WTF does this stacktrace mean?" end up on StackOverflow, I invariably start my search on Google because every now and then it gives me useful non-StackOverflow tidbits, and I know I can always drill in more with specific tags on StackOverflow later.

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