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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?

#101

Post by belter »

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…

Could not agree more. Not only that, would be willing to pay, for a domain specific, high quality, ad free search engine. In the same range of prices of a Netflix or Amazon Prime subscription.

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

#102

Post by elorant »

People don’t seem to realize how good Google is in regional results. I live in a European country and every other search engine I’ve tried in the past is lacking when searching for local content. I can search for news articles that date back two decades in Google and get results.

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

#103

Post by jws »

What would a competitor need to defy Google? – A billion users who have not already chosen a search engine.

I slightly better experience should get a larger portion of new users, but existing users do not say "Today I will develop a methodology to conduct a survey of internet search engines and select the best one for me."

At this point everyone has either chosen a search engine or had one chosen for them.

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

#105

Post by briandear »

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…

DDG also lost the plot when they started censoring results based on geopolitical opinion.

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

#107

Post by ryandrake »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #100
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 organizat…

> 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.

It's telling, that a Google search scoped to a particular web site (xyz site:website.com) almost always produces better results than that web site's actual built-in search engine. If a web site that knows in detail its own content, its own users, and its own domain, still can't make their built-in search better, how does anyone else have a chance?

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

#108

Post by temp8964 »

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…

You do have a point. However, the internet today is very different from its early days. Its content is much more centralized.

In the past, Google search results will point to some good websites you never heard of and are very low traffic. But nowadays, the first couple pages are all popular websites with huge traffic even when they are low quality on the content. You can only find low traffic but good content websites in comments from social sites like reddit and HN.

So it seems to me, to build a usable search engine, you only need to index most popular websites.

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

#109

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Beltiras wrote: post #80
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, ot…

This hits the nail on the head. I feel like Google results have gotten worse not because technical problems need to be solved, but because the financial incentives means that I'm now scrolling through tons of ads, little "tidbits" that have just gotten more annoying over time, AMP carousels, and god forbid I'm searching for anything that happened over 20 years ago that has any slight resemblance to a current event - all I get are pages and pages about the current event, and Google has "memory-holed" the past.

IMO, all startups have a sweet-spot where they've figured out what the market needs, and they can be profitable, but they haven't yet sucked that bone dry to where they're forced to extend more tentacles to grow their revenue. For Google, for me, that was about the 2007-2012 time frame.

Any other competitor would have the same financial pressures eventually. Long term, it's impossible to "not be evil".

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

#110

Post by ColonelPhantom »

elorant wrote: post #102

People don’t seem to realize how good Google is in regional results. I live in a European country and every other search engine I’ve tried in the past is lacking when searching for local content. I can search for news articles that date back two decades in Google and get results.

DuckDuckGo does quite well here for me, as long as I enable the button for localized results. I very much like that it's an option there.
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