Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 332 posts

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

#121

Post by mbrameld »

ryandrake wrote: post #107
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the fact that the web site owner hasn't implemented better search than Google for their site is evidence that they can't do it, simply that they haven't.

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

#122

Post by klenwell »

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?

Here's another recent Show HN that demoed a new search engine:

Show HN: Goopt – Search Engine for a Procedural Simulation of the Web with GPT-3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443738

I know this was offered as a bit of joke. But it prompted a really thought-provoking discussion and seemed to me to suggest a genuine paradigm shift in search or information organization. It is a novel way to extract a useful signal from all the noise. It brought to my mind "Dr. Know" from Spielberg's AI movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0QkgAuEPbk

Will the signal be a good one? It will need to get better and inevitably will. The thing that worries me: will it even matter?

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

#123

Post by modeless »

There are some. Neeva is one I've heard of, and there was another similar one mentioned on HN just recently that I've forgotten. There was also Cuil. Bing exists of course. And then there are the language specific ones, Yandex, Naver, Baidu, and others I'm sure. And that's just the ones that make their own index, there's a sea of competitors like DuckDuckGo and StartPage that mostly license results from someone else (including Google). And there are also verticals with competitors like Amazon for products or Yelp for food, which Google very much considers as competition.

As much as people claim otherwise, it's not that Google has no competition. People are trying! Google's product is legitimately good, despite the widespread perception of declining quality.

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

#125

Post by tyingq »

jpalomaki wrote: post #99
festive-minsky wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Seems fair to me. They did improve quality for quite a long time. The quality only seemed to start dipping when shareholder expectations started driving what SERP pages look like.

Or, roughly, "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users"

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

#126

Post by akrymski »

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…

The only viable alternative to PageRank I know of is social search: show me results that my friends (and friends of friends and so on) liked/bookmarked.

Delicious sort of tried it but never executed well on the search side.

In a way it's a personalized PageRank algo with users linking to pages they like and to other users they follow. This always made more sense to me than a global authority ranking.

When looking for a babysitter you want recommendations from friends you trust, not some global ranking of popular babysitters.

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

#127

Post by aghilmort »

lettergram wrote: post #55
notsound wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason a lot of people use DDG is privacy, not uncensored search results. I do think that this move could have been handled better.

I think your mistaken, the only reason DDG took off, at least in the circles I’ve visited (open source communities, privacy focused, politics, etc) is the freedom to research anything in a safe way. Think of it another way, “who cares about privacy?” Probably those searching for “unacceptable” ideas. If they censor, who’s to say they wouldn’t turn you into the authorities for “wrong think”. Their value proposition of…

thank you for articulating this properly -- privacy & censorship are intricately intertwined, like yin & yang

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

#128

Post by Stealthisbook »

Search is kind of an investment dead zone. Even if you've come up with a completely paradigm-breaking method, getting money to develop the idea at scale would be tough since Google (and others) have so many patents that litigation risk would drive off funders.

If you have a great idea and access to deep enough pockets to develop it, there's still the problem that much of the information people want to find are behind various walled gardens and not suitable for public search. Incrementally more helpful arrangement of the same publicly available data that Google already has, isn't worth the effort of challenging the behemoth

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

#129

Post by go_prodev »

yokoprime wrote: post #115

DDG is absolutely emerging, usage year over year is rising rapidly. I’ve personally switched over to ddg after years of jumping back and forth. It’s finally good enough. For the Indernet as whole to switch over will take time. One thing that keeps customers coming back to google is the integration across their applications, i.e. email, collaboration (google docs) video (youtube) etc. That being said, I don’t really f…

Their Android browser is great. It kills ads and floating videos, and has excellent features.

However I just can't rely on the search results. It's rare for me to get a decent result for a search so I switch between chrome. I'm not sure why because I thought DDG used Google search.

Post reply on HN