because they Peter Thiel'd 10x'ed search and ads and competing against them would require extraordinary cost and a breakthrough in either.
Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
141–150 of 332 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#142>, 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…
"next big idea" is probably "selectable algorithms".
Create 3-5 different search algorithms, with names and understandable characteristics, then let me choose which one when searching. You may have some algorithm that prioritizes recency, or rapid changes, or more interaction, and others that prioritize longevity, citations/links, others that prioritize that type of information - prioritize regional or noteworthy events over historical info, etc. Have some algorithms that penalize spam/linkfarms more heavily than others. The git/so spam farms that come up when I search for an error message are simply useless, and would love ways to switch away and try other algorithms, without necessarily having to switch entire search systems.
Have algorithms that explicitly take in to account the search/click behaviour of others. Let me choose to have the search behaviour of friends/colleagues/famous-folks explicitly included or excluded in search results ranking.
Let people easily switch between multiple algorithms, and let 1000 gardens bloom (or something like that).
Also, determining better ways to 'search' non-text stuff. If virtual worlds become a thing, finding ways to 'search' those (whatever that might mean) will be big.
Image search still has a long way to go, IME.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#143DuckDuckGo just ended their value proposition: https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 Not that there are many great alternatives, but the whole point of a SEARCH ENGINE is not censoring results. I understand ranking makes it searchable, but omitting views / results based on politics is self-reinforcing and makes anyone using the service blind to views and in a sense reality. I think search can’t really b…
> but the whole point of a SEARCH ENGINE is not censoring results Disagree. I hate it as much as the next person when Google censor results due to DMCA request (a law i couldn't care less about which shouldn't have jurisdiction over me), but you have to admit there are things to limit. Should a search engine return child porn results? (Yes, it's an easy and egregious example, but that's the point - there are such sub…
> Furthermore, censoring low quality enemy propaganda is a public service.
I think anyone looking to keep people from understanding is an enemy. You fight propaganda with truth, not censorship.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#144>, 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…
You let the rank sources be selectable. Allow me to connect/select individuals or groups to include/exclude.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#145A viable business model. DDG has done a spectacular job of navigating the search space with arguably a very good product and look at how long it has taken them to get as far as they have. There isn't likely room for a 2nd DDG-type approach.
Setting aside all of the specifics related to building and running the engine itself, how do you make money doing it? Unless you are servicing a very specialized and lucrative vertical that doesn't mind paying, everyone else gets their search results for free so you generally can't charge users for it. This typically leaves advertising (which Google arguably owns the market for re: search) and/or selling user data (which is both unpopular with users and depending on jurisdiction, illegal). Figure out a new way to monetize search and you may have something...
This is a problem with today's world dominated by mega-tech companies: to compete in many areas of it you need to essentially be a monopolist in some other area so you can afford to compete in something like search as a loss leader at least until you get established. Look at how much Microsoft spent on Bing[1]... and they got how much of the market? Facebook wasn't initially profitable either, but they had a distinctly different approach to aggregating a pool of data Google couldn't search and users they couldn't monetize.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/i...
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#146Earlier 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…
Google knows about external inbound links, so has more data on which to rank your pages than you do.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#147DDG 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…
despite the HN party line on this subject I think DDG is practically useless for long-tail searches. I was reserving the history of a city owned property in Oakland, California on DDG, using the address and the assessors parcel number. DDG results were all unrelated real estate advertisements in other cities. Google returned many pages of official city records. It’s almost as if Bing is not capable of indexing PDFs? Whatever the cause, this put me off Bing for the time being.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#148Ultimately 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…
"though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better"
Curious what you think these are. I prefer Bing's UI to Google's but aside from that Bing is (IMO) a dumpster fire that quite literally makes me feel negligent (towards myself) when I use it - am I missing something?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#149>, 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.
Evidence?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Absolutely no need to provide a makefile. But... there can be multiple selectable algorithms for people to choose from, and eventually some ways to configure those to your needs.
Having results come up that are also explicitly labelled "You are viewing results through the FOOBAR lens - click here to use another lens".
Our results are already skewed by factors that we don't have much visibility in to - being more explicit/transparent about it, while giving people some ability to influence/change the lens they view results through would be useful.