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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?

#151

Post by systemvoltage »

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…

Whatever Algolia is doing, it is amazing. Would it be possible for them to scale as a general search engine for the web?

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

#152

Post by onion2k »

Google pays Apple ~$10bn a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. They pay Mozilla a significant percentage of Mozilla's revenue to be the default in Firefox. Obviously Google is the default in Chrome.

You can't compete with that by building a better search engine. Even if you had the infrastructure, capital, and you offered Apple and Mozilla more money than they get from Google, Google could beat your offer.

The only way someone could beat Google, or even just compete with them, would be if they could make everyone understand that they can change their default search engine and give them a reason to do it and have Google screw up how they respond. I wouldn't bet on it happening.

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

#153

Post by ditsuke »

go_prodev wrote: post #129
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.

DDG uses Bing (like most other alternative search engines). I believe Brave's new search engine uses its own index though.

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

#154

Post by lessname »

prismatix wrote: post #131

I've been using Kagi as my default search engine on my phone to test it out. Honestly, it just doesn't hit the convenience mark. when I search for a restaurant + hours, Google shows the hours in a card at the top of the results. Kagi can't or doesn't do that, and often doesn't even find the restaurant. I haven't used DDG so I'm not sure if they're similar, but for the average user Google just consistently hits the ma…

Thats because many companies directly type in their data on Google My Business to make their business easier to find. There is also a community doing this (same with facebook). Smaller competitors could do the same with a community or at least manually typing in the data at least for bigger companies.

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

#155

Post by wenbin »

When google got started, they indexed ~25 million web pages. Then they grew together with the web, compounding over ~30 years.

Today, it’s totally possible for a single person or a small team to build a domain specific search engine that indexes 10s or even 100s of million documents.

Building the index v0.1 that kind of working is not hard. But maintaining the index to handle countless edge cases is tedious and need non-stop investment (eg, infrastructure + paying salary for talents)

Also, a search engine is more than “keyword matching”. You need to do search result ranking. And it gets exponentially difficult to do as # of indexed documents increases.

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

#156

Post by notreallyserio »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #133
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…

There is an opportunity for niche applications. I would like a search engine that only indexes discussion forums. These are hard to surface on the SEO driven major search providers.

Kagi is working on this with its "lens" feature. I think it works pretty dang well. Most results I get when using the discussions lens come from Reddit, but you can block or reduce the ranking of sites, making this less of an issue, if it is even an issue for you. I suggest trying it out and joining their discord to share feedback (they're responsive).

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

#157

Post by shafyy »

modeless wrote: post #123

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…

Kagi is also good, in fact I get better results on Kagi than on DDG.

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

#158

Post by shafyy »

prismatix wrote: post #131

I've been using Kagi as my default search engine on my phone to test it out. Honestly, it just doesn't hit the convenience mark. when I search for a restaurant + hours, Google shows the hours in a card at the top of the results. Kagi can't or doesn't do that, and often doesn't even find the restaurant. I haven't used DDG so I'm not sure if they're similar, but for the average user Google just consistently hits the ma…

I also use Kagi and I think it's good enough for most things. But you're right, for local search results Google still is better.

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

#159

Post by addaon »

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.

It sometimes works. Maybe more so than when signed out than signed in? I spent a huge amount of time at one point trying to search for a "tost ring" when signed in (as an account that has a history of searching for developer-related content, which this is not), and no combination of quotes, verbatim mode, etc could prevent it from being "corrected" to "toString". Eventually ended up going to Bing, and it was the first hit. This was a while ago, though, and today I hit tost rings immediately. No idea if this is a change in my profile or a change in the algorithm, of course.

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

#160

Post by DesiLurker »

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…

So basically google is the MLS listings of the web now. Sounds like a job for regulators to step in for both the problems.

Agree we need a coop of search engines, but I'll add that probably an org like mozilla is best suited for it, that way it can stay non-profit and recycle any profits back into R&D. personally I believe most of these solid business plan companies can be replaced by a simpler open-source version as IMO a lot of their energy is spend in securing revenue lines & profits.

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