Kagi keeps showing up here, perhaps check that out. https://kagi.com/
I can't figure out what their business model is. Do you know?
Yes they are planning to charge a monthly fee.
Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
181–190 of 332 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#182>, 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…
It's not going to be 'search' that displaces search, it'll be impossible. It will be made irrelevant through something else.
For example, someone comes up with a 'Finder' thing that's barely a comprehensive directory of the internet, and that, along with 'site search' aka for FB, Amazon, does better for the use case.
Most people are not 'searching' the web, they're often typing URLs or searchers for things they want answers to.
When I type a technical thing I'm really just searching 'stack exchange'.
On mobile, we use apps, which are different than pages.
Apple could come up with something that renders Google less than necessary.
Google will not be replaced directly.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#183Earlier 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…
> I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google. You only search whitelisted sites, which removes a lot of the SEO and blogspam from the results, and makes the index is wildly smaller. Search is free, but users can also pay a cheap subscription for the ability to flag sites as spammy, submit sites they think are missing, and submit queries the site has tr…
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Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's ridiculous. Google's search dies if people stop using it. They stop using it if the results are poor. There are no perverse incentives here unless you believe Google is hoping to cash out tomorrow and close its doors.
It's not ridiculous at all.
> They stop using it if the results are poor.
These are not laws of nature. There are so many reasons why most people would still use $X even if the performance of $X was underwhelming.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#185Google 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 you…
You could beat them in a small segment market though. EG: A group tired of being banned by google.
> EG: A group tired of being banned by google.
Huh? I don't understand what this means.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#186I will argue that he fact that Google is a monopoly is the only thing holding back competitors. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop... The only thing that would have a chance is if Apple developed a search engine and used it as the default instead of using Google. People are busy/ignorant and do not care and will eat whatever search results they are given. But this might be a risk to Apple ba…
How does anti trust action solve this? Forcing to divest cloud and Gmail will not make competition have an easier job with their search engines.
Google search itself is irreducible, at least in any productive way.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#187Ultimately 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…
Maybe a search engine for niches, where the mid-sized contributors to those niches may even pay something to support the search engine? And new people contributing sites to those niches could pay some small fee to be listed (maybe under certain conditions or after 1 year free) and would be "elected" into the search results by a random selection of others in the niche? Where the interests of the group are aligned because they all want more people to use the search engine to find them, so they are incentivized to grow the amount of quality content available.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#188google competitors already exist they're just not obvious - When you want to find a place to stay you dont search google you go to airbnb.com when you want to buy random stuff you go to amazon, even coming to hackernews is a competitor. You are seeking something and find it. I do get your point tho about a direct competitor, at the end of the day - all the innovation around search is happening in that we are unbundling the search engine and turning each category/search result asset into a monetizable marketplace. My .02
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#189>, 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…
I've heard this a lot. I think there are two problems with this. First, you need massive adoption for the "social" part to be at all useful, hence only the few big social platforms can even try it. Second, even at maximum possible adoption, you'll probably run into the problem that actual human social networks have nowhere near enough branching breadth to help rank the behemoth that the web is today, i.e. for most queries and most possible hits, there's not enough signal coming from the social network.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning market. However, I guess big tech companies have become part of the superpower games (USA vs. China etc.). Breaking up Google might just mean a Chinese company takes over. Can't trust the other governments to enforce similar market conditions. So yeah, like you said, conditions of the universe :)
You could discourage them from buying out smaller competitors en Masse. In my mind it shouldn't make sense to found a company with the explicit goal of being purchased by one of the tech giants in a few years. Many are never even really trying to get s sustainable business model and venture capital is fueling this machine.
Why shouldn’t it make sense?
One point of view is that it’s a more efficient way for the tech giants to develop new features. An internal team trying to do greenfield work will inevitably be slowed down by bureaucracy, where a startup can iterate more quickly without all the friction of things like performance reviews, HR exercises, and if I’m being cynical, pesky issues like user data protection frameworks.
It’s risky, but the payoff for founders is significantly larger than what an equivalent employee would get for leading an internal project.