Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging? • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by mellosouls » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

togaen wrote: post #76

Everyone complaining about google’s “declining quality” is living in some fantasy world where there’s something better to compare google to. Its results are significantly better than any competitor, check for yourself. If you think you can do better, go for it.

Nope. Living in the real world with experience of how good Google used to be.

The high number of posts on the subject suggests real decline, and stopping that decline won't be helped by a rose-tinted assessment of the current situation.

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

#202

Post by jakub_g » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

This article has insights from folks who actually tried:

https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-fr...

TL;DR you need a lot of money and users (catch-22). Also, massive scale and massive noise.

You can also search HN for 'cliqz' for discussions about Cliqz shutting down.

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

#203

Post by samwillis » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

brentadamson wrote: post #194

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…

`We almost need an “Open Search Co-Op” which smaller search engines can join to share technology and refers users to each other.` Can you elaborate?

Something like a cooperative where companies become the franchisee owner for a specific search vertical. They could get access to technology, software and knowledge, but the costs of infrastructure would be the responsibility of the member. As well as having their own “front page”, website and branding there would then be a “meta” search engine that intelligently searches the franchisees search engines based on the query.

If someone searches for something on one engine and it doesn’t have the results the “meta” search engine could be checked and direct the user to another engine that would better fit their query.

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

#204

Post by lawwantsin17 » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

pronlover723 wrote: post #162

onion2k wrote: post #152

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 you…

You could lobby the govs to require search engine selection in browsers / device on first install. I don't think that would change anything though. Google's results might be declining but they are still arguably better than their competitors and ATM at least the majority of people would still choose them.

No post body was provided.

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

#205

Post by robertlagrant » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

pronlover723 wrote: post #165

Beltiras wrote: post #80

Earlier 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.

The quality would have to degrade dramatically for people to stop using Google em masse for that reason. It can still degrade a bit to increase revenue.

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

#206

Post by vmception » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

keyme wrote: post #196

The internet is too different now to what Google (or any SE) was designed to index. Too much of the up-to-date high value information is posted onto semi-public channels. Like facebook groups, instagram posts, telegram channels, etc. At the same time, too much of the publicly available websites are becoming clickbait and mindless marketing drivel. Just try to research anything slightly obscure that has to be up-to-da…

Somewhat related is how there is a whole generation of people that think they are entitled to finding information on a search engine, or a web indexed accessible source, and if its not there then it must not exist!

I see this in discussions a lot where many times the answer is that the data doesn't exist, but thats not satisfactory to the person making the challenging.

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

#207

Post by tmsh » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

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…

> Ultimately I think it’s because the internet is just too big!

I would disagree actually. I think the majority of searches people do and the solutions they would be satisfied with require only indexing major sites. Create a better UX attached to PageRank of the top 10-100k+ Alexa ranked sites and you'd have a competitor that could focus on other improvements.

At the bottom you could search Google or DDG if you want more niche results.

I.e., optimizing UX of the p90 searches would be enough for people to move and the p90 of searches are happy with a pretty narrow range of sites. (You could insert value prop of: no ads, no tracking, and crowd-sourced refinement -- i.e., realtime upvote/downvoting -- of the top results, previews, caching, more knowledge graph stuff on the right side, deeper metadata processing of top sites (i.e., avoiding the need to 'site:*'), or some other revolutionary UX like a one sentence hypothesis solution of exactly what the person is asking for again upvoted/downvoted for refinement -- Google does this but there is a lot of room for improvement). It's fun to think about. There is an order of magnitude in both precision and accuracy that can be improved for huge swaths of common questions people ask on Google.

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

#208

Post by csa » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #172

nobodyandproud wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way is to add search for walled gardens: The most common by far are corporate documents and datastores. It’s also a harder problem to solve than Google’s algorithm. After two decades Microsoft seems to have brought in support, but they left the hard part to others.

Isn’t Algolia pretty much eating this market? They seem to be very dominant on the problem of “here’s my dataset, please provide me with an api / interface to search it”

Maybe?

When searching for something on HN, I get much better results using Google and site: rather than using the embedded algolia search.

I would have to think that this would be true of a corporate data set as well.

Their api might be what sets them apart, though. I’m not sure… not in that space.

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

#209

Post by hattmall » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

native_samples wrote: post #146

ryandrake wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Assuming someone has ever used that link you should have that data as well and with potentially even more relevance than google because you can see which pages are most often visited through external links.

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

#210

Post by akrymski » Sun, Mar 27, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

amirkdv wrote: post #189

akrymski wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

The benefit of this approach is that it's an addition to PageRank, not a replacement. You don't need massive adoption of the social part I think cause you can link to eg HN, which already links to other sites. It's simply extending the backlinking concept to add personal pages.

Most long tail queries work well enough with Google and indeed most of the benefit of this approach would be in the head where ranking matters more. Furthermore nothing prohibits users from liking domains, not just individual URLs.