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

> And my impression is that it's been a bit more than a year that the quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers actually taste like food again.

Huh, maybe I don't eat there enough to notice differences, but on the occasions lately that I've had a McDonald's burger, I haven't noticed the quality being anything but terrible. Not entirely unpleasant, but just not at all a high quality meal, even compared to some of the other fast food burger places.

Google's search results are bad by default because they're hijacked by SEO farms. Despite this, I find that there's almost always a way for me to find what I want with Google. If I want thoughtful discussion about a topic, I'll append "from:news.ycombinator" to my search. This also often surfaces great personal blogs or old documents or other things that don't rank high in search results.

If it's not covered on HN, I'll append "from:reddit" instead (they're not always wise but as at least they're not getting paid per word written, and the upvote system gives me a sense of what real people think). If I want a broad survey of a topic, Wikipedia or some other wiki are usually great. If I want a really deep dive, I'll append "book", usually in conjunction with "from:news.ycombinator". Lastly, I sometimes add a time filter, e.g. "after:2021".

Clearly this is an awkward pattern. But it really works, and I'm having trouble thinking of something that would be meaningfully better. I suspect most people have found ways of using Google that work well enough for them. So I'm afraid Google Search will stick around for awhile.

The internet has become from being a source of information to a marketplace everyone wants to make a quick buck instead. The times where you can just search for information without being tracked what and when you search, is over. I never received spam or when, i had known it came from the shady website i signed up with. Today, my whereabouts, my age and sex are exploited as information for useless and silly spambots. They are not even trying to entertain me. And all that because using a mobile phone, goole knows where you are and where you are working. That estimates the income, making more stupid wine offers possibel, im non-alcoholic, that info they didnt get because i called help hotlines and those numbers are not listed and info is not legal to share. But well. If one wants to build a free search engine and knowledge base, has to fight with users not knowing that the world is round and alternatives available. It starts in school, kids end up in front of Windows Computers, Word is a text processor and google-ing stuff is the way to go. It goes to that extent that recommending alternatives, people refuse it, even if its better because they dont know it. Humans are sometimes stuck in their behavior.

It's kind of a facile answer perhaps, but I think the answer is as simple as 'you cannot out-Google Google'.

The declining quality of Google results seems pretty clear, but only in relative terms. That is, Google now compared to Google in the past. In an absolute sense the service remains pretty great.

A confounding factor is that maybe the quality decline is in fact in internet content in general. That is, Google per se is as good as ever, it's just it's become much more difficult to find good results.

So, simply, the answer is perhaps that no matter the effort a competitor could put in they simply cannot outdo Google at their core competency. Perhaps for fundamental reasons, but even if not in some niche, surely then for sheer funding and scale reasons when trying to expand beyond that niche.

If a competitor to Google emerges, it'll be in some non obvious thing that is not core web search. Basically, when core web search becomes less important and Google can't pivot quickly enough to the new more important thing to compete.

Add Brave Search to your list: https://search.brave.com/

Private, anonymous and independent search index. Generally, search has a lot of attention on it right now, lots of great efforts to compete with G.