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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?

#321

Post by freediver »

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…

> No one is making bets that big on search, especially when the online advertising industry (which is the only way to fund it currently) is in danger of massive regulation.

Isn't this exactly the reason why one should do it, as Google is the essence of the online advertising industry and this very regulation could threaten its existence?

>I think there is massive opportunity for domain specific search engines though

Challenge with niche search engine is discoverability. Imagine you had 10 of the greatest vertical search engines available today - how do you remember which one to use and how? The beauty of a general web search is that it is an easy to remember entry point to all of what is out there.

> You then potentially move towards a building “meta” search engines

Ever wondered why is this called meta search engine, and an email software that connects to multiple email servers is called email client and not "meta email". "Search engine client" sounds like a more appropriate name.

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

#322

Post by freediver »

Closi wrote: post #319
omnicognate wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://kagi.com/faq , emphasis mine. > We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, *unlimited plan at around $20-$30/mo" as well as have bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), organization/team plans, family plans and annual payment discounts available. I don't know where you're getting 5c per search from, but that unlimited plan would cap it at something I could live with and I dou…

> I don't know where you're getting 5c per search from, but that unlimited plan would cap it at something I could live with and I doubt I'll need it. I said a single search 'can cost' 5 cents, but in reality it depends on the search and how many filters you apply. You can view the cost of your searches on your account. Each 'user search' can be multiple 'charged searches', which is why the cost can be >5c for some se…

This is not a single search, in your example the user just made three distinctive searches.

If you have a better business model, that does not involve building yet another ad-supported search engine, we are all ears!

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

#323

Post by sanderjd »

randomsilence wrote: post #179
sanderjd wrote: post #163

I've been using Neeva, it works well.

That's funny: Their slogan: >try Neeva, 100% ad-free search engine, Totally private Their founders: >Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube). They met in the early days of search ads at Google, and came up with the idea for Neeva over hikes and coffee. They have founded a company that explicitly doesn't need the knowledge that they had…

Yep! It is ironic but also makes sense in my opinion. I know more about why the things I'm an expert in are bad than most people do. That doesn't necessarily mean I know how to fix the issues though, but at least I have a good sense of the problems, which is a start.

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

#324

Post by Closi »

freediver wrote: post #322
Closi wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know where you're getting 5c per search from, but that unlimited plan would cap it at something I could live with and I doubt I'll need it. I said a single search 'can cost' 5 cents, but in reality it depends on the search and how many filters you apply. You can view the cost of your searches on your account. Each 'user search' can be multiple 'charged searches', which is why the cost can be >5c for some se…

This is not a single search, in your example the user just made three distinctive searches. If you have a better business model, that does not involve building yet another ad-supported search engine, we are all ears!

How do you propose I search for a large image of a cat within your UI that does not take 3 distinct searches then?

I don't think most users would think this was 3 distinct searches, if it's just going through the steps you are required to take to get the single search you want.

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

#325

Post by freediver »

Closi wrote: post #324
freediver wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a single search, in your example the user just made three distinctive searches. If you have a better business model, that does not involve building yet another ad-supported search engine, we are all ears!

How do you propose I search for a large image of a cat within your UI that does not take 3 distinct searches then? I don't think most users would think this was 3 distinct searches, if it's just going through the steps you are required to take to get the single search you want.

There are two steps needed instead of three as you can search images directly. Searching for a large image (or any other search where filters and modifiers are used) are probably less than 0.1% of all searches so this use case is not worth optimizing for yet as it would not have a meaningful impact on overall average monthly cost.

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

#326

Post by richardsocher »

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…

you.com has a lot of useful apps for developers.

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

#327

Post by Batman8675309 »

briandear wrote: post #105
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…

DDG also lost the plot when they started censoring results based on geopolitical opinion.

In practice, it used to say that 2+2=5 and they blocked that. How is that wrong?

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

#328

Post by cupofpython »

ryandrake wrote: post #107
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #100

Earlier 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…

my take is that the big bottleneck in search is not the index or the search but in understanding what it is the user is searching for in the first place.

that becomes a big can of worms very quickly, and starts to put into perspective some of googles other most successful verticals: NLP, Translation, Maps ("Near me"). Of course a lot of the verticals are also a generic means to get value out of all the server resources and experts required to operate the engine and then additional related branches to those verticals (email -> drive -> docs)

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

#329

Post by cupofpython »

I believe a competitor would need to be such a better experience that by saying you are "googling" something, as in the common word for searching, an essence of the competitor is left out.

If bing was successful at it, for example, it would cause the sentence "I tried to google it but ended up needing to Bing it" to make tangible sense to someone who has used both services.

Even if you create a better search engine, there is too much of a marketing gap to compete on that alone. "use bing because the results are better!" simply doesnt motivate enough people to switch off google.

Quite frankly, it is rare that google does not deliver expected results for the generic use case.

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

#330

Post by freediver »

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…

This is because we are still in beta and simply do not have local search developed yet. Work in progress. Glad you are comparing a year old startup to a 20 year old, $2T company - keep us honest!
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