41–50 of 561 posts
Google won because they started early and had a right algorithm. They then had the scale to grow with the internet. It would be very hard to start a new general-purpose search engine now (capital, monopoly, tech) Nobody seems to have The Next Big Idea for a better search engine yet.
> DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google. I disagree. I use Bing for about half of my searching because Google simply struggles with things like exact phrase matching in many cases. Where Google falls off, Bing tends to succeed. Though Bing also sometimes lags behind, where Google tends to do better, hence my split usage.
These solutions don't answer any of the fundamental problems with Google: - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available) - how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades) - how to personalize without invading privacy, e.g. Google had an option to search through your email in Google search...it's gone now, I won…
Kagi is "users pay". Yes, average users won't pay, but I don't see how that matters to me as a Kagi user.
And that's by the way why Google is still successful as well. Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers without needing to do anything else. The only way to beat that is to make it even better while not making it more complicated which is very hard to do.
These solutions don't answer any of the fundamental problems with Google: - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available) - how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades) - how to personalize without invading privacy, e.g. Google had an option to search through your email in Google search...it's gone now, I won…
Overall it seems very rare anyone ever considers this an engineering problem. Really, what's stopping you from running a search engine?
> The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.
You want the information that you'll eventually get from visiting links, not the links themselves. In fact often you don't even want the information, you just want to solve a problem. I don't know about you, but I don't like learning all about air conditioners and spending time finding the product available in my area with the highest quality/price ratio that fits into my budget. I just want the best air conditioner…
No search engine has tried to address the issue of the user's context for the search. - does my current location matter for the search? - am I trying to spend money (shopping), or trying to get information (facts)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also important for anyone actually thinking of taking Google on, very few of the features listed are things Google can't easily do, too. Attacking their strengths is crazy. You better have something both crazy good and hard to replicate by someone with more money than god. Whatever replaces Google will be doing something that Google can't without causing them other problems. The first thing that comes to mind is make…
I think this comment is a bit strange in the present, considering search engines like duckduckgo, which is basically Bing promoted with a "we don't track" advertising campaign (also hashbangs are pretty cool). DDG is not at google numbers, I know, but you don't need google numbers to make money. I don't think privacy is a very special angle to advertise from either, promising to remove amazon-affiliate blog-spam from…
The article is titled "The Next Google." I was responding to that, not "A Profitable Also-Ran".
No search engine has tried to address the issue of the user's context for the search. - does my current location matter for the search? - am I trying to spend money (shopping), or trying to get information (facts)?