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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#81

Post by darinf »

KindAndFriendly wrote: post #4

"The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links" I think one strong contributing factor to Google's success is its simplicity. All the listed competitors add a lot of complexity imho. While all the customization buttons, knobs, lenses, meta crawling, code generation features etc might add some value for the advanced and technically skilled user, it provides rather little value for the average user wh…

Actually, just taking the ads out of the experience can make for a simpler and better search experience. I think the google founders knew this too (https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/rzr2n3/the_founde...). They just couldn't hold back the avalanche of revenue that search ads yields.

I work for Neeva, and this is a big part of why I left Google to join Neeva. There has to be a better experience, and it doesn't start from another business that works just like Google. It has to be a different kind of business. Neeva does not make money from showing you ads, so it can provide a different search experience... a simpler search experience, like the original google even, but it can go further...

With the Neeva app for example as you start typing in the URL bar, it will take your input as search suggestions (just as any other browser + search engine would) but instead of just showing you completed search suggestion, Neeva will show you the results from running those searches inline. The idea being that maybe those results will be helpful to you and make it so you don't even need to go to the search results page. You can just take the result right there from the URL bar suggestions drop down. Saves you time. Simpler.

Stuff like that. There's a swim lane of innovation and ideas on how searching and browsing can be better that is just really hard for Google to build, even though many of these ideas are thought of inside the walls of Google. They just can't ship them if they are stuck being beholden to their search ads model.

Another great example... ever wonder why Google isn't working to make it so Chrome doesn't have a million tabs at the top of your browser? It gets to the point where it is hard to get back to what you were doing. Me, I just end up closing the tabs, declaring tab bankruptcy. Google is okay with that because it means I have to search again. The Chrome team wants to fix this but it is hard to do so as it would result in people searching less often!

Again, just means there is opportunity for a simpler better experience to be had and Google won't be the ones creating it.

Re: The next Google

#82

Post by zarzavat »

amelius wrote: post #13

Search is the wrong way to look at it. It needs to answer questions, like an oracle. Anyway, Google is getting less relevant because the technology is getting better than "good enough", and any additional tech that Google adds is not really all that useful. It's like PCs. You don't need a faster one because your old one can do word processing just fine.

An oracle is how Google sees itself. However, their quest to be an oracle has come at the expense of losing their edge at searching the web. So now there is an opening for another service to be better at search than Google.

Re: The next Google

#83

Post by hedora »

The next google is to google as Craigslist is to classified ads.

Google is ripe for disintermediation by a competitor that doesn't siphon cash off search to subsidize other things.

Now, all we need is a technology shift that erodes their moat.

Re: The next Google

#84

Post by chakkepolja »

helen___keller wrote: post #71

> For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads are not an option. This is a red flag to me. I would like if this were true for a next gen anything, but in my experience truly next gen experiences - the kind that spread like wildfire and displace incumbents - have no reason to make promises about privacy or ads. Why would they, if they have a product that consumers want to use?

Exactly.

The person who asked 'is HN becoming an echo chamber?'

would've got their answer by now.

Re: The next Google

#85

Post by aaomidi »

boomer918 wrote: post #12

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…

I do think there's actually some space opening up for paid services.

From what I'm seeing, if you could create a bot free eco system, people will pay for it.

The question is "can you make it bot free". This is gonna be the next trillion dollar company.

Re: The next Google

#86

Post by marginalia_nu »

sdoering wrote: post #77
marginalia_nu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems the first of these can be solved by reducing the scope. Do you really need a data center to run a search engine? Overall it seems very rare anyone ever considers this an engineering problem. Really, what's stopping you from running a search engine?

Really? Or are you the one I should have refrained from feeding. But if you must know: First you need to collect a lot of content from the internet. From many different sites. With very different types of code structure. Broken html. More often than not behind some SPA JS code. Behind robots.txt files and bot protection efforts. So the first problem to solve would be building a crawler at scale. That is able to crawl…

All of this is a long series of solvable problems. I should know, I've dabbled in solving most of them. This is why I suggest actually taking a stab at it before you dismiss it as impossible.

There are some problems that aren't as big as they seem. Parts of an SPA can't be reliably linked to anyway even if you find interesting text there, so you can just leave them out of the index.

Likewise, there isn't as great of a need to keep a fresh index as it may seem. The odds of a document changing is proportional to how frequently it changes. This is a bit of a paradox, where even if you crawl really aggressively, the most frequently changing documents will still always be out of date. Most documents are relatively stable over time. You can actually use how often you see changes to a document or website to modulate how often you crawl it.

The bad HTML is quite manageable. You really just need to flatten the document to get at the visible text. Even with really broken formatting, that's manageable.

The storage demands are also not as bad as you might think (most documents are tiny, sub 10 Kb), there are ways to lessen the blow on top of that. Both text and indexes can compress extremely well. Since you're paying for disk access by the block, you might as well cram more stuff into a block.

Most of the crawling concerns, in general, can be gotten around by starting off with Common Crawl (even if I do my own crawling, which also is finnicky but manageable).

> This is relatively straightforward for a limited search and document space up to a few million entries in your DB. A few million documents should be doable with off the shelf parts.

Right, so shouldn't the question be how to find the documents that are even candidates for being search results? Most documents are not ever going to be relevant to any query ever. Get rid of that noise and your hardware goes a lot longer.

I'm running a search engine on consumer hardware out of my living room that can index 100 million documents. Go a bit higher budget than a consumer PC, and you've got 5 billion. That goes a long way.

Re: The next Google

#87

Post by uhtred »

How is DuckDuckGo a worse version of Google?

I get less ads, more privacy, and pretty much the same or better results. Plus I can use my down arrows to traverse the results list!

Re: The next Google

#88

Post by fallat »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #43
sanxiyn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi is "users pay". Yes, average users won't pay, but I don't see how that matters to me as a Kagi user.

A paid search engine? Bold. I'd pay if it could do anything close to what the old google code search could do. I miss it every day.

It's actually so good I plan to pay when they start charging.

Re: The next Google

#89

Post by superasn »

Google can be the next Google if they just stopped being evil for a second:

1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome extension.

2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with what it thinks I want.

3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search results. Where I can narrow down the search results using additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to weed out spam and narrow my search accurately.

Re: The next Google

#90

Post by johndfsgdgdfg »

I think the replacement of Google can't come sooner. Google invades our privacy and keeps users hostages for more money. Thanks to HN I am aware now how bad Google is. I always recommend people to switch to Amazon, Apple or MS. Google is EVIL.
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