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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#131

Post by simion314 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #45

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user ch…

>I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't.

People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster or better people want the customization. At my job we have paying users that requests features that indeed are work related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded people will disagree and they prefer to bend their work to fit a guru-s vision.,

Now my turn to ask, why do people like you think there is a generic and basic solution that works at the same time for the casual user and for the user that has a lot of tasks to accomplish? Is there some theorem that shows this, like "The GNOME theoreme of product design, keep removing features until the shit convergence to the local minimum where you find the minimum product and the minimum set of users possible.

Re: The next Google

#132

Post by chewz »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #74
Barrin92 wrote: post #45

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user ch…

> a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want better than I do. Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google. I'm convinced the death of the web and in…

> Give me links to websites.

There are no more websites worth linking to anymore... If you filter out all SEO spam there is barely few webpages left...

Google is desperately trying to hide that fact. Most of the web 1.0 can nowadays fit into small town telephone directory... You do not need mulitibilion dolar business to run web directory...

Re: The next Google

#133

Post by antishatter »

I find ddg is an improvement on google because it’s more like google 10 years ago plus a quick !g tosses it back to google for the occasional topic google does better.

Re: The next Google

#134

Post by Nextgrid »

arecurrence wrote: post #116
ryandrake wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. How about an image search that... actually returns the URL of the raw image? Here's a dead simple use case that is just unnecessarily frustrating. As a user, I want a high res picture of a buffalo. So: a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page contains thumbnails of buffalos. b. I click the first result, it's tagged with "nationalgeographic.com" so it's probably gonna be good. Instead of the image…

Alas, Getty sued that experience into oblivion https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

Why couldn't they litigate it? As far as I know it wasn't a court decision but a settlement, which means no legal precedent has been set and it wasn't determined whether their original behavior was actually illegal.

Re: The next Google

#135

Post by tdrgabi »

MockObject wrote: post #57
alphabetting wrote: post #27

In my view Google could possibly be the next Google. They're leading in AI right now and if they can get the magic we've seen in some of their papers into products like Search or Google Assistant it would be major moment.

People aren't complaining about Google because of a lack of AI, but because of product decisions they're intentionally making, presumably that increase their profits, but many of us would be overjoyed if they simply rolled back to their 2012 algorithm.

2012 algorithm with today's advanced seo and spam won't give you good results.

Nobody uses yahoo search today...

Re: The next Google

#136

Post by ravenstine »

Barrin92 wrote: post #45

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user ch…

Where did this idea come from that all viable products have to appeal to the widest possible audience?

Re: The next Google

#137

Post by abhinavsharma »

Barrin92 wrote: post #45

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user ch…

While generally true, this isn't necessarily true if the customization is well-layered and the user is at a dead end in their search journey.

Too many products equate frictionless == featureless these days and there should be more power when the user needs it.

That's why we built a search extension that improves upon Google specifically in ways that it's weak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives

Re: The next Google

#138

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

rdiddly wrote: post #129
Barrin92 wrote: post #45

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user ch…

All you have to do to improve on Google at this point is to do less, make it less bad, i.e. a process of removals, not additions. Just do the same thing, but without all the shitty extra stuff. But then what's the business model? (Since that is in fact most of the shitty stuff. Oh sure there's still the SEO spam, and you're in that arms-race, like it or not, even if you're not a successful search engine, so you do th…

100% agree. Want a search engine that is better in every way than Google? Give me Google from 2010 or so:

1. Much clearer delineations between ads and organic search results.

2. For anything remotely commercial it wasn't the case that literally the first 4 or 5 results were ads, pushing organic results below the fold.

3. No AMP carousel

4. There wasn't a vomitous amount of those "tidbit" sections - there were only a couple and they were usually helpful.

Re: The next Google

#139

Post by Nextgrid »

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…

Average users may not pay, but specialized users may pay and pay more than enough to subsidize some sort of free tier.

Not to mention, if free search engines keep devolving into an endless sea of spam, people may have no choice but to start paying. There's plenty of things out there people pay for not necessarily by choice but because there's nothing else out there that would accomplish the task at hand.

Re: The next Google

#140

Post by jsnell »

darinf wrote: post #73
_jal wrote: post #20

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…

Actually, you are spot on. One simple feature of the Neeva app is that it shows inline search results as you type into the URL bar. This is because we aren't trying to show you ads, so we don't need you to visit the search results page (where Google and others show you those ads). We just show you the results straight away in the suggest experience. Now, this isn't going to show you everything you care about and you…

But that is exactly how Google searches worked on desktop platforms for more than half a decade (Instant Search), not some kind of a new idea. Given how long they kept that feature on, it seems pretty obvious that it can't have been the kind of revenue killer you suggest. If you can serve and display search results for a given possibly partial query, you can obviously serve ads too.
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