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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#161

Post by np- »

egeozcan wrote: post #54
ezekg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam. Don't correct my term, especially when I'm searching verbatim (which I almost always want). It'd also be nice to be able to downvote certain results.

> Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam I think achieving this would be worth billions, at least? We really tend to underestimate the amount of spam on the internet. Google does badly here: it overcorrects and you get only super safe results. Yandex? Unless you get lucky, lots of spam.

The problem is that for every $1 someone is willing to spend to not have spammy results, a spammer is willing to pay $10 for you to see it anyway. And the more "trustworthy" a platform grows, then the going price for manipulating it will keep rising until they hire the right MBA who decides to squander the company's reputation for a quick buck. Seems to be a recurring theme at least.

Re: The next Google

#162

Post by bko »

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 agree with this, however it could be used as a platform for others to provide their own config and you can piggyback off the work of others.

It's kind of like ad-blockers where you don't have to maintain a list of domains to block. Others do that for you. And then people could create hosted version of their simple box with all the infra taken care of.

Re: The next Google

#163

Post by mikehollinger »

sanxiyn wrote: post #153
mikehollinger wrote: post #142

There's an opportunity for helping with enterprise data. There's: - Files (Box/DropBox/Google Drive/SharePoint) - Static(ish) Pages (Wikis/internal CMS's/Actual websites hosted on some random nginx/apache) - Web Apps (eg Internal Learning Platforms or helper HR apps or whatever) - Chat (Slack/Discord/Teams/??) - Email - Files stored on my actual laptop - Source Control (eg GitHub/GitLab/whatever ... which have their…

Remember Google Desktop? I want Google Desktop back. (Google Desktop was discontinued in 2011.)

I do too!

Re: The next Google

#164

Post by Nextgrid »

qeternity wrote: post #10

> Everybody has different preferences of how they want a search engine to look and feel. This sounds like it was written by the infamous Dropbox commenter. No, most people have never given a single thought to this.

> No, most people have never given a single thought to this.

Probably because they're stuck in a local maximum with no idea how much better it can be. They may not even be aware that there are sites out there that have quality non-commercial content if all they've been given for the last decade is spam to the point where spam has been normalized.

Re: The next Google

#165

Post by time_to_smile »

sanxiyn wrote: post #22
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…

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

Another important feature of Kagi that I'm paying close attention to is: they are currently privately bootstrapped as far as funding goes.

To me the fact that Kagi is not currently VC funded is huge for me as far as adoption. Every customer facing VC funded startup I've worked at inevitably starts to institute increasingly anti-user practices while grinning and talking about "customer first!"

I know it's a huge ask, but if Kagi remains privately funded/non-VC I'll happily pay the moment I can.

I've only been using the service for a short while now but have been enjoying it a lot. The ability to blacklist domains has already dramatically improved my search.

Re: The next Google

#166

Post by guntars »

sam0x17 wrote: post #145

Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi has done a great job of solving some of the UX and privacy problems endemic in online search these days, but at the end of the day they could be snuffed out at the whim of the big search providers (Google, Bing) if they decide to kick them off until they can get their own indexing solution o…

Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier now than it was in the early 2000s. It's the ranking that's the hard part. PageRank helped put Google on the map and they've battled the hordes of low-ethics SEO practitioners ever since. I think it's generally agreed that PageRank wouldn't cut it today.

I tried Kagi as the default search engine for a few days and realized just how many little things Google does that I prefer, but never noticed until now. Not strictly related to search results, but things like converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. It's a ton of work to implement all that. For now I switched back, but I'll keep an eye out.

Re: The next Google

#167

Post by Nextgrid »

egeozcan wrote: post #54
ezekg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam. Don't correct my term, especially when I'm searching verbatim (which I almost always want). It'd also be nice to be able to downvote certain results.

> Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam I think achieving this would be worth billions, at least? We really tend to underestimate the amount of spam on the internet. Google does badly here: it overcorrects and you get only super safe results. Yandex? Unless you get lucky, lots of spam.

Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking signal.

You'll still get spam if that's all that matches your query, but now all it takes is for someone to make a page matching the query without the aforementioned items to outrank the spam results. You wouldn't need to append "site:reddit.com" to your queries because the (mostly) non-commercial Reddit results would automatically outrank all the blogspam and listicles.

If ads were downranked it would make a lot of spam/clickbait/listicles unprofitable overnight as they'd rank low enough that the costs of creating & maintaining the spam site/content would outgrow the returns from ad impressions.

Re: The next Google

#168

Post by sam0x17 »

ryandrake wrote: post #106
superasn wrote: post #89

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 ne…

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…

There is actually a chrome extension that brings it back

Re: The next Google

#169

Post by jonathankoren »

The problem with going up against Google isn't competing with features, or even relevance. No one cares about features beyond basic relevance, and relevance isn't enough to get people to switch.

You have to provide an excuse, or perhaps an experience, that gets people to come back. Just one niche, is all you need.

You're not competing with Google the search engine, or even Google company. You're competing against google the verb.

Re: The next Google

#170

Post by politician »

chewz wrote: post #132
mostlysimilar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I think this is exactly correct.
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