The next Google

> The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links.

Hard disagree. I spent years of my life working on a "new way to search" (Graph Search at Facebook, ~2012) and the biggest takeaways for me from all of that time is:

1) people don't want to learn a new way to search, and they don't want to learn new tools, filters, lenses, whatever you want to call it. it must be a keyword-search based input because Google has trained billions to search (and to think) this way for 20+ years now. imo the next google shouldn't fight this behavior, but rather adopt it as part of the core strategy

2) ownership of the "search intent entrypoint" is key. people generally don't care what they are using to search, as long as it's easy and fast to use and actually works. google understands this and makes it almost impossible to bypass searching with google if you're on an Android phone. All of these alternative search engines have a huge barrier to entry not only on the technology and data side, but mainly on the entrypoint side. They can't reasonably expect hundreds of millions of the people to go through and manually update their default search engine on all of their devices. What about when I go to use Google Assistant? Google maps? All entrypoints that Google has used to lock up search intent. It's brilliant. I believe there are moves still available for a future Google assailant to overcome these barriers, but I haven't seen many that have directly touched on this point yet. new technical shifts may open up new entrypoints here (VR/AR?)

3) the search engine that has the lowest time between [query] -> [answer] for a user wins. any search engine that adds additional cruft through forcing more clicks, usage of advanced tooling (filters, lenses, etc), visualizations, etc will lose out because they are getting farther and farther from the core problem a user has - "find me x". this is the thing that is driving the hero/knowledge units on Google, further cementing their leadership

4) the one brightspot - verticalized search intent is a huge area of untapped potential in the search arena. Google is great at general search (and honestly also at a huge number of verticals that it's developed over time), but there are many verticals that google honestly sucks at. I do believe there is a potential entrypoint here for a "new google" if they can take on a vertical-by-vertical expansion strategy. Owning the intent entrypoint would still be as important as ever, but this play would look a lot like the early Yelp vertical expansion strategy from the early 2000s. It's anybody's guess what the actual right starting vertical and entrypoint match is though

tl;dr Google won't go down easy, and a Google killer may actually look incredibly similar to Google in it's end-state

Or there just may be demand for walled gardens that are better kept

> Reddit's own search has become less reliable

Not sure what you mean... It's always been an absolute pile of shit

Tech power users (and power users in general I would say) might have more money to throw at the problem. "Nicheness" isn't necessarily a bad thing if your niche is profitable. I heard somewhere that power-grid-scale transformers are have insanely long lead times so the industry most be pretty niche (when's the last time you needed one of those?) and yet I think we can all agree that the equipment is valuable and I bet those manufacturers are making bank.

This would be easily exploitable by a competitor. For example, search engines (used to) rank back links - that is other domains pointing to your domain. Some bad actors took advantage of this by creating rings of sites that voted each other up. Google responded by punishing the behavior. Then, competitors started taking advantage of this punishment by creating a network of sites that backlinked to a competitor, so they would get punished instead.

This isn’t a hypothetical example - Google actually includes in their webmaster tools a “disavow links” capability so sites can avoid getting punished for bad actors trying to make them look bad. But you can imagine if the penalties were even more severe other folks may get caught up in an unforgiving dragnet with no judge or jury and no way to appeal.

My main point is that people will find ways to game the system, and usually sharp edges (“harsh punishments”) on any system will be taken advantage of by actors, and unfairly penalize others.