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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#281

Post by theiz »

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…

Google has these options, but these are solved by AI. So with that you come in a catch22: people want personalised content, but rather not have their data given away. If you open YouTube without login, you get all kind of rubbish so you want to login. Probably this is by design: you want what google wants: results based on your data. Both happy. Now if there was a privacy friendly way of doing this, I am all for using that. I just don’t see how, and I don’t see who wants not to gain a profit if you would have that data. So the next google probably is another google.

Re: The next Google

#282

Post by thesuitonym »

theiz wrote: post #281
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…

Google has these options, but these are solved by AI. So with that you come in a catch22: people want personalised content, but rather not have their data given away. If you open YouTube without login, you get all kind of rubbish so you want to login. Probably this is by design: you want what google wants: results based on your data. Both happy. Now if there was a privacy friendly way of doing this, I am all for usin…

If Google has these options, why can't I search for any image and have it not return any Pinterest results? If I search with -site:pinterest.com, I get Pinterest's million alternate tlds, if I just search for -pinterest, Google decides, in their infinite wisdom, that I didn't actually mean that and ignores it.

Re: The next Google

#283

Post by Sebb767 »

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…

> 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.

And that's great if it works! The problem is that once it fails (and, at least in my use-case, it does so quite often), working with it becomes an absolute pain.

I, too, would prefer an omniscient box perfectly answering my questions. But it clearly doesn't exist. And a box with screws to adjust so that I can eventually find what I'm looking for is the second best thing.

Re: The next Google

#284

Post by twobitshifter »

darinf wrote: post #81
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…

To be fair to Google, they do have the I’m feeling lucky button, which will take you directly to Amazon (example from the article) rather than showing you links.

Re: The next Google

#285

Post by taosx »

I too like many others feel that Google results have gone really bad in the last year which may be partially due to web pollution but the main issue is that I feel like google's search totally ignores my requests, a lot of times it even ignores exact matches using quotes.

If only we could get some sql-like powers in that simple input box. Maybe I'm not their target audience...who knows.

Re: The next Google

#286

Post by twobitshifter »

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.

Even if it’s not everyone or most people, you can still segment the market into power-users and others.

Re: The next Google

#287

Post by acatton »

bob1029 wrote: post #267

Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web crawler and building my own damn search engine from scratch. I can't ever come up with a hard reason it wouldnt work in 2022, other than the dynamic javascript blogspam that may be more challenging to trawl for meaningful content these days. Perhaps this is a win-win: The shit I can't crawl I wouldnt want to read anyways. Compete with google? Who gives a shit.…

(Disclaimer: I work for a big company which makes a browser, an OS for smartphones and a search engine. This is my own opinion, and does not reflect my employer, and so on, and so on…)

> Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web crawler and building my own damn search engine from scratch.

A few things:

* Storing the index. For example if I search for "Sushi", google says there is 1.3 Billion results. That's already 19.3 GiB just to store the relationship between "sushi" and its results. (If you use UUIDs) And you need to do that for most words in the english dictionnary. And I'm assuming you're not even storing what you crawl for debugging/re-indexing.

* Website admins might throttle you. For example, discourse — a website which runs most discussion for Rust, Ocaml, and many other projects — blocked the bingbot at some point[1] due to its crawling aggressivity. Cloudflare, which is the front-facing caching service for almost half of the internet now, is notoriously anti-crawling. (It will quickly display captchas)

* grep over the web will yield you bad results. (most of the time) You want a search engine which at least groups words semantically. If I search for horses, I'm usually also interested in mares and ponies.

[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/bingbot-is-no-longer-default-th...

Re: The next Google

#288

Post by celdon25 »

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…

It never fails to amaze me how many people, apparently triggered by these omens, come out and say this as if there was never such a thing as a default configuration. "But you MUST configure!" Um, no.

Google has preferences also.

Re: The next Google

#289

Post by polote »

dannywarner wrote: post #238
polote wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like the engine understand well the query, but for test searches it didnt show better results than Google, it actually gave me almost the same answers. So if they use their own index thats pretty good. But not the Next Google

You might be missing the point. Try a difficult question instead of a regular web search. Something like this. "Why did Twitter add Elon Musk to its board of directors, and what impact did that have on twitter's share price?" Then click on "View in Reader" on the results. This is not like Google dude. People on the Discord are trying crazy questions like that and reporting what it does good or bad on. It screws some…

I tested "What impact adding Elon Musk to Twitter board of directors had on twitter's share price" and I agree with you the result is much better that when you search the same thing on Google.

To be honest that's impressive for complex queries

Re: The next Google

#290

Post by Youden »

chrisshroba wrote: post #120
legohead wrote: post #98

I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple advice. I did a bunch of online research before I booked things, but man was it painful. There are so many copy-cat blogs who just throw together a bunch of basic information with no real research done in order to get those clicks/adwords. For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple e…

I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great actionable recommendations within an hour or two for: - good coffeeshops - tacos - Korean grocery stores - places that have traditional style al pastor tacos - finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store - finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe) - hot chicken - canolis and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you…

You need to be careful about reading the subreddit rules when you do this though. In my for-locals subreddit tourists asking questions like this were a plague, even when there was a very clear and prominent rule forbidding any kind of tourism content.

Also important to at least try searching at first. So many people thought they had a super original question but it'd really been asked and answered to death already.

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