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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#391
post #369

I wonder how feasible would it be to index everything locally? I mean how far are we from having the cpu and storage space to allow a search within our computers? Do we really need to store everything ? Maybe a local "ai magic" could select the specific information we regularly search for and sync from an open public index. In the case we need results it could sync and/or request those bits we are not indexing locall…

Good q. Totally feasible imho, and I used to help build the goog search engine! :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia 20GB, which is tiny these days. Fits on a $10 USB key. I think with some of that AI magic we'll soon be in a situation where most of the traditional (non-proprietary) human knowledge you ever need (text, images, 3d models of machines, anatomy, etc.) will be immediately accessibl…

Sounds really good.

I hope the open source community can come up with a solution for this. Maybe there are already projects with this goal, if not someone should start it.

It will improve our collective knowledge and at times like this were disinformation is really high we need technology/tools to reduce it

Re: The next Google

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's because Reddit is one of the few places left on the web that is open (aka: not a walled-garden like Facebook) and has people talking to people without financial incentive. HN is another. Reddit is changing fast though. It's becoming more walled-off every day as they push to become the next Pinterest, and it's increasingly plagued with spam and bad actors. Google brought this upon us by lifting SEO spam website…

Reddit is still fine on smaller, more niche subs. The larger they are, the more painful it gets though.

Re: The next Google

#393
> You can change everything, from surface level appearances, to the final ranking of results.

People don’t want this. My first boss told me he would bet on regular TV if only streaming was left. He didn’t account for recommendation algorithms, so it’s easy to prove him wrong. But the takeaway here is that people prefer things working for them out of the box. That’s the secret to Apple’s or Google’s success: It just works.

Just works can mean that you’ll get “some” search results or a TV show that matches your preferences.

Almost nobody would like to put effort into customizing their experience.

Google provides “good” search results for a majority of users. From a business perspective it would be a wrong decision to enable customization for a neglectible fraction of users if the vast majority just want to “consume”.

Re: The next Google

#394

Know how you’ll find the next Google? Same way those of us over 45 found this one. A respected friend or colleague will tell you that the next Google just works better. That’s what made Google search win: it just worked better. It’s now I found out about it and probably how you did if you’re pushing 50. We didn’t care about pagerank or know what it is. That came after we used it and wanted to know why it worked bette…

I can still visualize a memory from my high school library, when my friend showed me Google search for the first time. I think I had been using Dogpile.

Re: The next Google

#395
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I visited my mom in Romania, I was amazed that hair dressers filled *exactly this purpose*. It almost felt like you were "Googling" for 30 minutes and getting a haircut as a side-effect. Customer: How is the newly opened Spa? Hair dresser: Other customers said the water was cold.

Not limited to Romania. Librarians are also pretty fabulous for local information and free.

this is so true! when i first moved to the USA, a librarian in austin texas was so incredibly helpful to me in sorting out/understanding the "i've just moved to the USA" process. i knew not even a handful of people and she was so selfless and generous in her efforts to help me navigate pre-web then-INS and TX state bureaucracy as a 0day new person here.

Re: The next Google

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Get rid of that noise and your hardware goes a lot longer. What qualifies? What defines signal, what noise? I agree, that a lot (probably nearly all) pages will receive very, very little traffic/search requests. But are these therefore not relevant? > I'm running a search engine on consumer hardware out of my living room that can index 100 million documents. That's extremely cool. I would love to know more. To me a…

You should try looking at people's profiles on HN - just click on the username.

Re: The next Google

#397
so difficult to find on that page if their search is powered by google or bing or wtv beneath.

if your advertisement for your search engine is not easily searchable, then...

I also don't want to customize anything anymore. I stopped playing RPGs, and I don't wanna RPG my engines too.

Re: The next Google

#398

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…

The future is trust networks. Where you trust a number of friends, who trust other people, etc. and you can use a matrix of trust to retrieve review scores, etc. Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the reviews from other HN users ...

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Re: The next Google

#399

The perfect search engine would be powered by humans with a search engine. Google is fantastic but there is no human understanding of the needs and wants that can be conveyed through series of keywords. For example when I type "best humidifiers" I want a suggestion that is ideally based on accurate anecdotes of people who've experienced a brand in a variety of context and edge cases. What google gives me is a cnet ar…

shout out to the travesty that was calacanis' mahalo.com[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com

Re: The next Google

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough I'm not sure that's true. Just to pick an example, basically any type of product search now leads to auto-generated spam/borderline-spam websites that scrape reviews from Amazon, which are themselves often fraudulent. I guess you could say that's "good enough" but only in the sense that someone being scammed at some point consents to something that makes them a…

DuckDuckGo is horrendous for spam and malware distribution. I have stopped recommending it to non-technical people because they can't recognize the obviously evil/bad-pattern sites that are on the first page of many DDG searches I do

What are you searching for?
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