Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The next Google

dkb.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 561 posts

Re: The next Google

#401

Post by manigandham »

user3939382 wrote: post #332
baxtr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about. That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.

> 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…

What exactly is Google supposed to do here? They're returning what's available. Beyond that it goes from search engine to active curation and recommendation - and they are actively moving in that direction by replacing results with "answers", which I find to be much worse.

Re: The next Google

#402

Post by ipaddr »

joneholland wrote: post #386
kovac wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't elitism. It's competence. A system designed by competent users for competent users are going to be different from one made for general masses. There's nothing elitist about that.

What defines competence?

Ability to use booleans and quotes in a standard search.

Re: The next Google

#403

Post by rschroed »

randmeerkat wrote: post #351
baxtr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about. That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.

> That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough. I’m sure that’s what Yahoo! used to think about Google before Google replaced it.

not us yahoo / Altavista / or whatever else was around at the time users. Google was so clearly better right out of the gate that I distinctly remember having conversations conveying the shock and awe at the quality of the results. Before Google everything was mediocre at best.

I’d say the for the bulk of Google’s visitors the results aren’t merely good enough, they’re insanely great.

Now, that said, the G monopoly is horrible and needs to die.

Re: The next Google

#404

Post by henning »

> We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before.

No we don't. Google needs to go back to what made it successful: showing web pages that have the words you search for, untainted by SEO shit.

Re: The next Google

#405

Post by ipaddr »

nmstoker wrote: post #381
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"High barrier to entry" ie, only accessible to an elite class (1337, if you will) "Elitist" feels pejorative. Also a not-inaccurate way to describe a system which presents high barriers to entry.

What were these high barriers to entry? Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines. Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field. Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyo…

When I started all modem calls required remembering 'atdt'

When netscape came out if you were lucky to have ppp access setting it up on windows 3.1 was difficult but once you were up as long as no one picked up the phone you were fine.

But even this was too difficult for the average person who lived in an aol world where the internet was limited to aol.

Re: The next Google

#407

Post by sam0x17 »

guntars wrote: post #166
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…

> 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

All the more reason for any serious competitor to try to do it themselves, yet no one does.

Re: The next Google

#408

Post by ehnto »

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…

"Word for a bad scientist" gives me results as if I had searched for "Mad scientists fun stories", and it wasn't even offered as a correction. Google can't even accept that I'm typing the word I want anymore, I must surely want something else.

Re: The next Google

#409

Post by russellendicott »

manigandham wrote: post #401
user3939382 wrote: post #332

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…

What exactly is Google supposed to do here? They're returning what's available. Beyond that it goes from search engine to active curation and recommendation - and they are actively moving in that direction by replacing results with "answers", which I find to be much worse.

Nothing, really. It's the "what's available" that's the problem. Quality paid services can't gain market share because free is a anticompetitive. Consumers will almost always choose it if it's not complete garbage. This throws all the metrics off for search because quality paid services become a statistical anomaly.

Re: The next Google

#410

Post by smitty1e »

baxtr wrote: post #225
idiotsecant wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death of the web is because most people don't want what you want. They don't mind walled gardens, so long as they are easy to use and have the content and connections that they want to see. The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market wants.

This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about. That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.

> This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online.

That's an excellent demographic point.

A counter-argument is that the move from port 80 to port 443 is the elitist drift. Instead of innocently putting information out there and sharing in an egalitarian fashion, we now have certificates and gatekeepers and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Post reply on HN