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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#411

Post by smitty1e »

technothrasher wrote: post #356
redmen wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not true I don't think. Anyone I watch older than 50 years old is constantly frustrated by google, they just don't know what's good, what's not. I think they use it because it's the "norm" and that is the only reason. And as far as everyone else.. I have no idea to be quite honest. I have a fairly big handful of non-techie friends who think google sucks but is good enough so there is no real incentive to change.…

> Anyone I watch older than 50 years old Hey, now wait a second there, you young whipper-snapper. I'm sitting here reading HN while I install Debian on an XCP-ng VM, and I hear I can't understand whether Google results are good or not? There are plenty of us over 50 that actually lived the early internet and watched it first-hand transform into what it is today.

Indeed, there was a time when Slashdot was as tech-heavy and full of learning as HN.

Re: The next Google

#412

Post by smitty1e »

bamboozled wrote: post #312
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.

Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ?

No, the point of amassing all of that pattern-of-life information is to pimp us to various customers.

Re: The next Google

#413

Post by magpi3 »

I look at statmuse.com and wikipedia: sites that provide DSS (domain specific search) for information as the anti-Googles. No one will replace Google, but a site that focuses on a narrow domain is extremely useful and is the one thing that pulls me away from Google.

Re: The next Google

#414

Post by ALittleLight »

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…

How could it possibly be only a few bucks to answer questions like this though? A human would have to be doing the research and writing for you. If that human is trying to answer a query a minute to earn a reasonable wage then your results are going to be rushed and poor. If the human takes enough time to find a good answer then the search will need to cost enough to make it worth the time of a skilled researcher.

I could see a "virtual assistant" version of this where you pay fifty dollars and send a request like "Reservations in Vegas for these dates at a hotel with good pool."

Re: The next Google

#415

Post by outloudvi »

Have tried Kagi for a while as a beta user. It generally works fine, but I am just reminded every time when I try to do a search via Private Browsing - and Kagi, a subscription service, will apparently ask me to login - that each of my search history will be able to be linked to an individual.

Then it's definitely not what I want.

Re: The next Google

#416

Post by ffwacom »

sytelus wrote: post #119

Next Google isn’t going to be index based search engine. Imagine a massive distributed neutral model which has digested billions of pages. The query isn’t going to be keyword-ish like “kids cough medicine” but rather question with all details like “what is least problematic over the counter good cough medicine for a 9 year old with asthma”. The results aren’t going to be bunch of links but rather aggregation, summary…

How could you trust the responses though.

Re: The next Google

#417

Post by chefandy »

idiotsecant wrote: post #100
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…

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.

Yep. Imagining nontechnical users would endure paths of greater resistance to avoid shady privacy and openness practices is magical thinking. Privacy and openness are important, but having tools designed to maximally reduce the overhead of solving your problems is more important.

I know I get on people's nerves on HN by harping on user needs and FOSS usability and interface design and such, but I think we as a group need to start taking user needs much more seriously. Open-source alternatives will always be alternatives until without taking usability and the overall experience seriously.

Many, if not most FOSS software developers choose some commercial tools— count how many MacOS and Windows laptops you see at OSCON or FOSDEM. Consider how different the cost/benefit analysis would be for people without the most basic requisite knowledge to reason about software problems, let alone troubleshoot, or throw in a PR to address them directly. Commercial companies don't get these seamless experiences by magic— it involves research, design, development and testing to deliberately remove friction and stumbling blocks rather than assuming your use case is universal, or that docs are a suitable replacement for fixing usability problems. There's nothing stopping any open source project from doing any of it. Volunteering isn't unique to coding— people volunteer to cook and build houses and clean up trash, too. But developers run FOSS and developers need to deliberately incorporate those other perspectives into their projects to get the benefit.

Re: The next Google

#418

Post by calvinmorrison »

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…

my first site was on geocities i made with a sort of pagebuilder inside yahoo on a crummy hand me down... i didn't know what 'programming' even was.

Why is publishing documents so complex now?

my site is all html, why not.

Re: The next Google

#419

Post by aghilmort »

polote wrote: post #96

None of the examples explained here impress me (with maybe the exception of Goggles by brave search). - The first example is not much more than Google with a styling chrome extension - The second doesnt bring anything more than Google when you are searching about webcontent. Some ideas on filters are interesting but this is not user friendly - You is powered by AI, so it is basicaly giving not what you want except wh…

we're attempting to build out content curation for search at Breeze

in some cases, those results are baked into the core search experience, e.g., click news or recipes on main search at https://breezethat.com

in other cases, we're doing stand-alone drops as we experiment with different curation &/or technical challenges for different topics:

- college scholarships -- wide quality variance, https://breezethat.com/b/scholarships

- golf expert -- sheer breadth of websites, https://breezethat.com/x/demo-golf-search

- gender filter -- getting the dials just right, https://breezethat.com/p/gender-filter-beta

while it is the case that we're doing curation internally at the moment, we fully expect to open that up in some way as we scale; that will likely be after our next release to (1) fix our really awful mobile UX and (2) to deploy some version of our time filter, which is a core part of our thesis about easily tracking topics over time, e.g., this thread with some March Madness examples, https://twitter.com/HeyBreezeThat/status/1511397583209570311

Re: The next Google

#420

Post by quintushoratius »

smitty1e wrote: post #410
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.

> 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!

In an age of free SSL/TLS certificates, and built-in support in pretty much anything, is this really true? Making your content available via port 443 really isn't impeding anything at all.
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