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

531–540 of 561 posts

Re: The next Google

#531

Post by evandale »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #198
chrisshroba wrote: post #120

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…

I have found that this only works if you take recommendations with the understanding that you're almost always getting "the reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated thing, and have bonded over that to the point that other recommendations between each other are heavily weighted and rapidly creates a "go to" response. Example: check r/sandiego fo…

>... "the reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated thing

One way to stop this is sort by controversial. It allows you to see what the hivemind votes down at the top.

I also find city subreddits can be much more polarizing and needing controversial sort vs interest subreddits. The only common thing city subreddits share is geography so you get wildly different opinions which controversial sort helps with. The subreddits dedicated to an interest are much more susceptible to the reddit answer.

The other option is search for an /r/askvegas or similar -- if a city subreddit has a dedicated subreddit for questions you can usually get better answers on the asking subreddit, but they are closer to the reddit answer than a general city subreddit will give you.

Re: The next Google

#532

Post by grae_QED »

-$5 or less a month -simple web interface -accurate results -privacy oriented -NO ADS

That's all I want from a search engine. I don't care about shopping or maps or any of the other 'features' all of these alternative are trying to implement. I want a gnu style search engine. I want something that "does one thing, and does it well," and I want that one thing to be 'search.'

Re: The next Google

#533

Post by theiz »

thesuitonym wrote: post #282
theiz wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably because the AI thinks it is better to ignore your input because it can be profitable to give you the Pinterest results.

Re: The next Google

#534

Post by mrkramer »

Long story short of Google's rise and "fall" in quality:

Altavista was dominant internet search engine in the 1990s but search quality was bad compared to what could've be done.

Google figured out machine learning was the key to success e.g. PageRank.

Google got incorporated in 1998.

Good leadership(Larry, Sergey and Schmidt) and vivid vision propelled Google to 90% of market share in search.

World Wide Web was drastically smaller two decades and one decade ago and Google was still able to "handle" it with already established machine learning algorithms.

Fast forward to today World Wide Web is zettabytes big and not even Google can rank it "reasonably" and efficiently. Google doesn't care that much about search quality anymore because they have 90% market share in search, billions flowing in ad revenue plus 99 other projects they need to manage and develop.

Re: The next Google

#535

Post by mrkramer »

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…

>I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.

You are wrong; Open Web died or almost died because of walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Billions of people who hang out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter would hang out instead on Open Web e.g. websites, blogs, forums etc. if walled gardens didn't exist.

Re: The next Google

#536

Post by mrkramer »

Soupy wrote: post #172

> 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 G…

I agree with you in so many ways. Lucid and illuminating post.

Re: The next Google

#537

Post by smitty1e »

quintushoratius wrote: post #420
smitty1e wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Except that there is now massive additional complexity that is both fragile and tricky.

Re: The next Google

#538

Post by richardsocher »

enoch2090 wrote: post #496

I’ve tried with Neeva, and to be honest, even put aside the potential privacy problems, it just doesn’t work. The quality of search results is notably poorer than Google. I used it for a dozen of PyTorch & Numpy related queries, and a dozen more on convex optimization maths. I often find that it can’t find the right answer for me. It’s really a pity because I quite like it’s feature to search information from connect…

Would love your thoughts on some random queries based on what you said for you.com, eg. https://you.com/search?q=implement%20interior%20point%20meth...

https://you.com/search?q=numpy+array+filter+elements+python - results include AI writing code, StackOverflow, Arxiv papers etc.

Re: The next Google

#539

Post by dflock »

sdoering wrote: post #446
dflock wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why? I don't change my reply based on the author. I reply to a statement to the best of my knowledge regardless of the author behind it. And I learned already a lot in this thread after the explanations unfolded. The initial statement sounded exactly like the armchair "experts" one so often encounters. Actually this was for a long time the first time that there is a person with substantial experience in the problem s…

> The initial statement sounded exactly like the armchair "experts" one so often encounters.

Maybe - but [marginalia_nu](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marginalia_nu) isn't an armchair expert - they've actually implemented theor own publically available search engine - which is linked in their profile.

Re: The next Google

#540

Post by sdoering »

dflock wrote: post #539
sdoering wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I don't change my reply based on the author. I reply to a statement to the best of my knowledge regardless of the author behind it. And I learned already a lot in this thread after the explanations unfolded. The initial statement sounded exactly like the armchair "experts" one so often encounters. Actually this was for a long time the first time that there is a person with substantial experience in the problem s…

> The initial statement sounded exactly like the armchair "experts" one so often encounters. Maybe - but [marginalia_nu]( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marginalia_nu ) isn't an armchair expert - they've actually implemented theor own publically available search engine - which is linked in their profile.

I didn't say they are. Only that the initial comment sounded like that. And in the thread above we discussed a bit about their achievements. I really liked it and learned a lot.
Post reply on HN