Kagi keeps showing up here, perhaps check that out.
Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
11–20 of 332 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#12They would need to be Apple, they would need to understand how to write software for this purpose and then deliver it, and they would need to be able to make this the default search engine for iPhones without antimonopoly distractions.
Beyond that, Google’s dominance isn’t going away due to their own “monopoly-like” positioning, their business relationships, the inertia of their massive public adoption, all of these applied within three or four other vital areas (ie: YouTube), their ability to pivot in response to anything novel that appeared to undermine their position, no apparent stories of Google executives hosting puppy kicking parties for the entire company to Satanic Panic everyone away from their products, the problem of promising companies being acquired because the owners (VC or founder or otherwise) are happy to be bought, the general “ick” factor of someone like Facebook attempting to enter the fray, some other things none of us have ever considered, random luck, and the initial conditions of the universe.
You have to have good results against the inconceivably vast amount of content out there, you have to be easy to use, you have to be free, and you have to be able to do all of this and more for the yeeeeeears it would take to wiggle into the space and expand while resisting the pressures above. Doable, wildly improbable.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#13First you need to ask, why everywo is using Google: Habits and ignorance. The casual web user is just fine with what Google has to offer. And besides that: Google is convenient and everywhere. To get rid of it it requires not only the will but also the technological skill that the common user just does not have. And that leads to the answer of your question: Create an alternative that is easy to use,ofcourse, that ca…
So why did everyone start using Google when before that everyone had been using Yahoo or AltaVista?
Because Google at the time was a dramatically better experience than AltaVista, and Yahoo was more of a directory than a search engine.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#14>, what would a competitor need to defy Google?
One thing a competitor needs is a new and innovative technical algorithm.
Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting back links instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This created a noticeable improvement in quality of results.
Nobody seems to have The Next Big Idea for a better search engine yet. Somebody did a Shown HN of a new search engine based on whitelisted curated domains such as reddit discussions. But there are many technical problems with that (e.g. Goodhart's Law & Hawthorne Effect creates bad feedback loop of gaming the reddit discussions which then poisons the search engine.)
Another technical idea of crowdsourced decentralized search index creates a very slow query engine which is a hard sell when web surfers are used to Google results appearing in less than 1 second.
DDG's idea of "privacy" is interesting, but being (mostly) based on Microsoft Bing's search engine doesn't actually create a quantum leap in better search results.
What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good signal from all the noise of a trillion web pages?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#15Because google's search engine is still better than all of its current competitors and the barriers to entry are extremely high.
It used to be, at least. As years pass, Google's search quality deteriorates. It's been quite dramatic in the last few years especially - I won't pretend to know why.
A lot of it started happening when they took away the ability to search for exact terms, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#16Google's competitor in what? As far as search goes they pay billions to device manufacturers and software vendors to have Google as default search everything, how would you compete with this? The actual search functionality, its speed, intuitiveness, etc. of any competitor is irrelevant.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#17No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#18They would need to be Apple, they would need to understand how to write software for this purpose and then deliver it, and they would need to be able to make this the default search engine for iPhones without antimonopoly distractions. Beyond that, Google’s dominance isn’t going away due to their own “monopoly-like” positioning, their business relationships, the inertia of their massive public adoption, all of these…
Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning market.
However, I guess big tech companies have become part of the superpower games (USA vs. China etc.). Breaking up Google might just mean a Chinese company takes over. Can't trust the other governments to enforce similar market conditions.
So yeah, like you said, conditions of the universe :)
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#19Because nobody is writing good benchmarks for search engines. You can't improve something if you can't see what you're doing.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#20The complaints regarding google's quality isn't because google is being bad or doing something anti-consumer it's just that spam and ranking has become harder and harder over time. A new competitor wouldn't be free from those issues.