101–110 of 299 posts
For me, it seems the direction for search is going towards AI sites. (Gemini, ChatGPT) Trying to reinvent Google/ Search in 2024 seems a bit like jumping the shark
Sure, garbage tier searches will be done LLM style. But few smart people might be bored with that, and pay for something better.
If someone is going to disrupt Google, it's because they've cut out the middleman that is search results and simply give you what you're asking for. ChatGPT and Perplexity are doing the best here so far afaik
Qwant used to pretend being a champion of privacy, a "french made" tech, but with a search engine mostly based on Bing, lobbying with Microsoft against our interests, and with a boss sucking as much public funding as possible to finance luxury HQ locations and lavish cars...
Qwant collapsed and was sold, but now it is just a mediocre ghost product trying to capitalize on a stained branding and on being a French/european alternative.
Every new search engine I've seen was a Bing wrapper with sometimes light reranking. I understand that competing with Google was borderline impossible a decade ago. But in 2024, we have cheap compute, great OSS distributed DBs, powerful new vector search tech. Amateur search engines like Marginalia even run on consumer hardware. CommonCrawl text-only is ~100TB, and can fit on my home server. Why is no company buildin…
>competing with Google was borderline impossible a decade ago. But in 2024, we have cheap compute, great OSS distributed DBs, powerful new vector search tech. [...] CommonCrawl text-only is ~100TB, Those example 3 bullet points of today's improved 2024 computing power you list isn't even enough to process Google's scale 14 years ago in 2010 when the search index was 100+ petabytes : https://googleblog.blogspot.com/20…
There is no open web anymore. Google killed it. There are probably fewer than 100k useful websites in the world now. Which is good for startups, because the problem is entirely tractable.
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You don't have to match Google's technical prowess if that capability is being superceded by MBAs doing aggressive enshittification.
You'd be surprised how long it takes to enshittify a piece of tech as well established as Google. The MBAs may be trying but there are still a lot of dedicated folks deep in the org holding out.
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Kagi is also building their own index at the background, and mixes these indexes as you search. When I search Kagi for "Hacker News", results start with this fine text: 65 relevant results in 1.09s. 47% unique Kagi results. So, other indexes are fillers for Kagi's own index. They can't target their bots to places, because they don't have the users' search history. They can only organically grow and process what they…
How is it possible that a search for "Hacker News" produces only 65 results? There are thousands of pages out there with that exact phrase on it (including many sub-pages of this site). The first result is almost assuredly the right one, but either they're ruling out a lot of pages as not-what-you-meant, or their index is really small.
Kagi reduces mental load by default, and this is a good thing.
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I think the problem with search is that while it's relatively doable to build something that is competitive in one or a few niches, Google's real sticking power is how broad their offering is. Google search has seamless integration with maps, with commercial directories, with translation, with their browser, with youtube, etc. Even though there's more than a few queries they leave something to desire, the breadth of…
This is one of those things that I think is interesting about how "normal" people use the Internet. I am guessing they just always start with google. But for me, if I want to look up local restaurants, I go straight to Maps/Yelp/FourSquare(RIP). If I want to look up releases of a band, I go straight to musicbrainz. Info about Metal Band, straight to the Encyclopeadia Metallum. History/Facts, straight to Wikipedia. Re…
Don't believe a single second the marketing speech about these 2 engines, they are both total crap trying to gain users with whatever hype subject is around. Qwant used to pretend being a champion of privacy, a "french made" tech, but with a search engine mostly based on Bing, lobbying with Microsoft against our interests, and with a boss sucking as much public funding as possible to finance luxury HQ locations and l…