I've been using Kagi as my default search engine on my phone to test it out. Honestly, it just doesn't hit the convenience mark. when I search for a restaurant + hours, Google shows the hours in a card at the top of the results. Kagi can't or doesn't do that, and often doesn't even find the restaurant. I haven't used DDG so I'm not sure if they're similar, but for the average user Google just consistently hits the mark (of convenience)
Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
131–140 of 332 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does work. In the past when I mentioned it, someone provided an apparent counterexample, a search with a term in quotes that wasn't found on the page. When I reported it to the search team, they found that the quoted term was actually in a hidden submenu on the site. So the term was still on the page, but not findable with ctrl-f, except in the source. Try it out and if you find a counterexample, let us all know.
Okay, I had this issue today and looked it up. Sure enough the term I had to quote and add a plus sign infront of was in the linked page after clicking through. But that's it, it was just "there" near the bottom. They put in all this fancy AI understanding and ML and NLP effort but when I go out of my way to tell the search that "this word right here is super important and critical", they just go ahead and append "pa…
The problem would be that you probably wouldn't want to exclude the page from the results in case people expect to find it. Did the page get ranked above other more relevant pages that had the quoted term more prominently? If it did, you're right, that should probably be a stronger signal.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#133Ultimately I think it’s because the internet is just too big! Google were only able to do it because they had the right algorithm early in the age of the internet. They were then able to grow with it to achieve the scale required. Starting from scratch now on a general internet search engine would be close to impossible without 10s, if not 100s, billions of investment. And you would need that to build the index befor…
There is an opportunity for niche applications. I would like a search engine that only indexes discussion forums. These are hard to surface on the SEO driven major search providers.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a potential technical improvement with Vector Search. Specially for the type of queries that are more “human” (“how do I…”, “where can I…”. At least for me, I find myself adding “site:Reddit.com” all the time I need a good answer and not just a SEO-tricked ad page. Vector Search could be a technical solution for this. Although it’s fairly new and there is still a lot of research to do.
I like the idea of "crowd sourcing". When the SEO-tricked ad pages come up and I either scroll past them or, if I do click on them but come right back to the search results and continue scrolling/clicking ... rank downward those brief or passed-over links. Seems like with enough actual humans I should never have to see another geeksforgeeks page come up in my search results.
Heh,
Geeks for geeks wasn't that bad when I frequented it a few years back.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#135They 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 :)
You could discourage them from buying out smaller competitors en Masse.
In my mind it shouldn't make sense to found a company with the explicit goal of being purchased by one of the tech giants in a few years.
Many are never even really trying to get s sustainable business model and venture capital is fueling this machine.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#136DDG simply needs to raise awareness that they have a good enough alternative that most people would be happy with if only they knew it existed.
DDG is just a Bing front-end/proxy. They do not have their own crawlers.
If microsoft quit search for some reason, DDG would go away with them.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your post is key. I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google. Pretty much the one company that has done it at scale (Microsoft) isn't exactly eating Google's lunch (though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better). It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to challenge Google at generic Internet search, and the few organizat…
Surely the only viable path to challenging Google is to own the web browser. Most users will use the default search engine.
I don’t know about “only” path but not sure why this is downvoted as it’s a valid point of view.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your post is key. I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google. Pretty much the one company that has done it at scale (Microsoft) isn't exactly eating Google's lunch (though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better). It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to challenge Google at generic Internet search, and the few organizat…
> Even in niche areas, I think it's still an enormous task to challenge Google. Despite the fact that 90% of my searches for "WTF does this stacktrace mean?" end up on StackOverflow, I invariably start my search on Google because every now and then it gives me useful non-StackOverflow tidbits, and I know I can always drill in more with specific tags on StackOverflow later. It's telling, that a Google search scoped to…
I guess the motivation is low as I frequently have to do this it seems.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#139Ultimately I think it’s because the internet is just too big! Google were only able to do it because they had the right algorithm early in the age of the internet. They were then able to grow with it to achieve the scale required. Starting from scratch now on a general internet search engine would be close to impossible without 10s, if not 100s, billions of investment. And you would need that to build the index befor…
I think your post is key. I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google. Pretty much the one company that has done it at scale (Microsoft) isn't exactly eating Google's lunch (though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better). It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to challenge Google at generic Internet search, and the few organizat…
> I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google.
You only search whitelisted sites, which removes a lot of the SEO and blogspam from the results, and makes the index is wildly smaller. Search is free, but users can also pay a cheap subscription for the ability to flag sites as spammy, submit sites they think are missing, and submit queries the site has trouble with. Someone manually goes through the top N most-repeated submissions each day (early on this is all of them) and determines whether to tweak the whitelist.
Because your initial audience has to be people who are very enthusiastic about better search results, you should identify what they're interested in and focus your efforts on initial whitelists to things they care about. That might be technical questions (MDN StackOverflow, every random framework's docs site), or maybe whatever it is journalists would want to have access to (I'm not qualified to answer).
I don't think VC-encouraged hypergrowth is possible with the above strategy, but you could probably get to ramen profitable in a reasonable time frame, with slow growth ever after.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?
#140So I agree that the quality of Google search is declining, but long story short the others are still worse (IMHO obviously).
I tried DDG for a couple of weeks and it was just awful. For almost all non-trivial searches i had to result to !g. I finally switched back after two weeks or so and suddenly I'm much happier with the quality of Google search results.
Obviously this is just one man's opinion.
I think the technical challenges are big enough to make this a really difficult task.