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The next Google

dkb.io

141–150 of 561 posts

Re: The next Google

#141

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…

"best x in vegas" + reddit

Duh.

Re: The next Google

#142
There's an opportunity for helping with enterprise data. There's:

- Files (Box/DropBox/Google Drive/SharePoint)

- Static(ish) Pages (Wikis/internal CMS's/Actual websites hosted on some random nginx/apache)

- Web Apps (eg Internal Learning Platforms or helper HR apps or whatever)

- Chat (Slack/Discord/Teams/??)

- Email

- Files stored on my actual laptop

- Source Control (eg GitHub/GitLab/whatever ... which have their own wikis/pages/content)

Is it just me? Anyone else feel like finding something across the above mediums is difficult?

Re: The next Google

#145
Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi has done a great job of solving some of the UX and privacy problems endemic in online search these days, but at the end of the day they could be snuffed out at the whim of the big search providers (Google, Bing) if they decide to kick them off until they can get their own indexing solution off the ground. If an alternative search engine reached Bing's level of popularity, this would undoubtedly happen.

The same goes for DuckDuckGo and others. All of the above use the Bing search API for the majority of their web results which for most use cases is not economically sustainable.

I do think there is a large swath of users who will pay a subscription for a truly great search engine offering, but indexing has to be at the core of this offering, at least for me. If users realized this is just Bing results with a few enhancements and additional result sources mixed in, they might not be as willing to pay for what they could technically get for free elsewhere, albeit with significantly less privacy.

That said I wish Kagi all the luck in the world. As the original dev who planned out and built the initial backend implementation in Crystal and put together their early engineering team, I can at least say they are building on rock-solid, very fast and privacy-oriented foundations, and this is a truly web-scale product in terms of the infrastructure design.

Re: The next Google

#146

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…

There used to be a search engine in the mid 2000s that was just like this. It was called ChaCha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)

Yep. That was the idea. 'voice assistants' came along, smart phones took off, and cell speeds became fast enough to make ChaCha untenable.

Source: worked at ChaCha.

Re: The next Google

#147

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…

There's a certain type of person who loves buttons and knobs. They're also the same sort of person who might decide to make a new search engine. But yeah, more knobs is definitely not something the market is asking for.

Re: The next Google

#148

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…

Most people don't want to tinker if they can avoid it, but many will come to appreciate the power of the advanced tab if and when they need it. These startups should take the "people are lazy" line of thinking to heart and make customization profiles easy to share, whether by direct link posted to Slack or a public customization "store" a la Chrome Web Store.

Re: The next Google

#149
post #85

These solutions don't answer any of the fundamental problems with Google: - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available) - how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades) - how to personalize without invading privacy, e.g. Google had an option to search through your email in Google search...it's gone now, I won…

I do think there's actually some space opening up for paid services. From what I'm seeing, if you could create a bot free eco system, people will pay for it. The question is "can you make it bot free". This is gonna be the next trillion dollar company.

Raising the cost of spam would be a good first step.

At the moment, spamming Google seems to be trivial with no long-term penalties if you get caught doing something nasty.

A simple rule (manually enforced on a case-by-case basis) that would ban your brand/domain for a year if you get caught breaking the rules would get Pinterest into compliance from day 1 for example.

Using ads/analytics/affiliate links as a negative ranking signal would make a lot of blogspam/listicles/clickbait disappear if their only funding method immediately makes them rank much lower below where they are no longer profitable.

Re: The next Google

#150

These solutions don't answer any of the fundamental problems with Google: - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available) - how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades) - how to personalize without invading privacy, e.g. Google had an option to search through your email in Google search...it's gone now, I won…

> - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available) - how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades) The solution for o both of these might actually be a paid service. If you have a paid service, there is a possibility of it being profitable with much fewer users. As an example, let’s say you have 1,000,000 users…

It will still pay to put ads in to paying customer's feeds. It's more or less inevitable if the customers tolerate it. If you think that's impossible I'd point to how streaming services are now serving up ever more adds.
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