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Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

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Re: Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

#291

Post by nprateem »

n_ary wrote: post #244
nprateem wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed out the only thing that's actually important: give users a compelling reason to use your site over Google. Google's dominance will never be upended by an incremental improvement.

How do you let the 99.999% of the population know that your site is better? I have seen friends and family now directly search in FB, if it does not return anything satisfactory, they open the very default browser that came with their device and type the query in the address bar, now whatever the default search engine is on their device that came preset gets the traffic. Only people I saw manually typing the url are…

This is backwards. The first step is innovating and creating a radically better search experience. This is then easy to market (and is likely to spread by word of mouth). Users love and it becomes the main way they search.

Eg see how chatgpt grew

Re: Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

#292

Post by kbolino »

carlosjobim wrote: post #252
kbolino wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google got big when being a dot-com URL meant something and the primary way the average person accessed the Internet was through a desktop PC. Neither of those things is true anymore.

That's why you got to have an app. People install more apps than ever before, it's completely normal.

I don't think people associate search with an app. Search is something built in to the operating system or browser (a distinction which is disappearing too).

Re: Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

#294

Post by immibis »

unionpivo wrote: post #287
immibis wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking too much by the rules. You can absolutely scrape them anyway. Probably the biggest relevant factor is CGNAT and other technologies that make you blend in with a crowd. If I run a scraper on my cellphone hotspot, the site can't block me without blocking a quarter of all cellphones in the country. If the site is less aggressively blocking but only has a per-IP rate limit, buy a subscription to one of th…

> You're thinking too much by the rules. You can absolutely scrape them anyway. Probably the biggest relevant factor is CGNAT and other technologies that make you blend in with a crowd. If I run a scraper on my cellphone hotspot, the site can't block me without blocking a quarter of all cellphones in the country. I am familiar with most of that, and there is a BIG difference between trying to find a workaround for on…

There are many rationalizations to not try.

Re: Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

#295

Post by carlosjobim »

kbolino wrote: post #292
carlosjobim wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you got to have an app. People install more apps than ever before, it's completely normal.

I don't think people associate search with an app. Search is something built in to the operating system or browser (a distinction which is disappearing too).

People use apps more than they use a browser. It's not a big deal to reform search to be an app, it will be natural. People listen to podcasts without knowing anything about mp3 files or file systems, they edit and upload their photos without knowing about jpegs, etc.

Re: Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

#296

Post by pphysch »

rustcleaner wrote: post #284
pphysch wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best way to stop SEO is to build a bot which detects commercial activity on the page (and/or availability of cart/payment controls), and commercial language in the text of the page (does the content look like an ad or product/sales page). Thanks for describing the detection algorithm, I will now design my spam sites to defeat it. This is how SEO works. There are no silver bullets.

All you can do is poison my results with garbage which won't make you money, which means you are paying out to do that.

What do you mean? My pages will return obfuscated JS (or WASM) that render into regular-looking commercial features and links, but only if you have applicable headers. So you need a highly sophisticated visual analysis engine, with potentially multiple spoofed Header passes per page, to catch anything. Doesn't sound cheap to scale.

Re: Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

#298

Post by BrendanEich »

prophesi wrote: post #80
onli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave search is a continuation of cliqz. A German company that developed a proper search engine, with an independent index. They shut down, but the tech got sold off. Cliqz was the first time for me that a Google alternative actually worked really well - and it, or now brave search, is what parent was asking for :)

Yet we're still back to Larry Page and Sergey Brin's conclusion in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" research paper[0]: > We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Brave Search Premium hasn't been around nearly as long as their free tier serving ads, and I'm not confident this conflict…

Brave Search Premium launched before we showed any search ads:

https://x.com/brave/status/1466510541128548362

Re: Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

#299

Post by z3ncyberpunk »

arnaudsm wrote: post #4

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…

Damn must be nice to be rich enough to be able to casually have 100TB of space for such projects.
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