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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#31

Post by Jyaif »

davidkunz wrote: post #9

> The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.

You want the information that you'll eventually get from visiting links, not the links themselves.

In fact often you don't even want the information, you just want to solve a problem. I don't know about you, but I don't like learning all about air conditioners and spending time finding the product available in my area with the highest quality/price ratio that fits into my budget. I just want the best air conditioner for me.

Re: The next Google

#32

Post by gotostatement »

> Everybody has different preferences of how they want a search engine to look and feel.

I will never ever ever ever spend time going into the settings of a search engine to customize my search experience. Not when Google does a good enough job for most of my tasks.

Re: The next Google

#33

Post by spaniard89277 »

focom wrote: post #21

> DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google. Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great.

I use it as daily driver and I wouldn't say DDG is great, but it's good enough definitely. I rarely use !g, like And I use it in two languages. Not bad.

For other results I find myself reaching to a bookmarked searx instance. I thought it just agreggates results but somehow it gives me different stuff.

And you also get magnet links :)

Re: The next Google

#34

Post by throw8383833jj »

My problem with google is that it often tries to figure out my search intent and then return results accordingly. the attempt might be commendable but for many types of searches they fail miserably. when they misread my search intent, the results are completely awful.

and to make matters worse, 95% or more of the web isn't even being shown to users and so I keep getting the same stupid search results: which is fine for many cases but not all cases. sometimes I need more than just another post by NBC.

I will say, google search is very good at technical searches, that's for sure. But, for example, they totally suck if you're looking information or doing research on financial matters or economics.

Re: The next Google

#35

Post by vasco »

amelius wrote: post #13

Search is the wrong way to look at it. It needs to answer questions, like an oracle. Anyway, Google is getting less relevant because the technology is getting better than "good enough", and any additional tech that Google adds is not really all that useful. It's like PCs. You don't need a faster one because your old one can do word processing just fine.

This depends on user preference and query. Some users want answers to a question, other users genuinely want to find websites.

If I search for "what's the weather now" I probably want to get an answer "like an oracle" as you say. But if I search for "riaa vs napster" I don't want an "oracle answer", I want a list of several websites so that I can learn more about the case. I'd like a search result for court documents, but also commentary from news websites and blogs, and maybe wikipedia. I want to open those tabs and come out the other way with more information, but there was no "oracle answer" to be provided.

Re: The next Google

#36

Post by kyrra »

masturbayeser wrote: post #19
qeternity wrote: post #10

> Everybody has different preferences of how they want a search engine to look and feel. This sounds like it was written by the infamous Dropbox commenter. No, most people have never given a single thought to this.

Quoted post unavailable.

By what data?

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

Android is 42% of the US market.

Re: The next Google

#37

Post by hubraumhugo »

Google won because they started early and had a right algorithm. They then had the scale to grow with the internet. It would be very hard to start a new general-purpose search engine now (capital, monopoly, tech)

Nobody seems to have The Next Big Idea for a better search engine yet.

Re: The next Google

#38

Post by skt5 »

Jyaif wrote: post #31
davidkunz wrote: post #9

> The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.

You want the information that you'll eventually get from visiting links, not the links themselves. In fact often you don't even want the information, you just want to solve a problem. I don't know about you, but I don't like learning all about air conditioners and spending time finding the product available in my area with the highest quality/price ratio that fits into my budget. I just want the best air conditioner…

To go a step further - you probably don't even care about having the best air conditioner. You probably just want to reliably feel cool when it's hot at a reasonable cost.

Re: The next Google

#39

Post by akvadrako »

Jyaif wrote: post #31
davidkunz wrote: post #9

> The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.

You want the information that you'll eventually get from visiting links, not the links themselves. In fact often you don't even want the information, you just want to solve a problem. I don't know about you, but I don't like learning all about air conditioners and spending time finding the product available in my area with the highest quality/price ratio that fits into my budget. I just want the best air conditioner…

There is no way you can trust an info box to give you that information.

Providing links is the only thing that scales, since you can delegate the aggregation work to specialists and you van verify the source.

Re: The next Google

#40

Post by mkmk3 »

_jal wrote: post #20
boomer918 wrote: post #12

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…

Also important for anyone actually thinking of taking Google on, very few of the features listed are things Google can't easily do, too. Attacking their strengths is crazy. You better have something both crazy good and hard to replicate by someone with more money than god. Whatever replaces Google will be doing something that Google can't without causing them other problems. The first thing that comes to mind is make…

I think this comment is a bit strange in the present, considering search engines like duckduckgo, which is basically Bing promoted with a "we don't track" advertising campaign (also hashbangs are pretty cool). DDG is not at google numbers, I know, but you don't need google numbers to make money. I don't think privacy is a very special angle to advertise from either, promising to remove amazon-affiliate blog-spam from results for example, would be a major feature in this space as far as I'm concerned. Being able to edit searches, and potentially gain some intuition for how the search space is set up, might be a much more significant feature, depending on how people take to it. It might flop but atm I'm excited to check it out
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