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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#371

Post by pizza »

Barrin92 wrote: post #45

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 should be a "make me lucky" button - to tell you what you ought to be searching for, since it's got enough data to know you better than you know yourself :)

Re: The next Google

#372

Post by WhyNotHugo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #45

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…

I agree; choices and tinkering add complexity to a search engine, and search engines need to be simple.

That aside, a search engine needs to be really focused on privacy. Customising it implies that the user needs to log in and remain logged in. I'd much rather no do that with a search engine, and I don't want its behaviour to react to my identity either.

Re: The next Google

#374

Post by [deleted] »

notadoc wrote: post #247

None of these seem like the next Google. Too complicated. The earlier Google, when Google was at its best in both performance and results, was incredibly simple. It indexed the entire web. It returned keyword matched results based on relevancy. There was no customization required. No editorialized results. No Big Brothering the user against thoughtcrime or wrongthink. No promotion of The Current Thing. Just informati…

[deleted]

Re: The next Google

#375

Post by Tmpod »

legohead wrote: post #98

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…

Have you given WikiVoyage a shot? It has been quite helpful in some occasions.

See [1] for Vegas, for example.

[1]: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Las_Vegas

Re: The next Google

#376

Post by pmayrgundter »

luis8 wrote: post #369

I wonder how feasible would it be to index everything locally? I mean how far are we from having the cpu and storage space to allow a search within our computers? Do we really need to store everything ? Maybe a local "ai magic" could select the specific information we regularly search for and sync from an open public index. In the case we need results it could sync and/or request those bits we are not indexing locall…

Good q. Totally feasible imho, and I used to help build the goog search engine! :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

20GB, which is tiny these days. Fits on a $10 USB key.

I think with some of that AI magic we'll soon be in a situation where most of the traditional (non-proprietary) human knowledge you ever need (text, images, 3d models of machines, anatomy, etc.) will be immediately accessible for free via an open-source knowledge engine.

With a commodity network connection, that knowledge engine can keep itself apprised of the post-traditional/proprietary knowledge by doing all the drudgerous work of reading through the world of Ads to get to today's news, etc..

Mate that with more AI magic to make it easy to conversationally interact with the engine and you get an agent who can represent you online and provide a distilled interface of online for you. Your digital twin or avatar.

Re: The next Google

#377

Post by beezle »

Million short https://millionshort.com can come in handy

I don't use it as my primary search engine as I often want images and news related to the search. But for any search that is going to get flooded with SEO type stuff it can get rid of a lot of the crud very easily.

Re: The next Google

#378

Post by autoexec »

nobody9999 wrote: post #318
bamboozled wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ?

>Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ? AFAICT, quality personalized search results isn't the goal for Google here. I think the point of all that is generating revenue via advertising sales. And while providing high quality search results might once upon a time have been a goal, both as a goal in itself and a to…

I think this is exactly why Google's search has become trash. They don't need it. Even when their goals changed from "making searching the internet better" to "Making money and collecting data on everyone" they still depended on search to see what people were doing both online and offline.

Now they have millions of cell phones collecting data and the GPS location of everyone offline, they run extremely popular DNS servers to see what websites people go to, most websites (including educational and government websites) include google's trackers so on most websites every page loaded will ping at least one of google servers. They've got people uploading their personal and work documents to their cloud. They are swimming in data collected from sources outside of web search. Between that and the lack of actual competition it's no surprise they aren't investing in making searching the internet better for people. In some ways they profit from search results being terrible. If anything beyond the first few results on the first page is filled with spam and irrelevant websites the top few results to any search become even more valuable.

Re: The next Google

#379

Post by matwood »

Barrin92 wrote: post #45

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…

> I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't.

It's often said that people don't want more choices, they want to be confident in the choices they make. It's the strength in simple product lineups like good, better, best. Googles lone search box is good example. Apple's product line also tends to be a good example at times.

Re: The next Google

#380

Post by unethical_ban »

user3939382 wrote: post #332
baxtr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about. That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.

> For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough I'm not sure that's true. Just to pick an example, basically any type of product search now leads to auto-generated spam/borderline-spam websites that scrape reviews from Amazon, which are themselves often fraudulent. I guess you could say that's "good enough" but only in the sense that someone being scammed at some point consents to something that makes them a…

DuckDuckGo is horrendous for spam and malware distribution. I have stopped recommending it to non-technical people because they can't recognize the obviously evil/bad-pattern sites that are on the first page of many DDG searches I do
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