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Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#71

Post by 19eightyfour »

Animats wrote: post #24

That's a good question, and something I've spent much time on. Cuil (2008-2010) tried. I knew some of those people. It cost them about $30 million to launch a full scale search engine. They had no revenue model. In retrospect, they were hoping to be acquired by somebody. It was some ex-Google people, trying to replicate older Google technology. They had a great launch, but the system wasn't very good and traffic rapi…

One could argue that a monopoly has no interest in improving service.

Also, it seems to me that both weaknesses described, legitimacy and provenance, are actually good for Gs core ad business, because if legitimate advertisers could reliably rank highly without paying, they'd have no interest to pay to out rank the competition. The competition who are buoyed by the nebulous practices Google pretends to frown upon, but for the sake of a delicate balance cannot justify completely stamping out.

The perhaps unpalatable and unutterable truth is that ad-supported search is a delicate business: be good enough to attract eyeballs, but not so good that advertisers who could pay you have no need to pay.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#73

Post by rocky1138 »

greglindahl wrote: post #42
rgovind wrote: post #22

Yes. In today's search engines, I cannot give you a blacklist and say filter out these results. If I am looking for tutorials, I cannot say no video results. If I am looking for market research, I cannot filter out news websites from the links. For personalization, I cannot give google any suggestions on what I absolutely do not want to be included etc.

blekko had these features, and almost no one used them. The google guy who teaches advanced Google searching says that almost no one uses Google's advanced search, either. So if this is a viable niche, you'll have to figure out how to find these users...

Who cares if a small subset of people use them? It doesn't make them worthless.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#74

Post by 19eightyfour »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #47
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all things Google can already do but decide not to. Which means if any startup attempts and gets a moderate success, google will of course decide to do the same. Your startup will be nothing more than an R&D department Google uses for free. Disruption happens by doing something completely different that happens to cannibalize the incumbent's business in a way that they can't change. All these little feature…

Keep in mind that it's been 20 years since Google's differantiator (PageRank) was invented. It's been about 10 years since Google's last meaningful changes to its search UI (autocomplete and "instant" search). So, while I respect Google's omniscience and omnipotence, I disagree strongly that Google/Alphabet are in a position to respond to a serious upstart competitor. Their primary response, as you hinted would be to…

They could erase competitors from results.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#75

Post by rocky1138 »

alain94040 wrote: post #19

Absolutely. I'm fairly confident that 20 years from now, we'll laugh at the notion that all Google could do was finding pages. I don't know what will replace it. Chat bots could be one. Much better understanding of context. Or providing answers based on the knowledge that is spread on many separate web pages. or actually taking action (if you are searching, it's to do something, not to read a page). But "finding a pa…

Finding pages is becoming more and more irrelevant as people less and less create and host their own websites like they used to when the web was young. Web page creation has mostly been centralized to things like Tumblr, Twitter, and major news organizations.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#77

Post by garysieling »

I think there is definitely space for niche search engines - there are tons of them already, if you include things like the DPLA, octopart, iconfinder.com, Spotify or class-central.com.

Google is focused on getting you to a relevant result quickly, but having a search engine that helps you discover new things is really useful. If you focus on a niche, you can also make use of a lot of metadata Google doesn't retain.

I'm exploring this on a small scale with https://www.findlectures.com. Having the date a video was made gives it a 'street view for history' feel, and lets me rank historical content differently from conferences (where recency is more important).

Building a graph of talks, conferences / speakers / books / publishers could be the building blocks for a pagerank implementation, or to build a different type of book search. Alternately, I think it would be interesting if search engines let you do LSA style queries, like "Brian Goetz" - "Java" + "Python", to help discover speakers.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#78

Post by 19eightyfour »

Animats wrote: post #60
tvural wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fix those two problems, and a new search engine could be better than Google. Whether anyone would notice is questionable." Yeah, I don't think many people will care about the difference between good and perfect. You might be able to find a niche in search that Google is ignoring, but you would have a hard time expanding from there into general search. In that sense Google is a bet against technology - you would inve…

The next direction in search seems to be direct question-answering. Echo (Amazon) is interesting in that, being voice only, it can't punt to a screen of search results. It has to answer the question.

The next direction in search is search that machines can use.

Without needing humans to tell them what the results mean.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#79

Post by desdiv »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #57
Analemma_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People wouldn't block Google because allowing Google scraping offers a return in the form of more traffic that offsets the cost. $BRAND_NEW_ENGINE wouldn't have that advantage.

Google's crawlers don't exactly perform 2FA before they crawl a website. If impersonating Google's crawlers doesn't suit your fancy, there are all manner of ways to anonymize a crawler. So I think blocking is one of the least interesting challenges. The other side of the coin is robots.txt is not inherently adversarial, and a crawler could waste quite some time and energy crawling truly meaningless content. That, in…

Google doesn't feel like being impersonated so they offer an easy way to authenticate Googlebot:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another search engine?

#80

Post by always_good »

dri_ft wrote: post #41
stupidcar wrote: post #25

For a general search engine, no, there isn't. The upfront capital investment, in terms of the data center capacity necessary to make a modern scraping and search infrastructure, is immense. And since the ad-word business model does not scale linearly with market share – e.g. the market leader collects a disproportionate share of the available profit – you will be losing additional money for a long time. Since the mar…

> the ad-word business model does not scale linearly with market share – e.g. the market leader collects a disproportionate share of the available profit Why is this so?

Because the market leader has all the publishers.

If you have space for a single banner ad, you're going to use the network with the highest payout, which is the one with the most competitive bidders.

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