A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi • Hacker News Board

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#81

Post by ricardobeat » Fri, May 04, 2012, 4:51 AM UTC

bitops wrote: post #75

lacker wrote: post #63

It was clear that Yahoo.com was the definitive result for the query "yahoo" so it would score a 10. Other Yahoo pages would be ok (perhaps a 5 or 6). Irrelevant pages stuffed with Yahoo-related keywords would be spam. As someone who worked on search quality at Google for some time, this bit jumped out at me as a terrible mistake. The correct way to judge results for the query [yahoo] is: (a) Where is yahoo.com? At th…

Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I think I understand your point but a few more details would be great. Thanks!

Most people don't look farther than the first 3 results, so what comes after that isn't very high priority. Might be the reason some more specific/obscure queries on google return terrible results :)

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#82

Post by cglace » Fri, May 04, 2012, 5:28 AM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #60

rkudeshi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect quality results also played an outsized factor in most people's switching, even if they don't admit it. Easy test: are you using Bing now? (with their new clean results pages)

Oh yes. I remember back in early 1998 I was using Copernic to aggregate and filter results from a whole bunch of search engines, because individually their results where so poor and irrelevant. Then I discovered http://google.stanford.edu and never looked back.

Same here except I used dogpile.com

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#83

Post by kitsune_ » Fri, May 04, 2012, 5:42 AM UTC

zmmz wrote: post #5

Relevant: http://youtu.be/E91oEn1bnXM It's a recording of a very very good talk by Inktomi co-founder Eric Brewer called "Inktomi's Wild Ride - A Personal View of the Internet Bubble"

Thanks, very informative to watch.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#84

Post by davidjohnstone » Fri, May 04, 2012, 6:24 AM UTC

goochtek wrote: post #71

nirvana wrote: post #51

This was a very interesting read. I was working for a vertical search engine in this very same period. I, and the other engineers, also attempted to get our management to recognize what google was doing right. Unfortunately, we were delayed greatly by bad technology choices forced on us by venture capitalists (e.g. "build your search engine on top of Oracle! they say they have full text search, it will save you time!…

As you haven't mentioned what exactly your search engine will focus on, I'll just throw this idea out there. I would love a search engine that returned results equivalent to Google, yet offered me the privacy level that I desired. With Google, currently I am the product. I know this. I understand this. Thing this is, I don't want to be the product any more. I want to pay for the product on say a yearly fee which guar…

Like http://duckduckgo.com/?

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#85

Post by andrewfelix » Fri, May 04, 2012, 6:28 AM UTC

As an Australian I used to use 'Anzwers' as it seem to give great relevance for Australian specific information. I think it used Inktomi?

I'm not sure why I switched to Google. Not to discredit the Google UX, but I think I switched because the name 'Google' was so catchy and eased it's way into my university's vernacular. "Just Google it" rolls of the tongue nicely.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#86

Post by InclinedPlane » Fri, May 04, 2012, 6:56 AM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #76

InclinedPlane wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close. Lots of other companies were also hiring pretty high tier talent as well, and had intense focus. Google's success came down to effectively executing across typically disparate disciplines. You have hard core research level CS eggheads, you have top tier software engineers, and you have state of the art data center operations. In a typical organization these groups have competing interests, they fight amongst t…

I agree, but I'd ascribe that to Google being run by technical founders rather than MBAs. The main benefit of technical company leadership is the ability to "see" across and coordinate the disparate areas. Infighting and begrudging compromises only happen when the leadership is blind to the details.

Having technical founders is a necessary but not sufficient condition, I think. Lots of companies have had technical founders who haven't managed a level of success as impressive (regardless of scale) as google.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#87

Post by yaix » Fri, May 04, 2012, 7:02 AM UTC

Wow, not only is there still a search page under hotbot.com, its also still run by Lycos! It's like time travel...

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#88

Post by simonw » Fri, May 04, 2012, 7:03 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #56

lobster_johnson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AltaVista tried to jump on the 'portal' bandwagon. I remember at the time how stupid I thought they were, trying to beat Excite and Yahoo at something that was already old hat, a concept that had the Internet had outgrown. Then they screwed up pretty much the same way Inktomi did. AltaVista still exists. It's awful, and it's powered by the Yahoo search engine. Which is pretty much the same thing, I suppose.

Yahoo! bought Overture (which owned AltaVista) way back in 2003. They only replaced the search results with Yahoo!'s a year ago after announcing the site would be shut down. Seemed like they were using it as an occasional test bed in the meantime.

Yup, when I worked at Yahoo back in 2006 I remember altavista being described as a useful site for running experiments.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#89

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 04, 2012, 8:35 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #86

paulsutter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I'd ascribe that to Google being run by technical founders rather than MBAs. The main benefit of technical company leadership is the ability to "see" across and coordinate the disparate areas. Infighting and begrudging compromises only happen when the leadership is blind to the details.

Having technical founders is a necessary but not sufficient condition, I think. Lots of companies have had technical founders who haven't managed a level of success as impressive (regardless of scale) as google.

[deleted]

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#90

Post by nicholassmith » Fri, May 04, 2012, 9:05 AM UTC

excuse-me wrote: post #19

paulsutter wrote: post #7

Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected. When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost. Google's main advantages were: - managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results - google's hiring process produced a very strong team…

The better abstracts is the reason I use DuckDuckGo at home. If I just want to know when the next episode of Big Bang Theory is out or what the weather is today I rarely need to even click on a result. For more obscure technical searches at work, Google still finds more answers. But remember - the barrier to change for a search engine's customers is very very low

With the new DuckDuckHack project as well it does make it a lot easier for very quick 'cheap' results. More complex queries I do seem to find myself !g'ing them. Getting better though, improved over the last 3 months I've been using it.