81–90 of 207 posts
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Kagi
No wonder Kagi is angry. Google is a monopoly across several broad categories. They're also a taxation enterprise. Google Search took over as the URL bar for 91% of all web users across all devices. Since this intercepts trademarks and brand names, Google gets to tax all businesses unfairly. Tell your legislators in the US and the EU that Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against registered trademarks (+/- some ed…
Antitrust do not work against large companies. Just dissolve them in acid.
This is the type of monopoly abuse these laws were designed to target, and antitrust laws actually do work against large companies. If you actually enforce them. Unfortunately, during the Reagan administration, political sentiment toward monopolies shifted and since then antitrust law has been a paper tiger at best.
I had misread the title as "Google is ending (full-web search) for [aka in favour of] (niche search engines)" The correct parsing is: "Google is ending (full-web search for niche search engines)"
Given that the title supplied is effectively editorialised, and the original article's title is effectively content-free ("Updates to our Web Search Products & Programmable Search Engine Capabilities"), my rewording would be at least as fair.
HN's policy is to try to use text from the article itself where the article title is clickbait, sensational, vague, etc., however. I suspect Google's blog authors are aware of this, and they've carefully avoided any readily-extracted clear statements, though I'll take a stab...
Here's the most direct 'graph from TFA:
Custom Search JSON API: Vertex AI Search is a favorable alternative for up to 50 domains. Alternatively, if your use case necessitates full web search, contact us to express your interest in and get more information about our full web search solution. Your transition to an alternative solution needs to be completed by January 1, 2027.
We can get a clearer, 80-character head that's somewhat faithful to that with:
"Google Search API alternative Vertex AI Search limited to 50 domains" (70 chars).
That's still pretty loosely adherent, though it (mostly) uses words from the original article. I'm suggesting it to mods via email at hn@ycominator.com; others may wish to suggest their own formulations.
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What are some of the niche search engines build on Google's index affected by this?
Kagi
> Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
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I don't weight home pages in any way yet to bump them up, it's just raw search on keyword relevance.
Google's entire (initial) claim-to-fame was "PageRank", referring both to the ranking of pages and co-founder Larry Page, which strongly prioritised a relevance attribute over raw keyword findings (which then-popular alternatives such as Alta Vista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Lycos, Infoseek, HotBot, etc., relied on, or the rather more notorious paid-rankings schemes in which SERP order was effectively sold). When it was firs…
Fair play to them though, it enabled them to build a massive business.
Google quietly announced that Programmable Search (ex-Custom Search) won’t allow new engines to “search the entire web” anymore. New engines are capped at searching up to 50 domains, and existing full-web engines have until Jan 1, 2027 to transition. If you actually need whole-web search, Google now points you to an “interest form” for enterprise solutions (Vertex AI Search etc.), with no public pricing and no guaran…
> “search the entire web” TIL they allowed that before. It sounds a bit crazy. Like Google is inviting people to repackage google search itself and sell it / serve with their own ads.
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Google's entire (initial) claim-to-fame was "PageRank", referring both to the ranking of pages and co-founder Larry Page, which strongly prioritised a relevance attribute over raw keyword findings (which then-popular alternatives such as Alta Vista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Lycos, Infoseek, HotBot, etc., relied on, or the rather more notorious paid-rankings schemes in which SERP order was effectively sold). When it was firs…
PageRank was an innovative idea in the early days of the Internet when trust was high, but yes it's absolutely gamed now and I would be surprised if Google still relies on it. Fair play to them though, it enabled them to build a massive business.
I publish exports of the ones Marginalia is aware of[1] if you want to play with integrating them.
[1] https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/ grab 'atags-25-04-20.parquet'
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It's a noble effort, but they're so late to the game that it's hard to see them making a significant dent. I hope I'm wrong. They were: > aiming to serve 30% of French search queries [by end of 2025] https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
I feel like soon there won’t even be a point having a search engine since almost the entire internet will be useless AI slop.
Internet isn't a global village, it's a global ghetto, and it's becoming increasingly true that the only way not to lose is not to play.
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PageRank was an innovative idea in the early days of the Internet when trust was high, but yes it's absolutely gamed now and I would be surprised if Google still relies on it. Fair play to them though, it enabled them to build a massive business.
Anchor text information is arguably a better source for relevance ranking in my experience. I publish exports of the ones Marginalia is aware of[1] if you want to play with integrating them. [1] https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/ grab 'atags-25-04-20.parquet'
Never build a product with core feature depending on a third-party, you will eventually get fucked up for sure. always have a 70:30 rule for revenue where 70% is core independent features.
Soon you'll find that you cannot exist on the web without relying on third parties. Sometimes you'll even have trouble getting paid thanks to the painful existence of payment processors.