[HN Gopher] The next Google ___________________________________________________________________ The next Google Author : dbrereton Score : 313 points Date : 2022-04-05 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (dkb.io) (TXT) w3m dump (dkb.io) | Minor49er wrote: | > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just | worse versions of Google. | | I disagree. I use Bing for about half of my searching because | Google simply struggles with things like exact phrase matching in | many cases. Where Google falls off, Bing tends to succeed. Though | Bing also sometimes lags behind, where Google tends to do better, | hence my split usage. | spaniard89277 wrote: | Why not just use DDG as an interface? | Minor49er wrote: | DDG is basically just a wrapper around Bing. I'd rather just | use Bing directly | bob1029 wrote: | Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web crawler | and building my own damn search engine from scratch. I can't ever | come up with a hard reason it wouldnt work in 2022, other than | the dynamic javascript blogspam that may be more challenging to | trawl for meaningful content these days. Perhaps this is a win- | win: The shit I can't crawl I wouldnt want to read anyways. | | Compete with google? Who gives a shit. I just want to be able to | hit a full text index that points back to URLs. I don't need | instant PhD-tier answers for life questions. | acatton wrote: | (Disclaimer: I work for a big company which makes a browser, an | OS for smartphones and a search engine. This is my own opinion, | and does not reflect my employer, and so on, and so on...) | | > Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web | crawler and building my own damn search engine from scratch. | | A few things: | | * Storing the index. For example if I search for "Sushi", | google says there is 1.3 Billion results. That's already 19.3 | GiB just to store the relationship between "sushi" and its | results. (If you use UUIDs) And you need to do that for most | words in the english dictionnary. And I'm assuming you're not | even storing what you crawl for debugging/re-indexing. | | * Website admins might throttle you. For example, discourse -- | a website which runs most discussion for Rust, Ocaml, and many | other projects -- blocked the bingbot at some point[1] due to | its crawling aggressivity. Cloudflare, which is the front- | facing caching service for almost half of the internet now, is | notoriously anti-crawling. (It will quickly display captchas) | | * grep over the web will yield you bad results. (most of the | time) You want a search engine which at least groups words | semantically. If I search for horses, I'm usually also | interested in mares and ponies. | | [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/bingbot-is-no-longer-default- | th... | the_common_man wrote: | Let's be honest.. If it's any good, it gets bought by Google :-( | simoneau wrote: | I want to pay for researched, impartial answers to my questions. | Would someone build that, please? | potatoman22 wrote: | Have you considered JSTOR /s | yumraj wrote: | > The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out | links. | | I have a fundamental disagreement with this. The best search | engine is still an input box that spits out links based on what | was typed. This allows the user to express what they're looking | for, their query, in most natural terms. | | Everything else is secondary. At least for me.. | Soupy wrote: | > The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out | links. | | Hard disagree. I spent years of my life working on a "new way to | search" (Graph Search at Facebook, ~2012) and the biggest | takeaways for me from all of that time is: | | 1) people don't want to learn a new way to search, and they don't | want to learn new tools, filters, lenses, whatever you want to | call it. it must be a keyword-search based input because Google | has trained billions to search (and to think) this way for 20+ | years now. imo the next google shouldn't fight this behavior, but | rather adopt it as part of the core strategy | | 2) ownership of the "search intent entrypoint" is key. people | generally don't care what they are using to search, as long as | it's easy and fast to use and actually works. google understands | this and makes it almost impossible to bypass searching with | google if you're on an Android phone. All of these alternative | search engines have a huge barrier to entry not only on the | technology and data side, but mainly on the entrypoint side. They | can't reasonably expect hundreds of millions of the people to go | through and manually update their default search engine on all of | their devices. What about when I go to use Google Assistant? | Google maps? All entrypoints that Google has used to lock up | search intent. It's brilliant. I believe there are moves still | available for a future Google assailant to overcome these | barriers, but I haven't seen many that have directly touched on | this point yet. new technical shifts may open up new entrypoints | here (VR/AR?) | | 3) the search engine that has the lowest time between [query] -> | [answer] for a user wins. any search engine that adds additional | cruft through forcing more clicks, usage of advanced tooling | (filters, lenses, etc), visualizations, etc will lose out because | they are getting farther and farther from the core problem a user | has - "find me x". this is the thing that is driving the | hero/knowledge units on Google, further cementing their | leadership | | 4) the one brightspot - verticalized search intent is a huge area | of untapped potential in the search arena. Google is great at | general search (and honestly also at a huge number of verticals | that it's developed over time), but there are many verticals that | google honestly sucks at. I do believe there is a potential | entrypoint here for a "new google" if they can take on a | vertical-by-vertical expansion strategy. Owning the intent | entrypoint would still be as important as ever, but this play | would look a lot like the early Yelp vertical expansion strategy | from the early 2000s. It's anybody's guess what the actual right | starting vertical and entrypoint match is though | | tl;dr Google won't go down easy, and a Google killer may actually | look incredibly similar to Google in it's end-state | focom wrote: | > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just | worse versions of Google. | | Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great. | desiarnezjr wrote: | Almost. Annoying are things like geographic context in results | that are terrible (for me) but it's more adapting queries. | | It's sad what today's web has become. Each year you see it | degrade and there's no real fix I'm afraid. | u2077 wrote: | > Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great. | | For anything that isn't the least bit obscure or technical. | (Same with just about every search engine) | | IIRC, someone on hn said that search engines are only good for | things you _already_ know are there, not for finding new | information or different perspectives. | spaniard89277 wrote: | 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 <5% of the | time I search for stuff. | | 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 :) | abhinavsharma wrote: | The problem with trying to replace Google is that you have to.. | 1. Do (nearly) everything Google does as well as them AND 2. fix | Google's weak spots (usually in subjective queries) AND 3. offer | something new and exciting. | | It's hard to do (1) well given Google's data moat and how good | that makes them at head queries. It's rare that people stick with | one of these alternatives because they struggle to be as good in | the majority of simple queries. | | We built a few such search engines before choosing a different | route -- we made something that augments Google (or Amazon, or | whatever other search engine you use) and improves it in areas | that it's weak in. | | I posted our thoughts on this a few weeks ago on HN that | generated some discussion as well -- | http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 | | The apps we built are a mobile browser extension for iOS and a | desktop browser extension | | https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperweb/id1581824571 | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag... | | It's one approach, but we're trying to be more non zero-sum about | it, and consider that the search engine doesn't have to be | replaced 1:1 with a better search engine. | [deleted] | swethmandava wrote: | I might be biased but I see myself depending on trusted sources - | no SEO links, no spam! I want yelp for restaurants, stackoverflow | for coding questions, reddit for opinions or allrecipes for | recipes. | | So I love you.com - it has an app for everything! | kristianpaul wrote: | Developing search engines and personal assistants are the way to | go. Too much information these days to digest , what a better job | for a computer that helps us with the literacy aspects of it. | KindAndFriendly wrote: | "The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out links" | | I think one strong contributing factor to Google's success is its | simplicity. All the listed competitors add a lot of complexity | imho. While all the customization buttons, knobs, lenses, meta | crawling, code generation features etc might add some value for | the advanced and technically skilled user, it provides rather | little value for the average user who just wants to look up a | cooking recipe. | | So maybe when searching for "the next Google" the interesting | question is not "what search features can be added", but "how can | search even be simpler than using Google". | darinf wrote: | Actually, just taking the ads out of the experience can make | for a simpler and better search experience. I think the google | founders knew this too (https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comme | nts/rzr2n3/the_founde...). They just couldn't hold back the | avalanche of revenue that search ads yields. | | I work for Neeva, and this is a big part of why I left Google | to join Neeva. There has to be a better experience, and it | doesn't start from another business that works just like | Google. It has to be a different kind of business. Neeva does | not make money from showing you ads, so it can provide a | different search experience... a simpler search experience, | like the original google even, but it can go further... | | With the Neeva app for example as you start typing in the URL | bar, it will take your input as search suggestions (just as any | other browser + search engine would) but instead of just | showing you completed search suggestion, Neeva will show you | the results from running those searches inline. The idea being | that maybe those results will be helpful to you and make it so | you don't even need to go to the search results page. You can | just take the result right there from the URL bar suggestions | drop down. Saves you time. Simpler. | | Stuff like that. There's a swim lane of innovation and ideas on | how searching and browsing can be better that is just really | hard for Google to build, even though many of these ideas are | thought of inside the walls of Google. They just can't ship | them if they are stuck being beholden to their search ads | model. | | Another great example... ever wonder why Google isn't working | to make it so Chrome doesn't have a million tabs at the top of | your browser? It gets to the point where it is hard to get back | to what you were doing. Me, I just end up closing the tabs, | declaring tab bankruptcy. Google is okay with that because it | means I have to search again. The Chrome team wants to fix this | but it is hard to do so as it would result in people searching | less often! | | Again, just means there is opportunity for a simpler better | experience to be had and Google won't be the ones creating it. | twobitshifter wrote: | To be fair to Google, they do have the I'm feeling lucky | button, which will take you directly to Amazon (example from | the article) rather than showing you links. | darinf wrote: | Exactly. Notice how "I'm feeling lucky" is only on the home | page and not part of the search experience when using | Chrome or any modern browser where you search from the URL | bar? Wonder if that is intention? Not a wonder at all. | | The "I'm feeling lucky" button would never be added to | Google if it didn't already exist. It was grandfathered in. | u2077 wrote: | I think they each capture different markets. Google is simple | _because_ for most people it is "good enough". Google isn't | going to spend a ton of time developing new features for the | (large) minority that find it inadequate. | | Google also has a few good things going for them: | | - it's the _standard_ when it comes to search and is setup by | default on just about every platform | | - People use the brand name itself when talking about looking | stuff up (no one says "just duck it") | | - They control the ad market, the standards for what a | "optimized" site is, _and_ the web standards themselves. | beamatronic wrote: | No search engine has tried to address the issue of the user's | context for the search. | | - does my current location matter for the search? | | - am I trying to spend money (shopping), or trying to get | information (facts)? | [deleted] | sanxiyn wrote: | You can configure Kagi to disable location based customization, | which can be a big improvement indeed. | spaniard89277 wrote: | These are variables taken into account by Google AFAIK. | sanxiyn wrote: | How do I disable location based customization for Google? | beamatronic wrote: | The user does not get a choice | taosx wrote: | I too like many others feel that Google results have gone really | bad in the last year which may be partially due to web pollution | but the main issue is that I feel like google's search totally | ignores my requests, a lot of times it even ignores exact matches | using quotes. | | If only we could get some sql-like powers in that simple input | box. Maybe I'm not their target audience...who knows. | darinf wrote: | Happy to answer any questions you all might have about Neeva. I | left Google to join Neeva about a year ago. Got inspired by the | opportunity to make a better product. AMA :) | relaunched wrote: | nerds like nerd knobs... not sure customization has a mass market | appeal. I also fundamentally disagree with the sentiment that the | general public cares about privacy... though nerds do. | | Good luck! | Shadonototra wrote: | google is not just search anymore, why stuck with a title that | pretends we are living in 2004? | db1234 wrote: | The problem with so many customization options is that it creates | friction to users. We need something that just works out of the | box. Just like Google did when it launched. | antishatter wrote: | I find ddg is an improvement on google because it's more like | google 10 years ago plus a quick !g tosses it back to google for | the occasional topic google does better. | lcnmrn wrote: | The next Google should be powered by AI/ML algorithms to go | around SEO tricks. If lots of people pick a result from page 16 | that result should be on the front page. | sanxiyn wrote: | I mostly replaced my use of Google Scholar with Elicit. You ask | questions, and Elicit gives answers, with citations. Elicit is | powered by GPT-3 and it is amazing. Go try it. | | https://elicit.org/ | mahmutc wrote: | We cant even search without account. | [deleted] | hedora wrote: | The next google is to google as Craigslist is to classified ads. | | Google is ripe for disintermediation by a competitor that doesn't | siphon cash off search to subsidize other things. | | Now, all we need is a technology shift that erodes their moat. | JSONderulo wrote: | "DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just | worse versions of Google." | | "The next Google can't just be an input box that spits out links. | We need new thinking to create something much better than what | came before." | | Could not agree more. | | Great roundup of some exciting search alternatives. Thanks for | sharing. | spaetzleesser wrote: | The next Google should have less AI and be more deterministic. At | least it should have a mode where it searches exactly what I | specify instead of searching what it thinks I want. Also give me | options to filter out certain domains. Again, let me tell the | search engine what I want instead of the engine telling me what I | may want. | | I feel a lot of modern software is becoming very authoritarian. | "We know better than you what you need". | kivlad wrote: | Google used to let you block domains a long time ago. I'm not | sure why that was removed, but I have a feeling it had | something to do with giving the expectation that you can block | ads from a specific domain. | sanxiyn wrote: | Kagi can filter domains. Do try it. | umvi wrote: | > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads | are not an option | | Ok, so how does the new generation pay for itself? I couldn't | find that anywhere in the article. | einpoklum wrote: | > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives - they're just | worse versions of Google. | | Bing - maybe. DDG - it used to be much more of an alternative, | now a little less, with their decision to actively censor their | content. Still, they - supposedly - don't collect and store | information about you. That's the sense in which they're an | alternative. And in Google, there is massive, manipulation of | results with all sort of commercial biases. In DDG we don't know | that that is the case. | | > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads | are not an option. | | Hmm. I notice they didn't didn't say search results manipulation | is not an option. | | > Why should everyone have the same search experience? | | As far as search results are concerned - so that you don't get to | play games with what's more and less visible on the Internet? For | the sake of fairness? | | > We all have our own preferences about how things should look | and work. | | Oh, so you want to _flaunt_ how you'll manipulate people's search | results to fit your interests? I'm sorry, I mean "the default | preferences"? | uhtred wrote: | How is DuckDuckGo a worse version of Google? | | I get less ads, more privacy, and pretty much the same or better | results. Plus I can use my down arrows to traverse the results | list! | MuffinFlavored wrote: | I don't think displaying data in different fashions is enough to | come even remotely close to dethroning Google. It's their data, | how much of it they have, and the algorithm that sits in between | the search input box and the delivering you results that makes | them the best. | advael wrote: | You lost me at "Duckduckgo is a worse version of google" | | Privacy aside, I find the results much more helpful on average | these days, and weeding past sponsored links is enough of a | hassle within google search results to consider it a UX QOL | downgrade | xmly wrote: | So kagi is still returning bunch of links, right? | alphabetting wrote: | In my view Google could possibly be the next Google. They're | leading in AI right now and if they can get the magic we've seen | in some of their papers into products like Search or Google | Assistant it would be major moment. | MockObject wrote: | People aren't complaining about Google because of a lack of AI, | but because of product decisions they're intentionally making, | presumably that increase their profits, but many of us would be | overjoyed if they simply rolled back to their 2012 algorithm. | tdrgabi wrote: | 2012 algorithm with today's advanced seo and spam won't give | you good results. | | Nobody uses yahoo search today... | JKCalhoun wrote: | Minus ads. | xiphias2 wrote: | Pathways was the first time when Google got to a level where | they could collapse multiple searches into one. They needed | working chain-of-thought prompting to make deep learning useful | for researching solutions for problems. | Imnimo wrote: | >But right after that, we're greeted by an "Interesting Finds" | section, which has a fun blog post by Derek Sivers, an article | filled with stories of Steve Jobs in Japan, and some other cool | things you can't find on Google. | | You can definitely find these on Google. | superasn wrote: | Google can be the next Google if they just stopped being evil for | a second: | | 1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow | clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome | extension. | | 2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the | plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been | deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with | what it thinks I want. | | 3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search | results. Where I can narrow down the search results using | additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So | i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to | weed out spam and narrow my search accurately. | ryandrake wrote: | 4. How about an image search that... actually returns the URL | of the raw image? | | Here's a dead simple use case that is just unnecessarily | frustrating. As a user, I want a high res picture of a buffalo. | So: | | a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page | contains thumbnails of buffalos. | | b. I click the first result, it's tagged with | "nationalgeographic.com" so it's probably gonna be good. | Instead of the image, I get another page, but with a slightly | bigger picture than a thumbnail. When you over over it, it says | "3,072 x 3,072" but the image itself is clearly not that | resolution. | | c. So I click that image, and it opens a new goddamn tab of | nationalgeographic.com's web site, with another picture, still | not the promised 3,072 x 3,072! WTF!? When I try scrolling down | to look for the raw image somewhere I'm hit with an E-mail | signup-wall. Good grief! | | d. Little did I know, if at step b. I instead _right-clicked_ | on the image and selected "Open Image in a new tab", I'd have | gotten the image I was looking for. Thanks, Google, for hiding | the 99.9% use case that people want to do. | | The actual user experience _should_ have been: | | a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page | contains thumbnails of buffalos next to clickable .jpg links. | The End. | vikingerik wrote: | For step d, why is that Google's fault? Your browser already | has a means to view an individual image, why should Google | reimplement something that a right-click can just already do? | lupire wrote: | Yes, everyone likes content better when they don't have to | pay for it, all else equal. But content IP owners don't want | to make content for free. | Nextgrid wrote: | They are welcome to disallow the Googlebot in their | robots.txt. | airstrike wrote: | Well, in the age of "creators" I'm sure there are countless | of people who would be willing to post pictures of buffalo | "for free" if they believed they had a chance of having | their work actually make it to the top of the search | results | arecurrence wrote: | Alas, Getty sued that experience into oblivion | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages- | after... | Nextgrid wrote: | Why couldn't they litigate it? As far as I know it wasn't a | court decision but a settlement, which means no legal | precedent has been set and it wasn't determined whether | their original behavior was actually illegal. | LordDragonfang wrote: | It's amazing to me that Pinterest hasn't been sued for | this, despite having much more blatant examples of | copyright infringement that don't link back to the source. | ryandrake wrote: | Wow, I forgot about that--you're right. I guess I should | rant at the lawyers instead. Thanks for the reminder! | superasn wrote: | You can thank Getty images(1) for that :/ I personally think | Getty and most stock image results are pure spam and google | should have just ditched them altogether and kept the | original search. Now google image search is also shit and | full of stock photo spam: | | (1) https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features- | get... | sam0x17 wrote: | There is actually a chrome extension that brings it back | annexrichmond wrote: | Maybe they can include these features in a premium service, and | call it... Google+? | superasn wrote: | I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but I happily pay for | Youtube premium and it's truly an amazing experience compared | to the ad-ridden non-usable free Youtube. If Google created a | similar Google premium where it had such features and no | pesky ads I'd pay for it in a heartbeat. | cpill wrote: | yeah, but then your just encouraging them to make the free | version a bad as is acceptable, like YouTube, and | possibility create classes like on commercial airlines. you | want the world divided into classes? | DocTomoe wrote: | We already have classes, and some people do pay premium | for better service and quality happily. | | A world without that choice, where everyone's experience | is equally bad ... how sad that would be. Just ask your | average east-European soviet-era survivor. | airstrike wrote: | The world is already divided between "free" and "paid", | so I'm not sure what you're getting at here | joering2 wrote: | I'm about to do this as well. Must be amazing experience. | First when I stareted youtube on my FireStick it was one | commercial 5 seconds. Then 2 comms 5 sec. Then 2 each 1:30 | seconds, but I can "skip ads" after 5 sec. Now its 2, | sometimes 3, each 2:50 (I seen ad for some Christian church | had 28 minutes!) and sometimes no "skip ads" button. The | YT+ cost $18 per month... alot, until you realize huge | freedom of not wasting 15 to 30 minutes a day when you want | to do some research and watch some science-focused videos. | booi wrote: | Me too. and Youtube premium is insanely expensive for what | it is. | lupire wrote: | Google already did it, and killed it. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor | gigaflop wrote: | An easy way to personally blacklist (and a bare minimum on/off | switch if you need to toggle it) would make me so damn happy. | | Why should I be forced to look at a page full of purple links | when searching for some specific programming topic? It feels | like there's a bunch of potentially-fake developer blogs that | copy/paste from Azure documentation, without adding anything | novel. | xmly wrote: | So Kaji is still returning a bunch of links, right? | taxonomyman wrote: | Likely not the next Google but wanted to share: | https://sanction.millionshort.com | | SANCTION is an experimental search engine powered by the popular | experimental search engine Million Short - an experiment within | an experiment. (This is alpha and buggy!) With SANCTION you can | choose to remove results from any Country you wish, for whatever | reason. | | Result removal is based on both the ccTLD and geographic location | of where the page is hosted (a 1st degree connection). We have | also provided the ability to remove results based on the ccTLD | and location the scripts a particular page includes via script | tags (a 2nd degree connection). | davidkunz wrote: | > 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. | luckydata wrote: | I would prefer it returned "knowledge" instead of links but I | hear you. Still, I think the fundamental flaw of all of this | including Google is everyone looks for info in documents, while | what you really need is a queryable knowledge graph where | documents are linked to. Google made a half assed attempt at it | but never took off, I'm looking forward to what that space | could look like in the future. | dvirsky wrote: | Also, most of these examples in the articles are input boxes | that spit out links :/ | educaysean wrote: | Your answer reminded me of the Ford quote: "If I had asked | people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." | | I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, I just strongly | believe that in 20 years we'll look back at our Googling years | and wonder how we managed to find anything at all. Who know | what the next pattern of information retrieval will be, but I | personally think it'll be an even bigger jump than the jump | from reference desks and encyclopedias to Google. | | Edit: okay, maybe not 20 years. Decades, perhaps. | amelius wrote: | Faster horses could have been better for the planet than | cars. | | https://horses.extension.org/what-is-the-carbon-footprint- | of... | | > The digestive process of horses produces far less methane | than the digestive system of cattle and sheep. (...) | Jyaif wrote: | 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. | skt5 wrote: | 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. | akvadrako wrote: | 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. | JKCalhoun wrote: | Never mind the creators of those sites. Do they really want | the Reader's Digest version of their pages scraped and | presented to a user without getting the click? | convolvatron wrote: | clicks == value is a big structural failure in the | current web | MockObject wrote: | Folks have been working on answer engines since Ask Jeeves, | but none has surpassed the utility of a good search engine. | sanxiyn wrote: | I'd prefer answers to links. | ezekg wrote: | Exactly. Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam. | Don't correct my term, especially when I'm searching verbatim | (which I almost always want). It'd also be nice to be able to | downvote certain results. | egeozcan wrote: | > Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam | | I think achieving this would be worth billions, at least? | | We really tend to underestimate the amount of spam on the | internet. | | Google does badly here: it overcorrects and you get only | super safe results. Yandex? Unless you get lucky, lots of | spam. | np- wrote: | The problem is that for every $1 someone is willing to | spend to not have spammy results, a spammer is willing to | pay $10 for you to see it anyway. And the more | "trustworthy" a platform grows, then the going price for | manipulating it will keep rising until they hire the right | MBA who decides to squander the company's reputation for a | quick buck. Seems to be a recurring theme at least. | wormer wrote: | I think it would probably be worthless. SEO means money | spent to the search engine company, and why improve UX when | you could buy your seventh super yacht? | ezekg wrote: | Not every search engine needs to be an ads company, | though. | | I'd pay /mo for a good one. Why not? Currently trying | Kagi. | Nextgrid wrote: | Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather | than trying to detect whether something is spam or not, | just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics, | affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking | signal. | | You'll still get spam if that's all that matches your | query, but now all it takes is for someone to make a page | matching the query without the aforementioned items to | outrank the spam results. You wouldn't need to append | "site:reddit.com" to your queries because the (mostly) non- | commercial Reddit results would automatically outrank all | the blogspam and listicles. | | If ads were downranked it would make a lot of | spam/clickbait/listicles unprofitable overnight as they'd | rank low enough that the costs of creating & maintaining | the spam site/content would outgrow the returns from ad | impressions. | xtracto wrote: | > Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. | Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or | not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads, | analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a | negative ranking signal. | | This would be a really interesting experiment: A search | engine that ranks websites by the amount of Ads and other | spam that they contain. | usui wrote: | Kagi is experimenting with this already. It's one of the | options to filter trackers in the page. | bsparker wrote: | This is one of the reasons I love working for You.com. | | SEO is killing Google and it needs to be addressed before | it kills the internet. Having the opportunity to build an | app that solves a search, instead of perpetuating a spam | system, has been really rewarding... and we're just getting | started. | ezekg wrote: | It's crazy how quickly I got quality results for "java | ed25519 bouncy castle" on both You and Kagi. I literally | spent all day on Monday using Goog and DDG trying to find | implementation examples of Ed25519 and AES-256-GCM in | Java, trying every variation of keyword, verbatim quotes, | and site scope I could think of, and ended up using GH | gist search instead to find what I was looking for. The | results on Goog/DDG were literally all SEO spam sites | copying content from SO or the Bouncy Castle docs that I | had already read. | | I've been trying out Kagi as my default search engine, | but will give You a try next. | sanxiyn wrote: | I still get lots of spam on Google. Maybe it's better for | English? I mostly search in Korean. | MichaelMoser123 wrote: | A lot of the snooping does have an actual role with search - they | need to guess the intended domain of the query [1] | | Welcome to my side project, a better organized directory of | domain specific search engines, based on duckduckgo !bang | operators | https://github.com/MoserMichael/duckduckbang/blob/master/REA... | | The project also adds some explanation on the role of each search | engine, also the page has been auto translated into several | languages. | | Ideally this directory/thesaurus should help you to find a domain | specific search engine, without the need of snooping on the part | of the search engine. | | [1] of course they also need the snooping for targeted | advertising, but that's a different story! | qeternity wrote: | > 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. | masturbayeser wrote: | peoplefromibiza wrote: | putting aside the (idiotic) negative framing of third-world | countries, that are called developing countries nowadays | anyway, they also represent 3/4 of the World's population. | | Doesn't seem so bad as a market. | kyrra wrote: | By what data? | | https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united- | sta... | | Android is 42% of the US market. | IshKebab wrote: | And 69% in third world Europe. | GoatOfAplomb wrote: | Agreed, but I think there's probably a profitable business to | be made out of 1% of Google Search's users. | IshKebab wrote: | Maybe it should be titled "The Next Bing"! | qeternity wrote: | I think you're still off by an order or magnitude (or two). | | It might plenty to create a nice business, but a bit absurd | to call it the next Google. | joering2 wrote: | I'm longing for categorized YouTube site... When doing home | project I can navigate with tabs: home -> security -> | outside cam installation -> softfit mounted -> how to strip | softfit / how to run cable / how to drill and patch cables | hole etc. | | Could be Wikipedia-style cultivated if enough people know | and care. | twobitshifter wrote: | Even if it's not everyone or most people, you can still segment | the market into power-users and others. | Nextgrid wrote: | > No, most people have never given a single thought to this. | | Probably because they're stuck in a local maximum with no idea | how much better it can be. They may not even be aware that | there are sites out there that have quality non-commercial | content if all they've been given for the last decade is spam | to the point where spam has been normalized. | dogleash wrote: | > We need new thinking to create something much better than what | came before. In the last few years, different groups of people | came to the same conclusion, and started working on the next | generation of [foo]. For this new generation, [bar] is necessary, | and [baz] are not an option. But that's where the commonalities | end. Beyond that, they've all [zoz] in very different directions. | | This pitch voice makes me want to gouge my fucking eyes out. | gotostatement wrote: | > 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. | [deleted] | codemk8 wrote: | This reminds me of the user interface for pied piper's | compression algorithm | | https://images.app.goo.gl/G1K7J8gZ135x98mz7 | johndfsgdgdfg wrote: | I think the replacement of Google can't come sooner. Google | invades our privacy and keeps users hostages for more money. | Thanks to HN I am aware now how bad Google is. I always recommend | people to switch to Amazon, Apple or MS. Google is EVIL. | cmarschner wrote: | People don't understand that Google is in a game of user data: | you can only win this game if you have the largest market share, | plus a plethora of additional data sources like ads. Microsoft | invested 10s of billions into bing to get to the level it is at. | But more clicks and user behavior data means you would win | against bing. | | The only company that could theoretically build a web search | engine due to the amount of data they have is Meta. | | Search is one of the biggest moats ever built. | mikehollinger wrote: | There's an opportunity for helping with enterprise data. There's: | | - Files (Box/DropBox/Google Drive/SharePoint) | | - Static(ish) Pages (Wikis/internal CMS's/Actual websites hosted | on some random nginx/apache) | | - Web Apps (eg Internal Learning Platforms or helper HR apps or | whatever) | | - Chat (Slack/Discord/Teams/??) | | - Email | | - Files stored on my actual laptop | | - Source Control (eg GitHub/GitLab/whatever ... which have their | own wikis/pages/content) | | Is it just me? Anyone else feel like finding something across the | above mediums is difficult? | ktsayed wrote: | I agree 100% but for corporate usecases many would be slightly | uncomfortable giving Google (or a competitor) access to all of | those to search though | sanxiyn wrote: | Remember Google Desktop? I want Google Desktop back. (Google | Desktop was discontinued in 2011.) | mikehollinger wrote: | I do too! | SV_BubbleTime wrote: | I want Google 2011 back. | calbruin wrote: | throw8383833jj wrote: | 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. | donnoit wrote: | Nitpicking here.. but the title and article are presumptuous are | out-of-touch in 2022. Google is primarily an advertising company. | Gmail, YouTube, Android, Mobile Apps, Google Home, Maps, devices, | Search App all synergistically funnel users towards advertisers. | G-Cloud and G-Pay may be among the few exceptions to that but | also constitute Google. Point being: you cannot be the Next | Google by building a better search engine, just like you can't be | the Next Microsoft by building an email system better than | Outlook or a desktop OS better than Windows. | bambax wrote: | Most of these features have been tried, and abandoned, by Google | itself. It's possible Google stopped doing them because they hurt | its ad business, but it's also possible (and likely) they | confused users or were difficult to maintain and not actually | used. (What's a "non-commercial website"? And what happens when | it suddenly becomes commercial? And when there are millions of | them? etc.) | | I predict that in 10 years Google Search will still be dominant, | and we'll still be complaining about it. | api wrote: | I now use Kagi as my default and will definitely pay for it. | kegi wrote: | sorry for you :P | asciimov wrote: | The older I get the less I want to waste time on customizing | things. | calbruin wrote: | logicx18 wrote: | I've been using you.com for a couple of months now and I think it | has a lot of potential for one reason: choice. You can choose to | be in private mode where they don't track you or you can choose | to see some sites higher than others. Feels more customizable and | the layout feels new | code2life wrote: | I love you.com mobile app, just saw that they made a layout | update, really cool | boomer918 wrote: | 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 wonder why? | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | > - 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) | | The solution for o both of these might actually be a paid | service. If you have a paid service, there is a possibility of | it being profitable with much fewer users. As an example, let's | say you have 1,000,000 users at $10/month, that is a | $10,000,000/month which might be enough to run the service and | provide a comfortable profit. | | With regards to the spam issue, the fact that you have a small | user base would be to your advantage. Because there are so many | Google users, it is in websites' economic interests to spend | money to try to game the algorithms. With much fewer users, | your paid search users may not be worth it for the sites to | spend money trying to game your algorithms. | avsteele wrote: | It will still pay to put ads in to paying customer's feeds. | It's more or less inevitable if the customers tolerate it. If | you think that's impossible I'd point to how streaming | services are now serving up ever more adds. | Nextgrid wrote: | The spam issue can trivially be addressed by implementing | actual penalties for rule-breakers. If it takes a long time | to acquire a good reputation & ranking on the search engine, | you're unlikely to risk it by doing something nasty in fear | of your domain, keyword or brand name being banned for a long | time. | _jal wrote: | 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 them choose traffic vs. advertisers (I | don't know, if I had an idea of how to, I would not be writing | this), but they're big enough that other wedges could start | chipping away at their margins. | darinf wrote: | Actually, you are spot on. One simple feature of the Neeva | app is that it shows inline search results as you type into | the URL bar. This is because we aren't trying to show you | ads, so we don't need you to visit the search results page | (where Google and others show you those ads). We just show | you the results straight away in the suggest experience. Now, | this isn't going to show you everything you care about and | you can still click to see the search results page. It is | just handy to be able to quickly get to where you are trying | to go and especially if it is likely to match what you are | looking for (e.g., a wikipedia link). This is something | Google cannot bring itself to do because it would be cost way | too much in terms of lost ads revenue. There are other | examples like this where Google and other ad-supported search | engines just can't innovate, can't change the search | experience. The current way of searching is too lucrative and | there is too much business inertia around it. That's why | Neeva is interesting and why I left Google to join and help | :) | jsnell wrote: | But that is exactly how Google searches worked on desktop | platforms for more than half a decade (Instant Search), not | some kind of a new idea. Given how long they kept that | feature on, it seems pretty obvious that it can't have been | the kind of revenue killer you suggest. If you can serve | and display search results for a given possibly partial | query, you can obviously serve ads too. | darinf wrote: | I was talking about mobile. As for desktop, Instant | Search was serving up full page results instantly, which | included ads. That's a different thing altogether, and of | course, in the case of Instant Search there was plenty of | room for both sponsored results as well as real results. | On mobile there isn't. | mkmk3 wrote: | 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 | _jal wrote: | > but you don't need google numbers to make money | | The article is titled "The Next Google." I was responding | to that, not "A Profitable Also-Ran". | sanxiyn wrote: | While "The Next Google for Wall Street" is one | interpretation of "The Next Google", I am more interested | in "The Next Google for me". | sanxiyn wrote: | Kagi is "users pay". Yes, average users won't pay, but I don't | see how that matters to me as a Kagi user. | Imnimo wrote: | I guess it depends on whether you consider "The Next Google" | to imply that it becomes a the dominant company in the space, | used by every "average user", or if it's enough to be a niche | solution for highly technical users who prefer it to Google. | DocTomoe wrote: | So the question will be "Will the average user prefer to | feed on free junk food when healthy food is ten bucks a | month?" | | Chances are there will be both. | time_to_smile wrote: | Another important feature of Kagi that I'm paying close | attention to is: they are currently privately bootstrapped as | far as funding goes. | | To me the fact that Kagi is not currently VC funded is _huge_ | for me as far as adoption. Every customer facing VC funded | startup I 've worked at inevitably starts to institute | increasingly anti-user practices while grinning and talking | about "customer first!" | | I know it's a huge ask, but if Kagi remains privately | funded/non-VC I'll happily pay the moment I can. | | I've only been using the service for a short while now but | have been enjoying it a lot. The ability to blacklist domains | has already dramatically improved my search. | sillysaurusx wrote: | A paid search engine? Bold. I'd pay if it could do anything | close to what the old google code search could do. I miss it | every day. | josh_p wrote: | It's free while they're in beta. There's a "waitlist" but | put your email on it and you'll get an invite within a | week. Give it a try. | | I've been using it for a couple weeks now on my work laptop | and for programming-related searches its been great so far. | And the usual annoyances that show up at the top of google | and DDG don't show up on Kagi (geeks4geeks, etc). | fallat wrote: | It's actually so good I plan to pay when they start | charging. | spiderice wrote: | It's really good in some ways, and very lacking (for me) | in others. The search is fine. Good enough that I would | switch. However, if I was out and about and quickly | needed directions to Walmart, my normal flow with Google | is | | Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> click on | the map -> Maps app opens and starts guiding me | | When I switched to Kagi, the flow went like | | Pull out phone -> Safari -> type "Walmart" -> top result | is Walmart.com... no address to nearest Walmart to be | found -> Close Safari -> Open Maps app -> search for | Walmart | | And it got so annoying to have those extra steps. I know | I can change my workflow and get used to it. But it | wasn't just directions. It was other basic searches. Like | if I needed a phone number for a local business. It drove | me crazy. I really hope Kagi gets better at those sort of | things. I want them to succeed. But it was just too much | friction for me. | richardsocher wrote: | We found similar issues at https://you.com a while back. | We just had to be good for more query families. Now we | have both the walmart locations in a map app, eg | https://you.com/search?q=walmart and coding related | useful results, eg. https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I | %20find%20all%20files%2... | | or https://you.com/search?q=pyspark%20filter%20array%20el | ement | Ennea wrote: | Too bad you.com does not work in Firefox with the | "beacon" function disabled (beacon.enabled set to false | in about:config). | richardsocher wrote: | Hi Ennea, Can you help me understand why you make this | particular change in the config? | Ennea wrote: | To be perfectly honest, I cannot even remember making | that change, but also couldn't find any info on whether | Firefox or some extension may have done this. I will | leave it disabled, however, because its purpose seems to | be analytics, and opting out of (at least some of) them | this way seems like a good idea. | | Since disabling it this way removes the `sendBeacon` | function from existence, you should just be prepared to | properly handle its absence. | smk_ wrote: | I'll do the same as well. Kagi has literally improved my | life a significant degree. | href wrote: | Same. I switched to it for a day just to give it a try | and I never switched back. Absolutely willing to pay if | the quality stays the same. | aaomidi wrote: | I do think there's actually some space opening up for paid | services. | | From what I'm seeing, if you could create a bot free eco | system, people will pay for it. | | The question is "can you make it bot free". This is gonna be | the next trillion dollar company. | Nextgrid wrote: | Raising the cost of spam would be a good first step. | | At the moment, spamming Google seems to be trivial with no | long-term penalties if you get caught doing something nasty. | | A simple rule (manually enforced on a case-by-case basis) | that would ban your brand/domain for a year if you get caught | breaking the rules would get Pinterest into compliance from | day 1 for example. | | Using ads/analytics/affiliate links as a negative ranking | signal would make a lot of blogspam/listicles/clickbait | disappear if their only funding method immediately makes them | rank much lower below where they are no longer profitable. | sshumaker wrote: | This would be easily exploitable by a competitor. For | example, search engines (used to) rank back links - that is | other domains pointing to your domain. Some bad actors took | advantage of this by creating rings of sites that voted | each other up. Google responded by punishing the behavior. | Then, competitors started taking advantage of this | punishment by creating a network of sites that backlinked | to a competitor, so they would get punished instead. | | This isn't a hypothetical example - Google actually | includes in their webmaster tools a "disavow links" | capability so sites can avoid getting punished for bad | actors trying to make them look bad. But you can imagine if | the penalties were even more severe other folks may get | caught up in an unforgiving dragnet with no judge or jury | and no way to appeal. | | My main point is that people will find ways to game the | system, and usually sharp edges ("harsh punishments") on | any system will be taken advantage of by actors, and | unfairly penalize others. | Nextgrid wrote: | Agreed, I'm not saying this is the end-game or that it | will be perfect. But a simple rule (that's actually | enforced) saying that you are forbidden to serve a | different experience to the Google bot vs a normal | visitor would take care of Pinterest for example, and | they're not even doing _that_ despite it being a major | complaint especially in tech-circles where Googlers no | doubt lurk. | Nextgrid wrote: | Average users may not pay, but specialized users may pay and | pay more than enough to subsidize some sort of free tier. | | Not to mention, if free search engines keep devolving into an | endless sea of spam, people may have no choice but to start | paying. There's plenty of things out there people pay for not | necessarily by choice but because there's nothing else out | there that would accomplish the task at hand. | sjg007 wrote: | I would pay for an app that searches my stuff and provides some | kind of intelligent agent for web knowledge. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Seems the first of these can be solved by reducing the scope. | Do you really need a data center to run a search engine? | | Overall it seems very rare anyone ever considers this an | engineering problem. Really, what's stopping you from running a | search engine? | sdoering wrote: | Really? Or are you the one I should have refrained from | feeding. | | But if you must know: | | First you need to collect a lot of content from the internet. | From many different sites. With very different types of code | structure. Broken html. More often than not behind some SPA | JS code. Behind robots.txt files and bot protection efforts. | | So the first problem to solve would be building a crawler at | scale. That is able to crawl anything your users might want | to visit but don't know of yet. | | Then storage and retrieval. You need to store and update all | this content your crawler collected. You need to enrich it | with meta data and organize it for efficient retrieval. So | that you can surface it to your users when they use your | search engine. Indexing, structure, build g connections | between content pieces. A lot of interesting things to think | about. | | Then there is the front end. Make it easy to search, to | refine. Surface relevant content for search queries. | | OH maybe I forgot, but you probably need to do a bit of | engineering to make your system understand the users' search | intent. | | This is relatively straightforward for a limited search and | document space up to a few million entries in your DB. A few | million documents should be doable with off the shelf parts. | | Bigger than that. I would applaud you if done with orders of | magnitude lower than Google. Anyone would. | marginalia_nu wrote: | All of this is a long series of solvable problems. I should | know, I've dabbled in solving most of them. This is why I | suggest actually taking a stab at it before you dismiss it | as impossible. | | There are some problems that aren't as big as they seem. | Parts of an SPA can't be reliably linked to anyway even if | you find interesting text there, so you can just leave them | out of the index. | | Likewise, there isn't as great of a need to keep a fresh | index as it may seem. The odds of a document changing is | proportional to how frequently it changes. This is a bit of | a paradox, where even if you crawl really aggressively, the | most frequently changing documents will still always be out | of date. Most documents are relatively stable over time. | You can actually use how often you see changes to a | document or website to modulate how often you crawl it. | | The bad HTML is quite manageable. You really just need to | flatten the document to get at the visible text. Even with | really broken formatting, that's manageable. | | The storage demands are also not as bad as you might think | (most documents are tiny, sub 10 Kb), there are ways to | lessen the blow on top of that. Both text and indexes can | compress extremely well. Since you're paying for disk | access by the block, you might as well cram more stuff into | a block. | | Most of the crawling concerns, in general, can be gotten | around by starting off with Common Crawl (even if I do my | own crawling, which also is finnicky but manageable). | | > This is relatively straightforward for a limited search | and document space up to a few million entries in your DB. | A few million documents should be doable with off the shelf | parts. | | Right, so shouldn't the question be how to find the | documents that are even candidates for being search | results? Most documents are not ever going to be relevant | to any query ever. Get rid of that noise and your hardware | goes a lot longer. | | I'm running a search engine on consumer hardware out of my | living room that can index 100 million documents. Go a bit | higher budget than a consumer PC, and you've got 5 billion. | That goes a long way. | sdoering wrote: | > Get rid of that noise and your hardware goes a lot | longer. | | What qualifies? What defines signal, what noise? I agree, | that a lot (probably nearly all) pages will receive very, | very little traffic/search requests. But are these | therefore not relevant? | | > I'm running a search engine on consumer hardware out of | my living room that can index 100 million documents. | | That's extremely cool. I would love to know more. To me | an impressive feat already. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I think I was editing the comment while you were | replying. Sorry about that. I was just adding to it | though, didn't really rug pull on your response so I | think it's fine. | | > What qualifies? What defines signal, what noise? I | agree, that a lot (probably nearly all) pages will | receive very, very little traffic/search requests. But | are these therefore not relevant? | | Now this is a proper difficult problem with (probably) | fairly subjective answers. I do however think it's | something that warrants serious investigation. It's | _probably_ a decent candidate for a machine learning | model combined with some manual tweaking for sites | similar to wikipedia or github that have absurd amounts | of parallel historical content. | | Developing heuristics for this is a bit of a hobby horse | of mine. It feels tantalizingly almost doable with just a | little bit more resources and time than I have. | | > That's extremely cool. I would love to know more. To me | an impressive feat already. | | Yeah it's at <https://search.marginalia.nu/>. I've built | all the software myself from scratch in Java[1], and I'm | doing my own crawling and indexing. The machine it's on | is a Ryzen 3900X with 128 Gb RAM. Most of the index is on | a single 1 Tb consumer grade SSD. | | I do use a MariaDB database for some metadata, but I | think it will have to go as its hardware demands is | becoming a serious bottleneck. | | [1] Despite using Java, I should say regarding the index. | This is approaches sunk cost at this point. Building a | search engine index is not something Java is at all | suitable for, its limited low-level I/O capabilities is | incredibly handicapping. | nojs wrote: | > Building a search engine index is not something Java is | at all suitable for | | Worth pointing out that Lucene/Solr, the biggest open | source player, is also Java! | marginalia_nu wrote: | This is some of the nonsense you are dealing with | implementing a search index in Java: | | * You can only allocate on-heap arrays of 2 billion | items. | | * On-heap arrays have a massive size overhead in terms of | GC book-keeping. | | * You can only allocate off-heap memory map 2 Gb at a | time. | | * This also goes for memory mapped areas. | | * You have no control over the lifecycle of mapped memory | and off-heap memory. They get cleared if and when the GC | feels like it. | | * You have no madvise capabilities | | * The language _barely_ acknowledges unsigned types | Nextgrid wrote: | Out of curiosity, how much disk space does your index | currently use, and what's the storage hardware (SSD or | spinning rust)? | marginalia_nu wrote: | The reverse index is 180 Gb, on an SSD. I do think using | SSDs are a major part of why this is possible on consumer | hardware. I'd need _a lot_ of spinning rust to get the | sub-100ms response times I can get it to when the index | is warmed up. | | Should be said I do wear through this SSD at a pretty | alarming rate. I'm at 193 TBW on this disk since I | started using it as an index less than a year ago. | | I do have a bunch of mechanical drives I use for | archiving and as intermediate working areas as well, but | the index itself is on an SSD. | Nextgrid wrote: | Thanks - I'd be keen to try this at some point, if | anything just for personal usage. I've got more than | enough hardware CPU & RAM-wise, if all it takes is | getting a few TBs worth of solid-state storage it seems | like a no-brainer. | sanxiyn wrote: | Since you didn't seem to notice the username: you are | replying to a person who developed a search engine alone. | (So be prepared to applaud.) | paulpauper wrote: | The future search engine will look for content that is produced | by humans . We don't need more info for the sake of having info. | we need info that we can assume has been produced by an actual | sentient being. | Nextgrid wrote: | Since it's difficult to determine whether a human produced a | particular piece of content, a good alternative would be to | determine whether there's any incentive for a bot to produce | such content, and target _that_ instead. Ads, analytics, | affiliate links, etc. | | Sure, you could still make a bot that auto-generates blogspam | without the aforementioned things and rank as high as before, | but what's the point if you removed the very things that get | you paid? | | There's plenty of things out there that are trivially spammable | but outside of isolated cases (where the objective is to cause | damage/annoyance rather than profit) nobody is spamming them | because there's no profit to be made by doing so. | helen___keller wrote: | > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads | are not an option. | | This is a red flag to me. I would like if this were true for a | next gen anything, but in my experience truly next gen | experiences - the kind that spread like wildfire and displace | incumbents - have no reason to make promises about privacy or | ads. Why would they, if they have a product that consumers want | to use? | chakkepolja wrote: | Exactly. | | The person who asked 'is HN becoming an echo chamber?' | | would've got their answer by now. | giberson wrote: | IMO the next Google needs to use AI to classify results as | fact/fiction and supposition/exposition etc. It will identify | bias and even classify it (religious, political, cultural etc). | With the abundant sources of information (and misinformation) | ever growing, the job of a search engine will be to inform you | about the information you are viewing and alert you to key | factors that may be coloring the information. | hubraumhugo wrote: | 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. | thwayunion wrote: | LMMs are the next big idea for search. | riazrizvi wrote: | What's an LMM? | thwayunion wrote: | Sorry, a typo of LLM. gpt-3 et al. | riazrizvi wrote: | Oh AI is the future of search? Maybe. | | I think the bigger reason why search isn't getting much | better is that incremental technical improvements are | being offset by Google trading their dominance for | greater shareholder value. A safe business can take away | or buy-and-bury features that are better for the customer | but worse for the business's top line. Things like the | Power Search API, or search that integrates with other | platforms that hurt Alphabet owned businesses. | | Traditionally big innovation breaks some socio-political | constraint on market participation. I don't see how AI | will do that yet. | thwayunion wrote: | NLP generative models that you can interrogate with | natural language prompts, and which generate coherent | responses together with citations for sources, is | definitely the future of search. | | I don't know anything about AI or the relationship | between market participation and innovation. All I know | is that LLMs are a useful tool that is already displacing | search in many parts of my life. | riazrizvi wrote: | I see. These sound like two different products, Google | Search vs Google Scholar. I can imagine AI + natural | language processing is dramatically changing search | performance of dense-detailed text. | mountainriver wrote: | Yup ML is definitely the future of search and google is on | the cutting edge of that so I expect they will continue to | dominate | notadoc wrote: | 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 information, | whether good or bad, true or false, as a search engine should be. | | Something that can replicate that will have a good chance of | success, but I think the longstanding challenge to both Google | and competitors is how to rank material in an increasingly siloed | and ideological web filled with agendas, astroturfing, SEO | optimization, and spam. | sytelus wrote: | Next Google isn't going to be index based search engine. Imagine | a massive distributed neutral model which has digested billions | of pages. The query isn't going to be keyword-ish like "kids | cough medicine" but rather question with all details like "what | is least problematic over the counter good cough medicine for a 9 | year old with asthma". The results aren't going to be bunch of | links but rather aggregation, summary and organized composed | information from various sources with citations. Imagine if a | human had read all the pages and you asked him the same question. | | I would also predict search to be much more compute intensive and | therefore more expensive. The ad model is likely not going to be | sufficient to pay for compute resources. | code2life wrote: | This article is great, but you.com is just much better for my | work (software engineer), it's also free. I'd not pay for a | search engine | polote wrote: | None of the examples explained here impress me (with maybe the | exception of Goggles by brave search). | | - The first example is not much more than Google with a styling | chrome extension | | - The second doesnt bring anything more than Google when you are | searching about webcontent. Some ideas on filters are interesting | but this is not user friendly | | - You is powered by AI, so it is basicaly giving not what you | want except when you ask for the general case (the case Google | works pretty well for) | | - Andi is a chatbot. Which is basically Google + only the first | answer | | Brave Search Goggles, (what most people call collections, what | Pinterest calls a board, what Twitter call List) is for me what | is going to be the real innovation of search Engine. They are a | way to bring collaboration to enrich content, but nobody has | cracked the UX to make it work yet | dannywarner wrote: | Did you try Andi search? It returns full search results | alongside the answer and has full preview content for many of | the websites, and the content is from the websites not Google | or Bing's snippets. It's completely different to the way you | described it. | | My biggest problem with it is that the alpha version still has | errors and is weak for searches like local businesses. Also, | big problem is I'm in Australia and everything is in imperial | units. Having said that, however, I've been using it since it | became available a few weeks ago and it has already improved a | surprising amount. And the question answering if you ask | specific-enough questions can blow your mind. | polote wrote: | It feels like the engine understand well the query, but for | test searches it didnt show better results than Google, it | actually gave me almost the same answers. So if they use | their own index thats pretty good. But not the Next Google | dannywarner wrote: | You might be missing the point. Try a difficult question | instead of a regular web search. Something like this. "Why | did Twitter add Elon Musk to its board of directors, and | what impact did that have on twitter's share price?" | | Then click on "View in Reader" on the results. This is not | like Google dude. | | People on the Discord are trying crazy questions like that | and reporting what it does good or bad on. It screws some | up but it is cool. It finds stuff Google doesn't. | polote wrote: | I tested "What impact adding Elon Musk to Twitter board | of directors had on twitter's share price" and I agree | with you the result is much better that when you search | the same thing on Google. | | To be honest that's impressive for complex queries | [deleted] | amelius wrote: | 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. | zarzavat wrote: | An oracle is how Google sees itself. However, their quest to be | an oracle has come at the expense of losing their edge at | searching the web. So now there is an opening for another | service to be better at search than Google. | rmah wrote: | I think this was called AskJeeves. Google rolled over them | without breaking a sweat. | vasco wrote: | 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. | masswerk wrote: | I'd like my search engine to be not too intelligent. Sometimes, | humans suppose to know what they are meaning. | | So | | - optional verbatim and prioritized terms (like Google once did | it) | | - optional logical operators (and, or) | | - a separate input box for context (either, specific terms like | "product", "shopping", "legal", or some assorted terms to | indicate a field of meaning and/or associated concepts, time | span, etc) | | It's the latter, where the search engine may shine and users may | evoke its sophisticated intelligence, but, please, don't | reinterpret the principal search terms to concepts that maybe | just related. I do understand that this may not be for everyone, | nor may it be the sole interface, but there should be a niche for | this. | | Example, wanting to find something about the early press coverage | of System/360: | | - Search term: (IBM || "big blue") && System/360 | | - Context: news 1965,1966 computer | wppick wrote: | If there is any next Google (or Google Search competitor) it | would be, in my mind, something like Wolfram Alpha. I can search | for things like today + 160 days and get much more rich results | (as a simple example). Google does have some features like this | already such as weather/climate, calculator, translate, etc. This | area however is much weaker than I would like it to be. Wolfram | can tell me how long it will take me to get a sunburn in my | current location, and all kinds of stuff like that. Virtual | assistants like Siri and "OK Google" might be heading in this | direction, but why can't I ask "Ok Google, I will take a photo, | then can you compress it and send it as an email attachment to | Dave from work." Or something along those lines... | garbagetime wrote: | I thought 21e8 was the next Google. | microtherion wrote: | Buying the kagi.com domain for a search engine might be | suboptimal SEO for people with some longer memories: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 | sam0x17 wrote: | Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and | infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi | has done a great job of solving some of the UX and privacy | problems endemic in online search these days, but at the end of | the day they could be snuffed out at the whim of the big search | providers (Google, Bing) if they decide to kick them off until | they can get their own indexing solution off the ground. If an | alternative search engine reached Bing's level of popularity, | this would undoubtedly happen. | | The same goes for DuckDuckGo and others. All of the above use the | Bing search API for the majority of their web results which for | most use cases is not economically sustainable. | | I do think there is a large swath of users who will pay a | subscription for a truly great search engine offering, but | indexing has to be at the core of this offering, at least for me. | If users realized this is just Bing results with a few | enhancements and additional result sources mixed in, they might | not be as willing to pay for what they could technically get for | free elsewhere, albeit with significantly less privacy. | | That said I wish Kagi all the luck in the world. As the original | dev who planned out and built the initial backend implementation | in Crystal and put together their early engineering team, I can | at least say they are building on rock-solid, very fast and | privacy-oriented foundations, and this is a truly web-scale | product in terms of the infrastructure design. | guntars wrote: | Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the | infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier | now than it was in the early 2000s. It's the ranking that's the | hard part. PageRank helped put Google on the map and they've | battled the hordes of low-ethics SEO practitioners ever since. | I think it's generally agreed that PageRank wouldn't cut it | today. | | I tried Kagi as the default search engine for a few days and | realized just how many little things Google does that I prefer, | but never noticed until now. Not strictly related to search | results, but things like converting units (Kagi has this, but | it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), | shopping results, the QA answers, etc. It's a ton of work to | implement all that. For now I switched back, but I'll keep an | eye out. | mmaunder wrote: | Know how you'll find the next Google? Same way those of us over | 45 found this one. | | A respected friend or colleague will tell you that the next | Google just works better. That's what made Google search win: it | just worked better. It's now I found out about it and probably | how you did if you're pushing 50. | | We didn't care about pagerank or know what it is. That came after | we used it and wanted to know why it worked better - or we wanted | to manipulate he results. | | We didn't read a blog post telling us what's good. | | We were using another search engine and Google arrived on the | scene and it was just WAY better. I was using alltheweb. Friends | were using other engines. In weeks, everyone smart and productive | was using Google. | | Google/Alphabet may be a large company now, but never forget how | they started. They were just so good we couldn't ignore them. | | That's how good the next Google will need to be. | jonathankoren wrote: | The problem with going up against Google isn't competing with | features, or even relevance. No one cares about features beyond | basic relevance, and relevance isn't enough to get people to | switch. | | You have to provide an excuse, or perhaps an experience, that | gets people to come back. Just one niche, is all you need. | | You're not competing with Google the search engine, or even | Google company. You're competing against google the verb. | legohead wrote: | 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 enough. | Circus Circus actually has a waterslide, but if you dive deeper | (read a hundred reviews manually) you find out parts are often | shut down, and the hotel itself is quite trashy and smells bad | and has bad service (explains the really cheap room rate). But do | you find that information on blogs? No way, they just include all | the hotels with pools and copy in the verbiage directly from the | hotel websites or other blogs. | | There's probably an actual traveler blog out there that tells you | all this and has great information, but it's hidden by all the | SEO optimized trash blogs. | | And this example can be applied to so many things we do all the | time. Try to find a product you want on Amazon without spending | half a day sorting through reviews and trash blogs. | | So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service. | I'd pay a few bucks to call up a service to answer these | questions definitively for me. | amelius wrote: | The future is trust networks. Where you trust a number of | friends, who trust other people, etc. and you can use a matrix | of trust to retrieve review scores, etc. | | Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the | reviews from other HN users ... | ip26 wrote: | Isn't that called a travel agent? | trh0awayman wrote: | There used to be a search engine in the mid 2000s that was just | like this. | | It was called ChaCha: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine) | smlacy wrote: | See also Aardvark: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) | | Acquired by Google in 2010 and ... | pooper wrote: | Fifty million dollars would change my life. I would take a | guaranteed fifty million dollars payout over one in ten | chance to get a billion dollars. | | What are the chances that I cumbents will stand by idly as | the "next Google" just takes over? Best case I can think of | is the incumbent imitates the upstart and becomes better. | buttersbrian wrote: | Yep. That was the idea. 'voice assistants' came along, smart | phones took off, and cell speeds became fast enough to make | ChaCha untenable. | | Source: worked at ChaCha. | sizzle wrote: | Wow where did you go after! AskJeeves? | SahAssar wrote: | > For example: best hotel pool in vegas. | | I get what you're saying but, does anyone really need the | "best" here? why not "good" or "great"? | [deleted] | anticristi wrote: | When I visited my mom in Romania, I was amazed that hair | dressers filled *exactly this purpose*. It almost felt like you | were "Googling" for 30 minutes and getting a haircut as a side- | effect. | | Customer: How is the newly opened Spa? | | Hair dresser: Other customers said the water was cold. | zie wrote: | Not limited to Romania. Librarians are also pretty fabulous | for local information and free. | hackernewds wrote: | Amex has a really good concierge that handles this. And it's | free with most cards. Absolutely underrated, especially when | you're traveling internationally | KerryJones wrote: | Exact same experience except with Iceland. Google "top | attractions in Iceland" and you get a bunch of garbage posts | telling you about the Blue Lagoon. I ended up reading an entire | book on iceland tourism and perusing many blogs and reaching | out to many friends, and the Blue Lagoon is definitely not one | of the top spots. | sydthrowaway wrote: | "best x in vegas" + reddit | | Duh. | SV_BubbleTime wrote: | > So, personally, I think the future will be actual human | service. | | I love the idea. However... | | You have invented an influencer hellscape. Not to mention the | complete subjectiveness of so many things. | [deleted] | hackernewds wrote: | Imagine all these humans will be paid / corrupted by the | destinations if they hold outsize influence | telchior wrote: | A paper was posted here a few days ago about how to use | individual tasks on crowdsourcing marketplaces to put together | articles on complex topics: | https://joe.cat/images/papers/knowledge-accelorator.pdf | | I can imagine the first two steps of their process working for | a human-assisted search machine. Specifically, the "finding | sources of information" and "filtering information" steps. But, | I'd imagine the human workers would still need more complex / | configurable search tools than Google (which is probably what | the workers in the study used to find their sources). | adventured wrote: | I agree with everything you said about the spam blog problem. | | And yet Travelocity (and others) would have told you how | terrible Circus Circus is in five minutes or less. | | 22,000 reviews, 3.2 stars out of 5, among the worst in Vegas | (among major hotels) with a gigantic number of reviews. Its | room rate alone helps you to begin immediately forming a good | conclusion about its quality. This isn't a subtle thing. | | Oh, but that's not realiable, one might say. Yes it is. It does | a great job of approximating the quality of the hotel in | question, and it's an exceptionally easy and fast means to | narrow with. It isn't a perfect approach (is it really a 3.1 or | 3.3 star quality?!?) and doesn't need to be, it just needs to | let you know that Circus Circus is garbage, and it does exactly | that. | chrisshroba wrote: | I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great | _actionable_ recommendations within an hour or two for: | | - good coffeeshops | | - tacos | | - Korean grocery stores | | - places that have traditional style al pastor tacos | | - finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store | | - finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe) | | - hot chicken | | - canolis | | and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you posted to | the /r/vegas subreddit asking about the coolest hotel pool in | vegas, you'd get a bunch of up to date info. | ggpsv wrote: | This tends to work for me as well but signal vs noise ratio | has worsened over time. Despite Reddit's questionable | decisions in the past years it still has useful information | for all sorts of things. | | Reddit's own search has become less reliable so I search via | DDG like `<query> 'site:reddit.com'`, falling back to `!g | <query> 'site:reddit.com'` if the former doesn't get me | anywhere. | airstrike wrote: | > Reddit's own search has become less reliable | | Not sure what you mean... It's always been an absolute pile | of shit | wormer wrote: | Yea I always just put in the question I want into DDG and | then just add reddit in the end. It's so much better than | any blog or anything because at least it gives the | semblance of real users giving their opinion. | hackernewds wrote: | What is DDG? | Engineering-MD wrote: | DuckDuckGo | nostromo wrote: | That's because Reddit is one of the few places left on the | web that is open (aka: not a walled-garden like Facebook) and | has people talking to people without financial incentive. HN | is another. | | Reddit is changing fast though. It's becoming more walled-off | every day as they push to become the next Pinterest, and it's | increasingly plagued with spam and bad actors. | | Google brought this upon us by lifting SEO spam websites to | the front page while pushing down helpful websites written by | humans without incentive, like Ask MetaFilter. | jimmygrapes wrote: | I have found that this only works if you take recommendations | with the understanding that you're almost always getting "the | reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning | might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated | thing, and have bonded over that to the point that other | recommendations between each other are heavily weighted and | rapidly creates a "go to" response. | | Example: check r/sandiego for [insert type of taco] | suggestions. There should be thousands of options if you're | actually from San Diego but you'll get 5 or 6 at most that | stand out a lot, and 1 or 2 that get the most up votes or | responses. | | Now that may in fact be the "best" (depending on your and | their definition) but you might also find that it's just the | restaurant that has the most interesting social media | presence, or the one you go to in order to signal that you're | "one of us". Maybe that's exactly what you want, maybe it's | what you want to avoid, but either way it's important to know | the mood and trends of the subreddit as well as general | reddit culture (and don't tell me it doesn't exist). | Nition wrote: | I think this is a really good observation, and "bonded | over" is a good term. At the extremes, people will even | recommend the thing and disparage other options when they | haven't tried either one themselves. They're just trying to | be part of the group. | Youden wrote: | You need to be careful about reading the subreddit rules when | you do this though. In my for-locals subreddit tourists | asking questions like this were a plague, even when there was | a very clear and prominent rule forbidding any kind of | tourism content. | | Also important to at least try searching at first. So many | people thought they had a super original question but it'd | really been asked and answered to death already. | rubyist5eva wrote: | > So, personally, I think the future will be actual human | service. | | So...a travel agent? Nothing beats talking to a person one on | one who is actually trained to do this stuff and personalize it | to their client. | | We've come full circle. | system2 wrote: | Tell me this engine can serve millions of queries per second with | all of these features. | | Will the search take 15 seconds or 1.5? | kegi wrote: | I personally think this new search engine sucks. There's 1000 | good reasons to create a new search engine to fight Google but | they don't get it, they don't have vision and their features just | sucks. | | "[...]We do not log or associate searches with an account.[...]" | why would I trust that and why would a create an account in the | first place ? | luckydata wrote: | Good luck with that. The approach is all wrong. | Barrin92 wrote: | 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 chosen social graph, everything's | abstracted away. | | And that's by the way why Google is still successful as well. | Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a | question in and it gives you answers without needing to do | anything else. The only way to beat that is to make it even | better while not making it more complicated which is very hard to | do. | nate wrote: | There's a book I love to send people: | https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001REFRZG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect | (old school. no kindle. just hardcover. :) ) "Something Really | New" How innovation works. First question in the book is: you | need to come up with a new idea for a faucet company. Customer | research says: Users want lots of variety in their faucets. | Everyone then immediately comes up with the same exact ideas: | faucets that are easily customizable. Faucets that have skins. | Etc. | | When really innovative stuff is just about removing steps. If a | process has 10 steps, remove as many as you can, and now you | have something truly innovative on your hands. | | I feel like Google did exactly that. Pre Google steps: search | for XYZ, wait, check first link, second link, spam, spam, check | next page. Post Google: search for XYZ, get XYZ. | horsawlarway wrote: | eh... except google is now basically just the pre-google | product: Search for XYZ, wait, skip promoted link, skip | second promoted link, third promoted link is actually the | direct competitor to what I fucking searched, click result | that was on top ten years ago, but is now almost below the | fold. | | Or worse - Search for exact term: get a page full of "Missing | X - must include X" links hidden in tiny text below a result, | click "Must include X" get the SAME FUCKING RESULTS again, | click tools, click the dropdown, select verbatim, finally see | decent results | dave_sullivan wrote: | Of course blog and SEO spam is such a problem on Google now | that it looks more similar to your Pre Google steps. | | I don't know how to easily fix that though. Simply "crawling | the entire internet" is still not a simple problem, let alone | doing something more useful with the result than google can. | Ahrefs is an interesting business but not what people mean | when they say the next google. "Machine learning" but I think | google is all over this already (and has been for years). | | Google does a bad job at getting user feedback about results | while reddit does better so people search reddit, maybe a | hybrid is an opportunity. | theiz wrote: | Google has these options, but these are solved by AI. So with | that you come in a catch22: people want personalised content, | but rather not have their data given away. If you open YouTube | without login, you get all kind of rubbish so you want to | login. Probably this is by design: you want what google wants: | results based on your data. Both happy. Now if there was a | privacy friendly way of doing this, I am all for using that. I | just don't see how, and I don't see who wants not to gain a | profit if you would have that data. So the next google probably | is another google. | thesuitonym wrote: | If Google has these options, why can't I search for any image | and have it not return any Pinterest results? If I search | with -site:pinterest.com, I get Pinterest's million alternate | tlds, if I just search for -pinterest, Google decides, in | their infinite wisdom, that I didn't actually mean that and | ignores it. | Sebb767 wrote: | > Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a | question in and it gives you answers without needing to do | anything else. | | And that's great if it works! The problem is that once it fails | (and, at least in my use-case, it does so quite often), working | with it becomes an absolute pain. | | I, too, would prefer an omniscient box perfectly answering my | questions. But it clearly doesn't exist. And a box with screws | to adjust so that I can eventually find what I'm looking for is | the second best thing. | rdiddly wrote: | All you have to do to improve on Google at this point is to do | less, make it less bad, i.e. a process of removals, not | additions. Just do the same thing, but without all the shitty | extra stuff. But then what's the business model? (Since that is | in fact most of the shitty stuff. Oh sure there's still the SEO | spam, and you're in that arms-race, like it or not, even if | you're not a _successful_ search engine, so you do the best you | can with that.) | | Speaking of doing less, I would love to see the web be more | hierarchical or semantic (but not necessarily "the semantic | web" as it's currently conceived). Google itself is what made | the world reorganize itself. A world where that kind of search | exists will reorganize itself around search, maybe not always | for the better. | | Concrete example of going from a hierarchical/semantic world to | a search-based one: Instead of finding your socks in the sock | area, which is inside your clothes area, which is inside your | "do private things" area, let's say now every sock has a | trackable chip in it similar to an AirTag and you just say | "Alexa where's the nearest pair of socks?" | | Pros: | | No effort spent on putting your socks in the sock place. Just | throw them anywhere. | | Instant access to socks. | | Cons: | | Big Tech, with all its limitations and machinations, now | mediates and controls the relationship between you and your | socks. | | You succumbed to the temptation to slack off, and now there are | socks everywhere. The Roomba doesn't even work right. | distrill wrote: | > just do the same thing as google | | i know what you're saying, but this isn't exactly a | triviality | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | 100% agree. Want a search engine that is better in every way | than Google? Give me Google from 2010 or so: | | 1. Much clearer delineations between ads and organic search | results. | | 2. For anything remotely commercial it wasn't the case that | literally the first 4 or 5 results were ads, pushing organic | results below the fold. | | 3. No AMP carousel | | 4. There wasn't a vomitous amount of those "tidbit" sections | - there were only a couple and they were usually helpful. | planb wrote: | Those 4 points can be solved by ad blockers or other | browser extensions. The real problem is that the results | below the ads are also ads, seo spam and clickbaity stuff. | simion314 wrote: | >I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people | love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. | | People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to | do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster | or better people want the customization. At my job we have | paying users that requests features that indeed are work | related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded people | will disagree and they prefer to bend their work to fit a | guru-s vision., | | Now my turn to ask, why do people like you think there is a | generic and basic solution that works at the same time for the | casual user and for the user that has a lot of tasks to | accomplish? Is there some theorem that shows this, like "The | GNOME theoreme of product design, keep removing features until | the shit convergence to the local minimum where you find the | minimum product and the minimum set of users possible. | notriddle wrote: | The biggest problem with GNOME, and with Mozilla, and with | almost everyone who's commenting on their choices, is that | all of them are shuffling deck chairs around on the Titanic. | | The Titanic didn't sink because of the arrangement of deck | chairs, and Mozilla didn't sink because of any features they | did or didn't provide (and GNOME didn't fail to achieve | significant market share in the first place because of | features either). The actual problem doesn't have anything to | do with the stuff on the deck at all. | | It's the one-two combination of vendor-lock in and bottomless | marketing budgets. Since most of the value of the Windows | platform and the Web is the immense amount of stuff that's | built on top of it, there's a huge lock-in effect that | prevents you from even reaching parity, much less exceeding | it. And in order to overcome the marketing budget and pure | inertia, you need to be ten times better, not just on par. | | If GNOME becomes as usable as Windows, it won't have anything | to do with what they actually do in the desktop environment | itself one way or the other, whether it's continuing on the | road they take now, or reverting everything back to the way | GNOME 2 was, it's totally irrelevant. _GNOME becoming usable | will be entirely because of Valve investing in Wine, combined | with a whole bunch of other apps moving to Electron and | shipping Linux versions because heck why not?_ | | Unfortunately, while they are probably already on par with | Windows, they aren't ten times better than the Mac: | | * The Mac has a bottomless marketing budget. Good luck | competing with that, GNOME. | | * They've shown a lot more restraint than Microsoft has, | probably because macOS is considered a niche product to round | out their catalog rather than being their one and only | operating system like Windows is for Microsoft. They have | even reversed course on a few anti-features, like adding back | USB-A ports to the Macbook Pro even though it made the laptop | slightly thicker. And unlike Windows RT, they didn't lock | down the ARM Macs. | | * Those tectonic shifts I mentioned that made Linux usable? | They also make the Mac usable, because Wine is open source | and Electron is basically its own operating system. Anything | truly good that GNOME does, Apple can copy it just like | Chrome copied all the really good stuff from Firefox. | simion314 wrote: | The issue in open source is with projects with not a strong | leader ship , then you get some wanna be designer copying | Apple because they read some book and now he thinks that | shit needs to look and feel different. Then you have | developers that want to work on new cool stuff and not | maintain existing code, so every few years you get a full | reset but because of inexperience or incompetence the new | version is buggy for a few years, it gets fixed but then | the developers are bored and want to rewrite it using some | new ideas/tech. | | What would work IMO is someone with money paying the | developers and the designer but force them do do customer | support, you don't play with the new shit until most | tickets are resolved and customers waiting for response are | satisfied. maybe a paid support would help too. | notriddle wrote: | Did you reply to the wrong comment? Because nothing you | said has anything to do with any of what I wrote. It's | not even a counterargument. It just reiterates the | original point, which I don't entirely disagree with, but | don't think has anything to do with GNOME's lack of | market success. | | Market success has almost nothing to do with product | quality. Well, okay, it does, but only in the sense that | you need to not actually be a total fraud. You can get | away with dismal quality as long as your marketing is | good [1]. In formal terms, software development is a | loser's game [2]. | | [1]: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ | | [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26660679 | | This implies that the churn you're complaining about has | nothing to do with market success. You might not like it, | but that doesn't mean the failure of Linux on the desktop | is actually caused by it. | KarlKemp wrote: | MacOS is the perfect example: it's both easy to use and the | preferred choice by many professionals. | | "Hold on", you say, "professionals want _options_ , like | user-expandable RAM etc". No, that's the misconception about | the concept of a "professional". Unless you are a hardware | engineer, tinkering with your notebook's internals is the | absolute opposite of professionalism, its either a completely | misguided waste of time and money, or a perfectly fine hobby. | | Real professionals get work done. Customizing their workspace | is something they feel ashamed to do, because it's | procrastination at best. | mrtranscendence wrote: | Because most users would rather not have to customize | anything. It's funny that your example is gnome, as most | users are not tinkerers and would never use Linux on the | desktop unless it were made so simple that (again) they would | not have to customize anything. | | Obviously there are exceptions, and some tools are so | advanced that it's necessary to be able to customize them. No | argument from me there. But for most tools, and most users, | there's just no hunger for customization. Almost nobody wants | to have to manage an array of options to do a web search. | jtbayly wrote: | Being forced to manage an array of options is very | different from being able to if the need arises. | simion314 wrote: | I agree, there are users that don't use customization for X | but they use it for Y, so you get the idiotic philosophy | that removes customization from X and Y. So you get GNOME | fanboys that love that 10 features they personally don't | use are removed but when the ones they use is removed their | brain finally realize that not all people use the exact | same options, the exact same workflows etc. | | What is even more shitty is when soem feature is removed | like the System Tray and first they pretend they do not | understand what you mean when you say this feature is very | important, then after someone wastes his time to explain a | n=th time again how working people use the System Tray | features at work or at home the GNOME dude finally admits | the issue and offers some workarounds that are not | equivalent but are "possible to do but with lot more work". | | On short, some people do work on the computer, some people | use search engines for work to find relevant stuff, this | people do not ask features like "please use the exact same | padding everywhere because I am OCD" or "please make those | buttons/corners or edges smoother so I don't cut my tongue | when I lick my screen", this people want the customization | to do a task. | | I am not sure why simple people have a SEGFAULT if they | randomly end up in the Advanced section of a settings | section, what do they expect when they open Advanced? | Google main page has a small link for Advanced search see | https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 how | many GNOME users got hurt by this link existing? | guelo wrote: | It's a dead end if you are an ads business obsessed with | reaching billions of eyeballs that don't want to spend any of | their attention. | | It is not a dead end if you're building a tool. | Nuzzerino wrote: | It never fails to amaze me how many people, apparently | triggered by these omens, come out and say this as if there was | never such a thing as a default configuration. "But you MUST | configure!" Um, no. | | Google has preferences also. | nicce wrote: | > That's why TikTok is so successful. | | More likely, it exploits human's cognitive weaknesses | successfully with a simple way. It learns how how people get | their dopamine dose. And there is no going back. You need more | and more, more extreme content. More polarization. All you need | to do is to open app and get that dose. Is it the same for | search engine? | | And people make more crazy stuff to get views. How this ends? | Not well, probably. | drusepth wrote: | >You need more and more, more extreme content. More | polarization. | | This seems a little sensational. Many people (myself and most | of my friends included) don't see _any_ "extreme" content or | polarization. A quick scroll through my feed is largely | nothing but magnet fishing, frog tracking, cats, DIY | projects, and geologists talking about rocks. It's enjoyable | and arguably a dopamine dose on-demand, but not necessarily a | road down more "extreme content and polarization". | nicce wrote: | I agree that it is a little sensational, as it happens | mostly when you like only limited groups of things. It gets | harder for algorithms to polarize if you "mess up" with the | algorithm and like many different kind of things. | | To clarify, I don't mean with "extreme" necessarily a bad | things, just content which gives you "extreme" emotions. | Budged wrote: | I don't think it is fair when we frame products as being | objectively and consciously nefarious in this way. Conjuring | images of executives rubbing their hands together, giddy with | enjoyment that the war is leading to more exciting content. | | These are firms that are meeting a legitimate need- and | that's the need to feel connected. Tik-tok provides that, and | very effectively. Plenty of people get genuine enjoyment out | of their product, and meaningful connections do happen thanks | to Tik-tok | nicce wrote: | Maybe it is not fair, but that is what happens and | eventually it is acknowledged by executives, which leads | for new design decisions based on that on TikTok and other | platforms to get more money and users. | | I don't think they fulfill some gap of the need of feeling | of connected in a real way. More like a bandage. We have | seen the development of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram. | Their audience is fading on countries who have used them | longer time, what went wrong? How is TikTok so good that | they try to adapt it on their platforms as well? No way to | connect? | | Short video clips which might or might not lead for a real | conversation. They might offer escape from reality in your | lunch break at work. | | I understand the perspective of "feeling connected". It | brings people together with similar mindsets on | entertaining way. Or at least people who seems to enjoy | similar things. | | On the contrary, is it different than some oldschool cults | or religions? Cults which are using psychology writings as | base for feeling mutual understanding of themselves. Or | religions which share same ideologies and use it as a | solution for their problems? | | Technology is advancing, is TikTok a modern solution for | finding your role and place in the world when it does not | make sense and you feel you are alone with your thoughts? | Maybe it is, maybe it then fills some gap. | | I agree that TikTok is providing entertainment (well, that | is what dopamine usually is). It is easier to hook people | on short videos which are done by global audience versus | Netflix where there is a limited amount of material and | they cost a lot to make, when audience on TikTok is mostly | making them free and you just pick suitable ones with your | algorithms for showing the other audience. | | However, there are many problems in this. How it can be | abused and how it creates people living on their own | bubble, like people on some extreme Facebook groups. When a | narrative includes only content that boosts your own | thoughts, a reality can be lost. We need some research on | this matter, but for some reason social media companies are | doing their best to prevent that. | | Someone people also really get addicted on the | entertainment and cannot stop using it. Well, same thing | can apply also for alcohol, but is addiction risk closer to | opiates for example? | | I don't really believe that executives are thinking for the | best of the people, so optimizing platforms to hook users | is a quite dangerous play. | ip26 wrote: | And do you have to carefully configure it for the ideal | dopamine hit? Do you have to configure a switchboard to get | the extreme content you crave? | spaniard89277 wrote: | There are plenty of profiles for "people". | | This is the thing. I'm the power user in my circle. People | comes to me for suggestions about pretty much anything | involving tech. Sometimes just because they see me with | different stuff. | | So if I'm not the average user I may look for other options, as | other people like me may do. If I find such options reasonable | for the average user, that will be my recommendation to them. | melony wrote: | Tiktok didn't dominate by appealing to niche tech power | users. | Nextgrid wrote: | TikTok's purpose and use-case is completely different from | that of a search engine. | airstrike wrote: | Tech power users are still a niche in virtually every use | case except maybe HN | Nextgrid wrote: | Tech power users (and power users in general I would say) | might have more money to throw at the problem. | "Nicheness" isn't necessarily a bad thing if your niche | is profitable. I heard somewhere that power-grid-scale | transformers are have insanely long lead times so the | industry most be pretty niche (when's the last time _you_ | needed one of those?) and yet I think we can all agree | that the equipment is valuable and I bet those | manufacturers are making bank. | ravi-delia wrote: | Tiktok optimizes for momentary engagement and fast-paced | social content. It turns out that's a niche that people | want filled, and the rapid bouncing of ideas between users | has created some very fun content which sometimes escapes | containment so I can watch it. But not everything is going | for the same goal, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if | more than a few players could really get in on that space. | For other use cases, customization may well win out over a | totally frictionless experience. A search engine is a tool, | and benefits from more options much more than Tiktok does. | Nition wrote: | I've been using Kagi for a little while. The customisation | isn't really necessary - the defaults work fine - but it's | quite nice to have when you want it. I've banned Pinterest from | the search results. | ravenstine wrote: | Where did this idea come from that all viable products have to | appeal to the widest possible audience? | abhinavsharma wrote: | While generally true, this isn't necessarily true if the | customization is well-layered and the user is at a dead end in | their search journey. | | Too many products equate frictionless == featureless these days | and there should be more power when the user needs it. | | That's why we built a search extension that improves upon | Google specifically in ways that it's weak | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 | http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives | bko wrote: | I agree with this, however it could be used as a platform for | others to provide their own config and you can piggyback off | the work of others. | | It's kind of like ad-blockers where you don't have to maintain | a list of domains to block. Others do that for you. And then | people could create hosted version of their simple box with all | the infra taken care of. | plutonorm wrote: | I agree, none of these are the next google. Except perhaps | YouWrite which taken to the limit is asking an AI for the | answer rather than searching the internet. | mostlysimilar wrote: | > a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you | answers | | Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ | want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the | web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want | better than I do. | | Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious | to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google. | | I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum | communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search | results no longer actually returning real web results. | jader201 wrote: | > but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next | Google" | | You're in the small minority. You're a power user that thinks | like a software engineer, and likes to deal with data in | lists. | | Most users are completely happy that Google tries to answer | their questions and (usually) provides the right answer front | and center. | idiotsecant wrote: | The death of the web is because most people don't want what | you want. They don't mind walled gardens, so long as they are | easy to use and have the content and connections that they | want to see. | | The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring | systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market | wants. | ouid wrote: | What the market has produced is not ipso facto what the | people want. The market is simultaneously optimizing many | things. Walled gardens are much better explained by | companies benefitting from not having to allow their | competitors access to their customers than by "being what | the people want". | [deleted] | Nextgrid wrote: | The market can trivially get stuck in a local maximum. | Nextgrid wrote: | People don't mind walled gardens because for a while | they've been good enough if not better than the previous | status-quo. However, those walled gardens are decaying such | that there might actually be demand for something better if | it existed. | airstrike wrote: | Or there just may be demand for walled gardens that are | better kept | rapind wrote: | I think you're conflating "tinkering" with simply desiring | a different feature set. In my case I actually want "less" | from Google in terms of number of features. I don't want to | tinker either, but we naturally reach for toggles as a way | to tell the system we want different (not necessarily more) | features. | | Most of my search results at this point look like a spam | ridden inbox from the mid-2000s. | baxtr wrote: | 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. | simulate-me wrote: | Desiring choice isn't elitist. Early web adopters were | passionate and willing to put in more work. Nothing wrong | with that, and nothing wrong with liking simple default | settings either. | mattcwilson wrote: | Wondering if, by "elitist", GP meant more like "out of | reach to many laypeople because of learning curve." Is | there a good single word for that? "Difficult" and | "complex" aren't quite right. | | Anyway - you're right, nothing at all wrong with wanting | choice. I think the point being made here though is that | "layperson gravity" / mass market appeals / lowest common | denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search | will be a niche product, forever. Even if we'd both like | that niche. | bamboozled wrote: | 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 ? | nobody9999 wrote: | >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 tool to drive user adoption /engagement, | that's no longer necessary as they have a (relatively) | captive audience and a (relatively) captive customer base | (advertisers). As such, quality search results are no | longer all that important. | | I'm not a Googler, IMHO, YMMV, etc. | chewz wrote: | > Give me links to websites. | | There are no more websites worth linking to anymore... If you | filter out all SEO spam there is barely few webpages left... | | Google is desperately trying to hide that fact. Most of the | web 1.0 can nowadays fit into small town telephone | directory... You do not need mulitibilion dolar business to | run web directory... | eitland wrote: | Try search.marginalia.nu (especially | https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random but try some | searches for git commands or history too, just remember it | is a search engine, not a conversation partner so only | include words that should be in the article you search for) | and come back to me afterwards. | | I thought like you that if even Google couldn't find | anything it was not there, but after discovering marginalia | I now know it is just Google that has become unusably bad. | | For day to day searching I now use Kagi and for me it is | easily worth 10 or maybe 20 dollars a month since it "just | works" unlike Google and has a larger index than | Marginalia. | | For now though Marginalia gets the money since Kagi is | still in beta. | nuancebydefault wrote: | Just searched for "linux users" in marginalia and google. | Google's first answer seemed spot on. (users command | usage); Marginalia provided me with in comparison | _marginal_ results. Maybe it is because google knows me | better then i am aware of. I really don't notice google | results getting worse, while i read so several times in | HN comments... | marginalia_nu wrote: | Yeah it's not a search engine for answering questions, | but for finding documents. You'll get along with it | better if you see it as something like grep for the web. | This is something I'm very intentionally trying to | accomplish, as it's something I feel Google has gotten | worse at. | emsixteen wrote: | > search.marginalia.nu | | This is just retrieving articles when I search, not | actual websites. Interesting if you're looking for | article related to search keywords I guess, but genuinely | unusable for actually finding something specific. | nuancebydefault wrote: | Gave it another try with "ssh scp". Google's first result | explains me how to use scp (ssh provides a hint about the | context), which was what i would be looking for. | Marganilla... not so much it seems | marginalia_nu wrote: | https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scp&profile=yol | o&j... tho | jtbayly wrote: | If so, then where can I search this small place? I'd love | to. | politician wrote: | I think this is exactly correct. | jfoster wrote: | Google used to be this. It was great back then. | | The "we answer your question" thing could be useful, but: | | 1. It should be in addition to (not instead of) the web | search results. | | 2. The answers can't be wrong. Google often gives such a low | quality answer that I no longer want to use it for this, | besides asking about the weather and sunset/sunrise. | Melatonic wrote: | Google still searches forums pretty decently - I think what | you are describing are two separate phenomena | | 1. Yes Google search has gone to shit - even putting stuff in | quotes now does not do an exact search (there is another | checkbox you ALSO need to use for that). It tries to be too | smart even when no user is logged in. | | 2. Giant mega forums like Reddit have really taken over. | Instead of a dedicated forum people just go to subreddits. | Personally I think it is good and bad and I still try to | actively participate in both. | mgkimsal wrote: | I'd spend more time in reddit if they had better search. | Animats wrote: | _I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of | these alternatives is a fundamental dead end._ | | I tend to agree. It's an attempt to deal with bad design by | putting in switches, options, and knobs to tweak. That's | because 1) it's easier than focus groups, A/B testing, and | taking video of users using the thing, 2) design takes some | artistic talent, and 3) it lets the programmer blame the users | for the problem. | | This is a vice of open source people. It's why Linux on the | desktop has never taken off. "Just edit | /etc/conf/foo/bar/prefs.txt" is not a design. Nor is "On the | visual side, you can modify everything about the way things | look, even being able to write your own custom CSS." | | I'm critical of Google's search, but this is not the way to fix | it. | | Consider just few more search options, alongside "News", such | as "Scholar" and "Noncommercial", for when you're overwhelmed | by crap. And "Popular", for when you want the crap. Don't add | another interacting dimension of tweaking. | robertlagrant wrote: | Possibly, but being able to add in your email and private | services is interesting. | | Crazy from a privacy perspective, but potentially very | seductive in terms of convenience. | mullr wrote: | For Kagi, at least, there's a very well integrated search | customization method that they didn't bother to show here. For | any search result, you can add a ranking adjustment for the | site it came from. This is directly in the results, so it's | very accessible, and quite easy. One of the choices is 'pin', | which is fantastic for technical work: 'sqlite.org' is now | boosted over everything else, for me, and it's exactly what I | want. I could just as easily take it out, if it becomes a | problem. | notatoad wrote: | There's a certain type of person who loves buttons and knobs. | They're also the same sort of person who might decide to make a | new search engine. But yeah, more knobs is definitely not | something the market is asking for. | DocTomoe wrote: | I remember when the same thing was said about Apple's | reductionist philosophy: "The market doesn't demand stuff you | can't configure to your needs". | | Turns out the market doesn't know what it wants until market | participants see what is being offered. | drozycki wrote: | Most people don't want to tinker if they can avoid it, but many | will come to appreciate the power of the advanced tab if and | when they need it. These startups should take the "people are | lazy" line of thinking to heart and make customization profiles | easy to share, whether by direct link posted to Slack or a | public customization "store" a la Chrome Web Store. | dannywarner wrote: | Google is anything but a simple box that gives you answers now. | It hasn't been that for a very long time. I wish it was. | | It is a box that gives you a screenfull of ads, some spam | copycat sites I wish I could remove, and a lot of clutter. As | many people on here have said before, it only gets away with it | because it owns the web browser through Chrome, Android and its | Apple deal for Safari. | hans1729 wrote: | >it only gets away with it because it owns the web browser | through Chrome, Android and its Apple deal for Safari. | | From someone who tried the switch to duckduckgo and uses ddg | as the default engine: I can't remember the last query I | typed without adding "!g". Google doesn't get my queries | because the service is shoved down my throat, it gets them | because the alternatives I tried are _worse_ wrt the total | scope of my queries. | richardsocher wrote: | Would love your feedback on https://you.com - actually has | most capabilities that G has and also has the same bangs as | DDG. | notreallyserio wrote: | What counts as customization? I might agree that most people | don't care to change font sizes or colors or even themes but | they might want to be able to tell Google to never return | results from a particular site. Is hiding results from a site | customization? Is it the sort of customization that would | overwhelm a user if they saw it as an option? | richardsocher wrote: | At https://you.com we believe in choice but not force it. It | will just work out of the box, but as folks shop or get really | into something like coding - we have heard from many users that | they like or dislike certain sources or apps. Like w3school - | it's in every search engine but some folks hate it so they can | downvote it. | | I personally benefitted a lot from the ability to like the | reddit app once and then see more real reddit results? | b8 wrote: | Kagi requires for an account to be registered and will charge a | monthly rate when it's out of beta, so I don't really think that | it'll be a threat to Google. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-05 23:00 UTC)