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I think the most surprising vulnerability for Google is web search. Google has been pushing away from web search for years now, with moves like AMP, vertical se
by lubujackson 9y ago
I think the most surprising vulnerability for Google is web search. Google has been pushing away from web search for years now, with moves like AMP, vertical searches and quick answers that keep you on their domain.
If you look at the mission statement for their search team it is now something like "answer your questions" - which is great 90% of the time, but what no longer exists (with most people not realizing) is a good general search engine for the WEB, meaning the collection of websites out there.
There is no longer a sense of serendipity or of finding a cool new website, and maybe finding web pages on the web is just a nostagic thing with no real benefit, but there's no doubt that Google has moved away from that as real objective. The reality is that the web has become overwhelmed by listicles and minimum pages that go one inch past Google's definition of spam, but otherwise muck up the web. It would be amazing for a search engine to sift past all that cruft and low-effort material to find actually interesting and unique content.
In a way, simply by not being Google is already an advantage because everyone is catering to Google. If you use a different standard you can easily get different results - it's just a matter if those would be useful for anyone? Everyone mostly wants to see the "right" answer and Google has conditioned us to expect it.
- tspike 9y agoIf someone nailed discussion search, I'd have no use for Google for 90% of my searching. As it is, most of my searches are a series of: site:<reddit/ycombinator/stackoverflow/tripadvisor/random niche forum.com> "something someone interested in the same question/topic would say" .. all in an attempt to filter over-commercialized bullshit. There's an opportunity here for a startup to capture an audience hungry for real information and leverage them into becoming the next hub for over-commercialized bullshit.
- dvddgld 9y agoI use the same kind of search for most of my searching. Does anyone have any tips to add to this? e.g specific sites for any particular demands, or any other tricks
- fosco 9y agoFiletype: is also a favorite of mine. One thing to note when using filetype in bing by specifying xls it also catches other file extensions (xlsx) while google in my experience only would find xls. Yes I use bing sometimes and especially when troubleshooting Linux error logs I find it parses a copy paste better. Just my experience. Important to note I do not use profiles.
- dvddgld 9y agoThanks for the tips! I need to try bing more often
- tomashertus 9y agoI highly recommend to look for real examples on Google Hacking Database[1] for more tips & hacks. The audience of this site are mostly people looking to use google to find exploitable websites, but it shows techniques used to narrow your Google Search. 1. https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database/ https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database/
- dvddgld 9y agoOh wow, thanks for the tip!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ehnto 9y agoThat's been the most annoying part of search for a while now. Most searches result in hyper commercialised results, with SEO heavy sites winning out, and of course SEO heavy sites are going to be sites selling you stuff. If you're searching for a real human's thoughts on a particular mountain bike for one example, it will be nothing but product pages. Add in the word Reviews and you get the productized review sites. Even searching for "Best trails in {my area}" gives me an ecommerce site's blog laden with product links and not-so-subtle sells. Want to read a discussion about a book? Google will only show you product pages with review sections on the first page, on the next page the search results have already devolved into unrelated nonsense or spin sites. It's hard to find the humans on the internet through all the commercial pages. I can't blame Google entirely of course, they are helped by the SEO industry's incessant bombardment in the 2010ish era that filled the web with so much pointless crap, and the ongoing efforts of e-commerce stores with deep pockets to be the only heard voice for particular subjects.
- doomlaser 9y agoI do a lot of Twitter searches for that kind of thing when I want raw feedback about a particular topic. I've had a 't' custom search engine address bar hotkey for Twitter for years.
- md224 9y agoKind of interesting how searching social network content can often be more useful than searching the entire Internet. Edit: makes me wonder if the web is evolving in the direction of more social/curated search, less global search
- Trav5 9y agoYeah, social media is just too easy to use (and free). When people take the time to make a website, they often commercialize it, then it's not really a personal website anymore.
- rorykoehler 9y agoThe issue here is that the same companies who can afford good SEO can afford Google Adwords. While a search engine that can find you non-commercial information would be very useful it is, un-ironically, very hard to find a commercially viable business model for such a service. The profit incentive that needs to be attached to everything in a our current commercialist world really narrows the scope of feasibility for potentially cool services.
- astonex 9y agoIf you look at Naver Search in Korea, most of their search results focus on results from community discussion sites (called cafes), blogs, etc. instead of commercial websites.
- elsewhen 9y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
- nine_k 9y agoI wonder what payment model so you envision for such a search. I mean, even if you're a nonprofit only caring about the benefit of humankind, you'll need to cover operations expenses.
- tspike 9y agoI'd pay $20/month if it was actually good.
- sharemywin 9y agoand how much would you pay for that search? Nothing because google has devalued it to zero because it subsidizes it with product and service search.
- tspike 9y agoIf it were a top notch product, I'd probably pay $20/month for it.
- madisfun 9y ago> site:<reddit/ycombinator/stackoverflow/tripadvisor/random niche forum.com> "something someone interested in the same question/topic would say" That's why I keep ddg.gg as my default search engine. Ctrl-K, and type: !r "something" !hn "something" !so "something" !ta "something" And for some niche sites I submitted "bang" suggestions which were accepted. Works great for technical search, e.g. !cppr for C++ reference. In a rare case I need Google, I just add !g to my search.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoThe reality is that the web has become overwhelmed by listicles and minimum pages that go one inch past Google's definition of spam, but otherwise muck up the web. It would be amazing for a search engine to sift past all that cruft and low-effort material to find actually interesting and unique content. HN.
- junkscience2017 9y agoGoogle has 80% marketshare in search. This despite Microsoft pouring billions into Bing and hardwiring it into Windows. Websearch has passed over the great divide and is now a utility. "Beating" Google in search is only half of it...without the advertising business, you can't survive long enough to show off your tech. Without the 80% mobile platform, you don't have a way of putting it in front of people when they need answers right away. Of course this all assumes you can ACTUALLY build a better search...doubtful, Google may be evil but the search is still giving people what they want Accept that 1998 is gone and that window has closed
- njarboe 9y agoI would pay at least $10 a month for a good search engine, like google when it first started. Maybe that web is gone, so it could not work, but in the old days one could copy almost any error message and get a great explanation of the problem. I bet at least a million other people would too. Maybe $10 million a month in revenue could support a user focused search engine?
- junkscience2017 9y agothat's hardly "beating" Google, or even DDG for that matter
- perfmode 9y agoGoogle search earns over $138,000,000 per day. Best of luck outgunning them.
- justboxing 9y agoSource?
- infogulch 9y agoGoogle made $79B from ad revenue in 2016[1]. $79B in a year / 365 days per year = 218M per day. So GP underestimated by quite a bit. Or put another way: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+ad+revenue http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+ad+revenue [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... (Brought to you by Google Search: so ubiquitous it has become it's own meme.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- csallen 9y ago> "…maybe finding web pages on the web is just a nostalgic thing with no real benefit, but there's no doubt that Google has moved away from that as real objective." I can't think of an example where people en masse have stopped using something useful to replace it with something that provides "no real benefit".
- lern_too_spel 9y agoYou fundamentally don't understand AMP. I proactively choose AMP results over others. I prefer using Google to search for news because I know that (like the Bing app) it will show me fast-loading AMP results. DDG could serve news articles from its own AMP cache and remove that differentiator, but DDG seems to have simply ceded the "fast search" market to Google and Bing.
- whyagaindavid 9y agoAMP is both a data saver and avoids nagging'install our app' modal or redirect to play store.
- dingo_bat 9y agoIronically the bing news page is several times faster to load than the google news page. The difference is more pronounced on mobile. I don't know why, but it's funny.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoWhy is that ironic?
- dingo_bat 9y agoBecause Google news is notorious for using and promoting amp links, and the entire point of that is to load fast. But they lose to a simple non-amp webpage.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoGoogle News itself is not an AMP page, nor does it promote AMP pages, as you claim. As I pointed out in my original comment, Bing also uses an AMP cache and sends users to AMP pages from the Bing app, which is why saying that anything different about them is ironic makes little sense.
- 9y ago
- toast0 9y agoIt is definitely possible to be better at web search than Google, but it's going to be hard to make a significant dent. A) doing websearch well is expensive B) doing websearch well consistently over time is very hard -- if you remember when Google started, about every 6 to 9 months a cool new websearch would come out, and 5 months later would be garbage. Google managed to buck that trend, mostly (it still goes through cycles of crap results) C) even if you have the money to do it right, and consistently do it right, you have an uphill battle of market perception. Users will perceive Google results as better than yours, as long as they're marked as coming from google: even if the Google results are perceived as worse when compared to yours without branding. I think filtering out crap, without filtering out the long tail of esoteric content sites would be key to getting better results. But you have to be prepared to play a long game on marketing and user acquisition.
- speedplane 9y agoBing has spent untold amounts of money on in-house development and buying up companies and they've barely made a dent. I'm sure there are various reasons for that, but it at least suggests that having smart people and lots of money is not sufficient to crack Google's monopoly.
- WalterBright 9y agoBing went after Google's center. The way to go after a dominant player is go after a market niche they are ignoring, then expand from there. See "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Christensen.
- jacksmith21006 9y agoEasier said then done. MS spent billions and has not been able to create a competitive search engine even with many advantages over Google. It is the same with browsers and mobile.
- marcosdumay 9y agoYep, great book to read. Read it and you will see that: - You can't just take incumbents out of the market at will, there are some external conditions that must be right; - Not every niche is the same, you must get the correct one; - That is a completely inverted way to think about the problem. You first innovate (or lay plans to do so), then you start looking for niches your innovation fits. If somebody really wants to try to apply "The Innovator's Dilemma" disruption onto Google, it's not a bad idea to look at posts asking "and how do you expect to monetize this?" on this thread, and try to answer that question.
- m-i-l 9y ago> I think the most surprising vulnerability for Google is web search Is web search still the main problem, now so much content has moved off the web and into apps and walled gardens? Could the big challenge for Google be a startup that somehow solves the problem of searching all of that content (assuming that is a problem which can be solved)?
- jglukasik 9y agoICYMI, there was some discussion on HN two weeks ago[0] around https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ As opposed to a search engine that helps you find exactly what you're looking for, I see as wiby as more of a "serendipity engine" that helps you find what you weren't looking for. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15633361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15633361
- agumonkey 9y ago3rd time this month some say this here (me included). The web shifted, it's not people putting out webpages, it's a market, Google was necessary to find its way in the jungle, but now it's a structured space, and google moved to other things. Also, technology has spread all around, so you can have your own indexing/search ..
- oliv__ 9y ago>There is no longer a sense of serendipity or of finding a cool new website, and maybe finding web pages on the web is just a nostagic thing with no real benefit, but there's no doubt that Google has moved away from that as real objective I've been working on a sort of "social network for links" for that exact purpose: I personally love finding cool new websites and links, and I just don't see that happening with modern search engines. So I made Float[1]. I like to think of it this way: if Google is for search, then Float is for exploring. Still pretty early but core features are here...let me know what you think! [1] https://float.am https://float.am
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jpalomaki 9y agoFrom the article "A startup has no chance against the A team from an internet giant. But they should have a very strong chance against a C team" I think this is the challenge for anybody trying to take on Google with internet search. Google makes most of its money from the search. They are probably smart enough to keep the "A team" assigned to this problem. Hackers dislike the direction Google Search is taking, but I think they are trying to defend themselves against the competition. No startup can challenge Google on the hardcore internet search. Where they might be able to do that is providing direct answers to most of the questions. This is because for large part of the questions you don't need to index the whole web (just my gut feeling). Get data from Wikipedia, social media sites, price comparison engines etc. The problem becomes more of building partnerships than pure technical stuff.
- notduncansmith 9y agoThat’s still there, but it’s not waning because of the search engines, it’s because more and more content is getting created within silos and walled gardens. Ain’t nothin’ the search engines can do about it either, except build decentralized search so that users can search from their own vantage point within the closed ecosystem, erasing the functional distinction between that and the open web for most users; but that may not provide sufficient short-term incentive for any corporation to make that play. If I had to bet on one it would be Apple.
- vit05 9y agoI think we will see a battle for DISCOVERY option. The search will be for things that you need an answer. But discovery is something bigger. Like when you click the Magnifying GlassIcon on Instagram, or you open Pinterest. They give you things that are randomly generated but is not exactly from people that you are following. The best tool to suggest things that interest, that you need or want without collect too much personal information could kill all 3 with just one shot.