8 ms·

Not only is it possible to beat Google, it could happen sooner than we think

92 points by Nuzzerino 9y ago

walterbell 9y ago
What are some business models that could support a user-oriented search interface? Probably not advertising, if (big if) the new approach will return better search results than Google. Subscriptions have only worked for a few well-known services with exclusive content. Would users be willing to learn a more powerful interface, if they consider current search engine results “good enough”? Could Wikipedia or Archive.org address a subset of the search market, since they offer user-focused services? Archive.org already crawls a subset of the web.
- ybrah 9y ago
  Most people want the accessibility achieved through quick searches on their phones. The only users that would use a more powerful interface would be professionals. The professionals that would use it would be researchers, developers, and health practitioners.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    I wonder what those professionals use today: google’s advanced search interface, niche site search, social media search, libraries, paid services, bloomberg, lexis-nexis ..?
    - ohtwenty 9y ago
      As far as I'm aware, in the Netherlands wrt health: specialised sites. Google is all WebMD or unverifiable claims, or just doesn't go in depth. So you check your UpToDate, or pubmed, your country's/specialization's current guidelines, farmacotherapeutisch kompas for medicine (https://www.farmacotherapeutischkompas.nl/ https://www.farmacotherapeutischkompas.nl/ - search for medicine and find dosage, interactions, etc). Google is often good enough for a reminder, but won't hold up for specific knowledge or minute details. So at most that Google the name of the service to search on there. Which is why I use ddg - if I know what website/information store I'm going to end up going to, I might as well use the !bang to go there directly. And you know which tools to look at because you're given them when you're studying.
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    There's no reason that a powerful interface can't have an arbitrarily-designed, simple interface built on top of it. That's how computer systems generally work.
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  There are probably many that I haven't thought of. It may be possible that it is next to impossible to create both a better experience for the users, and create more revenue for the company at the same time. It doesn't need to have a huge amount of users, it doesn't need to get the majority of the market share, and it doesn't need to earn more revenue, or even any revenue at all, in order to deliver a better user experience. Such things are not mutually exclusive. I believe this is most likely to happen with the help of peer to peer technologies, combined with a healthy synergistic ecosystem of content curators, content providers, and content consumers. Steemit is a crude proof of concept for such a system. In Steemit, comments and posts are scored with a reputation algorithm, and assigned a tag. There's absolutely no reason why web links can't be associated with an arbitrary number of contextually-weighted tags, and a contextual reputation algorithm. Everything that Google does could be done in a peer to peer manner, with each user bearing a small piece of the responsibility. Wikipedia is a great example of this, with many users contributing to the system. No single company could ever produce the amount of content that the Wikipedia userbase has created. Even though Wikipedia uses a centralized foundation and centralized server, the editing culture itself is decentralized, with a set of principles being the main driver of decision-making. I bring up blockchain technologies, much to the disgust of many users on HN, but only because I see those technologies as lowering the barrier to creating systems such as Wikipedia, through automating, standardization, and enforcement of some of the mechanisms. It also creates a guarantee that a central authority doesn't exist and therefore cannot be manipulated in subtle ways by those in positions of greater power - That is a big appeal factor for a significant number of users, even if it is not the majority.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    >>> There are probably many that I haven't thought of. It may be possible that it is next to impossible to create both a better experience for the users, and create more revenue for the company at the same time. Yes. Google cannot be beaten. I don't think that any domain has more money to offer than advertising/marketing and certainly not easier. Then the real time auction and pricing systems that run Google are truly incredible. Business wise, google is milking the perfect cow perfectly. There isn't a better cow or a better milking strategy.
- ProxCoques 9y ago
  There has been at last one attempt at some of that: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/ex-google-employees-launch-rival-search-engine-879172.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... I think it folded after a year.
oh-kumudo 9y ago
So no evidence is offered, only imagination.
elvinyung 9y ago
It feels like this Quora answer explains why Google is successful, but doesn't really discuss or provide any compelling evidence as to why the author thinks it's "becoming more and more likely to happen soon". Also, > I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange itself can happen on a peer to peer basis ...
- apatters 9y ago
  "Number of people who tipped the author for this content" could be a very interesting search signal. It costs you nothing to link to someone. It costs you money to tip them.
  - notatoad 9y ago
    Yeah, but if it becomes known that that is a search signal, it effectively lets people purchase their way up the search rankings by paying other people to tip them. You'd have a much smaller pool of legit tips to overcome, because so few people pay for content, before you could become the most tipped article for any given topic.
    - Nuzzerino 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
    - TuringTest 9y ago
      You have just described paid advertising.
  - fooker 9y ago
    Also very easy to game. You can tip yourself.
electic 9y ago
Where do you start with this one? But okay, here goes: 1. The post assumes that the search result quality is not good. This simply is not the case. Users say the search results are good. Could they be better? Sure. Are they terrible? No. 2. The post assumes users want transparency on the search algorithm. This clearly is not the case. The whole reason that google became what it is today is because of the lack of clutter and good search results. If you remember Altavista then you remember users constantly having to fidget with all these knobs in the advanced section to get relevant search results. Lycos, excite, etc weren't much better. I remember using Google for the first time and it just worked. 3. The post assumes that users want deep customization. This again is not the case. Users want less clutter, less knobs, and a faster search experience. Google is delivering that. 4. The post assumes that any startup with a better algorithm can beat google. However this is not the case. Google has deep search integration with mobile providers such as it's own Android OS and also iOS. it also has it's own browser (Chrome) and has paid deals with Mozilla. Obviously, both browsers default to Google when you type something in the search field. Not to mention, the leading IOT devices all connect to Google to find results when it needs to search the web. And for safe measure, Google has come out with its own voice assistant device, Google home, to safe guard against any shenanigans from Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa that might happen in the future. It is heavily subsidizing the price to make sure it has a strong horse in the voice game. Integration aside, it also has scale. It crawls most of the internet several times a day. That's no small feat and it is quite hard for a startup to just replicate that with funding. I mean, even that won't cut it. Google is now even using machine learning to understand relevant pieces of information on a webpage so when you query it by typing on your keyboard, by voice, or future mind control it delivers the answer you were looking for. The only valid point the post makes is that Google has squashed competition by buying any startup that remotely could threaten it's position...for safe measure. I'll give the author that.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
  I'll come out and say it: Google's search quality is terrible. It's better than the competition, but that's a low bar. Most people do pretty good with Google simply because 1. their searches are "solved" by simply reducing the search space to pages that contain the combination of rare words in the query (e.g. "correct battery horse staple" is referring to the xkcd comic with high probability), along with the social signal of backlink ranking, 2. Google has trained us to use it effectively and so our expectations for search match that which Google can effectively deliver, and 3. All the meta-signalling that Google uses to turn obtuse queries like "that movie with the guy who does the thing" into the correct answer. But in general, if you can't figure out the exact words that are on the page you're interested in, the illusion fails and it reveals itself to be barely more than grep on steroids. Search is still waiting to be blown wide open and it very well could be by a competitor.
boomboomsubban 9y ago
A better search could be made and likely is out there already, but one sums it up best. How often do your peers use Yahoo? Still, the company gets enough hits to be worth billions. Part of that is a global market, Yahoo is big in Japan supposedly, but part of it is your Uncle having made his decision pre-dotcom crash.
lopatin 9y ago
I suspected the author was dreaming when he said the lack of rich customization of the search algorithm is taking away from the end user experience. People don't want to learn about the intricacies of your search algorithm. You're assuming they care. All they want to do is type their question into the magical text box. He also seems to not understand the value that search advertising provides. Search advertising is a win-win for businesses and consumers. If you see it as something parasitic that needs to be fixed, I can't take you seriously about "how Google will be beat". Then I read the last sentence, quoted below. Sigh. Nothing serious here folks, carry on. > I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange itself can happen on a peer to peer basis (via a synergistic ecosystem of content curators, content providers, and content consumers).
- QAPereo 9y ago
  How is search advertising a win for consumers?
  - tluyben2 9y ago
    Good question, when the ETH contract drivel appeared at the end, I hope he is somehow meaning to pay users Ether to see ads. ProofOfView whatever. People would fix Google if it had an API but it would mean censorship; I would add a ‘credible sources only’ button which is not good for the web but it is what I want. I do not care for traveldiscounters’ SEO or SO or Wikipedia scrapers; I care about the originals. That would greatly improve the experience, but in general it is bad for the internet because someone decides who is credible. Now there I see a place for Blockchain.
    - Nuzzerino 9y ago
      Forget about Ethereum for a minute. In the case of Wikipedia, no single company can produce the amount of content that they have on Wikipedia, especially with that reasonable standard of quality. Why is that? Wikipedia has a decentralized culture where principles are the main driver of decisions that are made. Wikipedia's collective Administrators, Bureaucrats, and Stewards do not compose a top-down management structure. It was not easy to do, requiring strong community outreach, culture building, and hard work. It is unlikely to be repeatable in the same fashion given that most Internet users feel they can find what they need online (the innovator in me disagrees with that sentiment, and I am very much aware that my opinion is a minority). Ethereum, in my mind, is merely a way to help automate, standardize, and enforce similar systems. If it can be achieved without any sort of blockchain, like in the case of Wikipedia, then great. But perhaps the barrier to doing so is just out of reach without the help of the technology. Yes, having a central authority decide who is credible is exactly bad for the Internet, and Ethereum is a possible means to facilitate alternatives. What other alternatives would there be?
thisisit 9y ago
Is it possible? Absolutely but it won't last very long. Google would have learned from Yahoo's mistake. They will acquire a company if there is even a whiff of serious competition. Whether that better algorithm will end up in Google search is another matter.
hildaman 9y ago
I switched to DuckDuckGo - it isn’t as good as google, but it is 90% of what I need. For the rest I have to slightly tweak my search criteria - but that is not a bad thing because it forces me to use my little gray cells. YouTube and Gmail substitutes and then I am Google free.
- igorbark 9y ago
  What do you use for maps?
  - hildaman 9y ago
    Huh got me there. I have started to trust Apple maps - not as good as Google though. Hope this gets commodotized though.
  - patkai 9y ago
    https://wego.here.com https://wego.here.com
  - 477353468463695 9y ago
    https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/
- surfparty 9y ago
  Have you looked at protonmail and Vimeo? Both have somewhat of a free offering, although the main product is a few bucks. You know what they say about that though, you being the product and all. For maps, check out openstreetmaps. Not quite as good as google, buy pretty solid. And you can run your own instance. Heck, you could also run your own email without much hassle.
  - Insanity 9y ago
    Protonmail does have a free offering as well if their mail service
  - murukesh_s 9y ago
greglindahl 9y ago
As someone who tried to compete with Google in search, it strikes me that everything he brings up was also true, and well known, in 2007 when we started Blekko. Cuil, SearchMe, and Blekko didn't fall into the UI trap that he outlines. None of us succeeded that well, but that's a different issue.
- ProxCoques 9y ago
  I remember thinking "SearchMe" was a rather odd name at the time. But why, exactly? Search me.
- murukesh_s 9y ago
  What happened to Blekko? If you don't mind about sharing the "different issue"!
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Well, it's always hard to say why something didn't work, but we certainly tried a very different user interface with our Izik UI, in which ambiguous queries got up to 200 answers organized into categories.
    - Nuzzerino 9y ago
      I'm curious as to how it failed. Did people use the site, and hate it? Did people join and then not return, or were those metrics unavailable? Were the operating costs abnormally high? Did the company receive a lot of users, but fail to receive enough revenue to cover even a normal amount of operating costs? Seems like one could narrow it down with the help of today's analytics tools. I'm also curious if you have kept up with other web search technology efforts since then or whether you moved away to other things. There's definitely some things that don't add up.
richard___ 9y ago
I've been thinking for a while that a conversational search engine is the next iteration of search. If you query a human expert, you don't expect the correct answer immediately - it comes by filtering out possible answers with subsequent clarifying queries. The next gen search engine should be this way.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  I just add another word to the original query and hit return.
  - richard___ 9y ago
    Let's say you're reading this research paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05407.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05407.pdf I want to know: "In Rob Fergus' paper intrinsic motivation and self-play, how is it that the reward for agent A can be based on the time taken for agent B's task, when agent A and B are run sequentially, and agent B runs after agent A?" Can Google answer this? No. Is NLP smart enough to answer this? Probably not. But the question itself is hard to write in one sentence. Complex queries are best structured as conversations, with clarifying back and forth, Socratic method style, like if you're asking a professor a question about hard science.
    - Nuzzerino 9y ago
      Funny enough, I once was on a team that was working on this exact technology. Sadly the company was dysfunctional beyond redemption.
rdlecler1 9y ago
To get people to switch the new solution needs to be 10x better. It’s not clear how you could do this without Google’s day network effects. Someone like SoftBank would have to go out and bets $10b on a search startup, but even then, Google is not going to be outsmarted by a new algorithm or interface. We’d need to move to a whole new mode of computing. Mobile has been the biggest threat yet.
tluyben2 9y ago
I believe not; there is no need unless their ads become too intrusive. When we have issues with a technical issue in China, I start the VPN and search with Google. What takes my Chinese colleagues a lot of time, is immediately found in Google, even for vague components. Specsheets they did not receive are easily found on Google but not on the engines they have. It is not that we cannot think up a better Google, but I believe that means better NLP, not a better backend. Google would destroy anything that comes close, simply because it will be something they can bolt on in no time and then they have the data, money and infra.
nocoder 9y ago
I don't think Google search will be beaten. I think the whole current concept of search by going to specific URL/app, seeing a list of search result will become obsolete. We are already seeing that with voice based UI where you want an answer not a list of pages. The second part will be that lot of stuff that you care about will be known by google/Alexa and will be readily available so no need of searching. This also is already happening with google launcher on android where things like news and score about my favourite teams, travel times to airport or workplaces being shown nearing the time of travel along with routes so I don't have to search for any of these. This can be further integrated with a cab being available just when you need to leave. All of these earlier would have involved some kind of searches. iMho this will be the natural progression. So if you are creating a better google search please stop you will be out of business before you start. This is no longer about standalone search but a larger ecosystem around the information needs.
murukesh_s 9y ago
I switched to bing long time back and haven't felt any difference. They even copied google look and feel to great extend. I did it after google started showing more details in my search timeline than i wanted to see, with it's integration with gmail with which google started scanning my emails for ticket purchases, product orders etc and whenever i searched that product - it says you have purchased this product with order tracking number blah blah. I am sure bing/msft also does everything they can to 'understand' me, but at least they don't see my browsing history or emails. Now back to beating Google - I do believe it's possible, but Google will soon catchup with any potential competition. They will catchup because it's their bread and butter and they have perhaps the worlds biggest concentration of technical personnel. The best way to beat any product/company is to be considerably better than it in at least few areas, given the scale of web indexing, that is a very very tough job only few companies can pull through. Microsoft has/had a good chance to beat Google, but Microsoft is considered a bigger evil/corporate than Google, so they have a slim chance to emotionally overcome Google, not to mention technical capability. But they can perhaps open source bing in an effort to beat Google, provided they have the will and moolah to do so. When I mention open source, it's not the code, but the underlying search index, exposed as an API, free of use for anyone/any product. That will dramatically shift the emotion as well as the usage towards bing. I even mentioned this during an internal bing meetup event (I am part of a bing beta testers group), but of course no one listens. A startup can also try to beat Google in their wildest dreams if they can associate themselves with the younger crowd like snapchat did and the younger crowd somehow finds it hip/cool to not use Google and use that service instead, and provided they get a decent web search data/index from established competition like bing or they manage to index themselves. These are few of the possibilities.
- nickelbox 9y ago
  I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about Microsoft making their index public. Maybe among certain crowds like this, but what would it gain us? I couldn't just send a PR to help improve it; the only benefit I can see is transparency and perhaps a fun, maybe even useful visualization. Also, the image of a "hip" Google competitor like Snapchat seems tremendously unappealing, personally.
zilchers 9y ago
This was non-sensical...someone will compete with google because Blockchain? There’s no issue with current payment models, you don’t need a trustless peer to peer system to beat google, you need to significantly change the nature of what it is to search. If instead of finding q&a’s on stack overflow an AI took my question, looked at my code, and answered / fixed it, that would be a game changer. Using a different UI than google? Has happened, will happen again, not really relevant (google itself has revved it’s ui extensively).
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  If you read through the rest of the comments here, you'll see these points were debated or addressed already.
  - always_good 9y ago
    You may have responded, but I can assure you they were not addressed.
haglin 9y ago
I have tried not to use Google, but I always come back. Results from Altavista, Bing and DuckDuckGo are so much worse. Note, it's not that Google has personal information on me. I'm not logged in, my cache is cleared, I use a VPN and google.com/ncr when it was available. Not sure how they do it. Perhaps their tracker sees how long people have visited a page and then they give those pages higher priority. Perhaps other search engines can do a better job, but they had over a decade to improve their results and they are still far off.
- RandomInteger4 9y ago
  Perhaps it's canvas fingerprinting. [1] I saw an article from 2014 saying ghostery works to defeat it, but haven't looked further and I don't use ghostery, so not sure if that's true still. You can test it here: https://browserleaks.com/canvas https://browserleaks.com/canvas [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-sites-can-fingerprint-you-online-even-when-you-use-multiple-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-s...
- 477353468463695 9y ago
  In my experience, the main-difference between Google and other search engines, aside from personalized results, is that Google tries very hard to interpret your query. For example, if you search for some programming topic, it will generally pull results more towards the top, if they reference the current or a recent version of whatever programming language/tool you're searching for. That helps, if you just want to type in "how do i do this? [programming language]" or similar. In other search engines, you'll instead first search "how do i do this? [programming language]", then possibly not really get any good results and then instead search for "how do i do this? [programming language] [current version]". This is how Google worked as well, some few years ago. Knowing what keywords to type in to get the right results was an actually valuable skill ("Google-fu"). Today's Google is instead designed to minimize the need for skill in phrasing your query. Great for the average user, but in my experience, if you do still possess Google-fu, then this interpretation actually hinders you. With other search engines, you get the results that your query asked for. You know immediately when your query was ambiguous or just bad and can adjust accordingly. And with that, you can more easily narrow down the results, given that you know how to narrow down the results. So, maybe give other search engines another try, while keeping that in mind. I personally very much prefer other search engines, because of that, even if I sometimes have to type one word more.
mevile 9y ago
When I'm doing an online search and the top results are from quora I know I'll be disappointed. The result will be on topic but the information will be the same kind of one person's faulty rambling kind of thing seen in this post here. There is somewhat good content on Quora, it varies, but it seems to be way more miss than hits. Information from Quora is usually about as good as a hit from some old PHPBulletin forum.
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype
  - always_good 9y ago
    I can imagine you smiling smugly and whispering "checkmate" as you submitted an obnoxious comment of wikipedia urls. Doesn't surprise me coming from the sort of person who submits their own Quora ramblings to HN.
    - Nuzzerino 9y ago
      I tend to respond obnoxiously to comments that are themselves obnoxious. If you check my history on both Quora and HN, you'd see that I am much more active on HN than I am on Quora. I tend to use whatever medium gets the job done. Best tool for the job and all. When you actually start submitting things at all to HN, send me a message so that I can learn from the best as to what the "proper way" to do things are. The post got a lot of views, so I would call that a success. Not sure what point you were trying to make there.
Animats 9y ago
Yahoo tried to compete with Google. Yahoo was first with "vertical search", about fifty special purpose question-answerers for weather, sports, celebrities, etc. Then Google copied that. Yahoo switched to reselling Bing, and gradually became irrelevant. Cuil tried to compete with Google. Their idea was that their system was an order of magnitude cheaper to run than Google's. But they never developed a revenue model. Cuil went bust. I tried a system which trimmed most of the ads out of Google result pages. That got very little use. Google does have search customization. It learns from your queries what you ask about. At least if you're logged in, and possibly if you keep the same IP address. Google is already moving past search to question-answering. They're not very good at that yet, but they're getting better.
future31 9y ago
The Language Council of Sweden was adding the word “ogooglebar” to the Swedish dictionary during 2012/2013 with Google with great force and success stopped that from happening. When searching for answers which Google has no answer for the answer should be “this is ogooglebar”. So you don’t have to spend hours trying to refactoring your query for hours. This would be a great improvement and a great user experience. This is Google’s akilles heel - never able to admit that they don’t know.
Razengan 9y ago
There is nothing that can’t be “beaten” through research and technology. I mean, someday, we will be encasing entire stars in artificial shells and creating black holes of our own. What’s a single corporate entity that managed to get a lead in barely the first stages of a relatively new industry?* How about incorporating search tech into web servers themselves? Move it to the level of DNS And other core protocols. Make individual servers automatically index all content that passes through them. They could then populate special caching servers with the indexes and results. When a user searches for something, the query gets sent to successive search-cache servers, kinda like a DNS lookup, until match is found or up to a browser-specified depth. — * People generally did not care much about search engines at the beginning; they usually just had a small list of sites in their memory or bookmarks that they visited regularly, and found others through magazines, links or word-of-mouth. Search engines were merely a hit-or-miss convenience, often used for porn or “wares” I’d wager, then that convenience emerged to become the core way of discovering and interacting with the internet. Does anyone here remember the point when they “switched” to using Google? I personally can’t recall myself ever doing that. I think it just happened casually, through a browser that defaulted to Google. I remember thinking how ugly Google’s UI was, and preferred other engines for their “looks.” But at someone point, Googling just became faster than any other way to get to what I felt like looking up. For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for the default search. :)
- jfk13 9y ago
  > For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for the default search. :) Try Firefox: it's right there in about:preferences#search. :)
PyComfy 9y ago
I have ditched google in favor of Searx, a metasearch engine that anyone can host https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances
Feniks 9y ago
Lol. fonts.googleapis.com google-analytics.com googletagservices.com Remember when your dumb parents thought Google was the internet? Who's laughing now.
silverlake 9y ago
Google will inevitably become a blundering bureaucracy like every behemoth before it. The inevitable corporate politics will cause it to crumble from within. My bet is Chinese companies will outmaneuver Google outside western markets (US and EU). Also, Google is primarily an ad display company. Global marketing firms should support competitors to blunt Google’s dominance, especially outside the US. Finally, the EU will declare Google a monopoly. All this will take a long time though, just like Microsoft.

92 points by Nuzzerino 9y ago

What are some business models that could support a user-oriented search interface? Probably not advertising, if (big if) the new approach will return better search results than Google. Subscriptions have only worked for a few well-known services with exclusive content. Would users be willing to learn a more powerful interface, if they consider current search engine results “good enough”? Could Wikipedia or Archive.org address a subset of the search market, since they offer user-focused services? Archive.org already crawls a subset of the web.

ybrah 9y ago
Most people want the accessibility achieved through quick searches on their phones. The only users that would use a more powerful interface would be professionals. The professionals that would use it would be researchers, developers, and health practitioners.
- walterbell 9y ago
  I wonder what those professionals use today: google’s advanced search interface, niche site search, social media search, libraries, paid services, bloomberg, lexis-nexis ..?
  - ohtwenty 9y ago
    As far as I'm aware, in the Netherlands wrt health: specialised sites. Google is all WebMD or unverifiable claims, or just doesn't go in depth. So you check your UpToDate, or pubmed, your country's/specialization's current guidelines, farmacotherapeutisch kompas for medicine (https://www.farmacotherapeutischkompas.nl/ https://www.farmacotherapeutischkompas.nl/ - search for medicine and find dosage, interactions, etc). Google is often good enough for a reminder, but won't hold up for specific knowledge or minute details. So at most that Google the name of the service to search on there. Which is why I use ddg - if I know what website/information store I'm going to end up going to, I might as well use the !bang to go there directly. And you know which tools to look at because you're given them when you're studying.
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  There's no reason that a powerful interface can't have an arbitrarily-designed, simple interface built on top of it. That's how computer systems generally work.
Nuzzerino 9y ago
There are probably many that I haven't thought of. It may be possible that it is next to impossible to create both a better experience for the users, and create more revenue for the company at the same time. It doesn't need to have a huge amount of users, it doesn't need to get the majority of the market share, and it doesn't need to earn more revenue, or even any revenue at all, in order to deliver a better user experience. Such things are not mutually exclusive. I believe this is most likely to happen with the help of peer to peer technologies, combined with a healthy synergistic ecosystem of content curators, content providers, and content consumers. Steemit is a crude proof of concept for such a system. In Steemit, comments and posts are scored with a reputation algorithm, and assigned a tag. There's absolutely no reason why web links can't be associated with an arbitrary number of contextually-weighted tags, and a contextual reputation algorithm. Everything that Google does could be done in a peer to peer manner, with each user bearing a small piece of the responsibility. Wikipedia is a great example of this, with many users contributing to the system. No single company could ever produce the amount of content that the Wikipedia userbase has created. Even though Wikipedia uses a centralized foundation and centralized server, the editing culture itself is decentralized, with a set of principles being the main driver of decision-making. I bring up blockchain technologies, much to the disgust of many users on HN, but only because I see those technologies as lowering the barrier to creating systems such as Wikipedia, through automating, standardization, and enforcement of some of the mechanisms. It also creates a guarantee that a central authority doesn't exist and therefore cannot be manipulated in subtle ways by those in positions of greater power - That is a big appeal factor for a significant number of users, even if it is not the majority.
- user5994461 9y ago
  >>> There are probably many that I haven't thought of. It may be possible that it is next to impossible to create both a better experience for the users, and create more revenue for the company at the same time. Yes. Google cannot be beaten. I don't think that any domain has more money to offer than advertising/marketing and certainly not easier. Then the real time auction and pricing systems that run Google are truly incredible. Business wise, google is milking the perfect cow perfectly. There isn't a better cow or a better milking strategy.
ProxCoques 9y ago
There has been at last one attempt at some of that: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/ex-google-employees-launch-rival-search-engine-879172.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... I think it folded after a year.

oh-kumudo 9y ago

So no evidence is offered, only imagination.

elvinyung 9y ago

It feels like this Quora answer explains why Google is successful, but doesn't really discuss or provide any compelling evidence as to why the author thinks it's "becoming more and more likely to happen soon". Also, > I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange itself can happen on a peer to peer basis ...

apatters 9y ago
"Number of people who tipped the author for this content" could be a very interesting search signal. It costs you nothing to link to someone. It costs you money to tip them.
- notatoad 9y ago
  Yeah, but if it becomes known that that is a search signal, it effectively lets people purchase their way up the search rankings by paying other people to tip them. You'd have a much smaller pool of legit tips to overcome, because so few people pay for content, before you could become the most tipped article for any given topic.
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - TuringTest 9y ago
    You have just described paid advertising.
- fooker 9y ago
  Also very easy to game. You can tip yourself.

electic 9y ago

Where do you start with this one? But okay, here goes: 1. The post assumes that the search result quality is not good. This simply is not the case. Users say the search results are good. Could they be better? Sure. Are they terrible? No. 2. The post assumes users want transparency on the search algorithm. This clearly is not the case. The whole reason that google became what it is today is because of the lack of clutter and good search results. If you remember Altavista then you remember users constantly having to fidget with all these knobs in the advanced section to get relevant search results. Lycos, excite, etc weren't much better. I remember using Google for the first time and it just worked. 3. The post assumes that users want deep customization. This again is not the case. Users want less clutter, less knobs, and a faster search experience. Google is delivering that. 4. The post assumes that any startup with a better algorithm can beat google. However this is not the case. Google has deep search integration with mobile providers such as it's own Android OS and also iOS. it also has it's own browser (Chrome) and has paid deals with Mozilla. Obviously, both browsers default to Google when you type something in the search field. Not to mention, the leading IOT devices all connect to Google to find results when it needs to search the web. And for safe measure, Google has come out with its own voice assistant device, Google home, to safe guard against any shenanigans from Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa that might happen in the future. It is heavily subsidizing the price to make sure it has a strong horse in the voice game. Integration aside, it also has scale. It crawls most of the internet several times a day. That's no small feat and it is quite hard for a startup to just replicate that with funding. I mean, even that won't cut it. Google is now even using machine learning to understand relevant pieces of information on a webpage so when you query it by typing on your keyboard, by voice, or future mind control it delivers the answer you were looking for. The only valid point the post makes is that Google has squashed competition by buying any startup that remotely could threaten it's position...for safe measure. I'll give the author that.

hackinthebochs 9y ago
I'll come out and say it: Google's search quality is terrible. It's better than the competition, but that's a low bar. Most people do pretty good with Google simply because 1. their searches are "solved" by simply reducing the search space to pages that contain the combination of rare words in the query (e.g. "correct battery horse staple" is referring to the xkcd comic with high probability), along with the social signal of backlink ranking, 2. Google has trained us to use it effectively and so our expectations for search match that which Google can effectively deliver, and 3. All the meta-signalling that Google uses to turn obtuse queries like "that movie with the guy who does the thing" into the correct answer. But in general, if you can't figure out the exact words that are on the page you're interested in, the illusion fails and it reveals itself to be barely more than grep on steroids. Search is still waiting to be blown wide open and it very well could be by a competitor.

boomboomsubban 9y ago

A better search could be made and likely is out there already, but one sums it up best. How often do your peers use Yahoo? Still, the company gets enough hits to be worth billions. Part of that is a global market, Yahoo is big in Japan supposedly, but part of it is your Uncle having made his decision pre-dotcom crash.

lopatin 9y ago

I suspected the author was dreaming when he said the lack of rich customization of the search algorithm is taking away from the end user experience. People don't want to learn about the intricacies of your search algorithm. You're assuming they care. All they want to do is type their question into the magical text box. He also seems to not understand the value that search advertising provides. Search advertising is a win-win for businesses and consumers. If you see it as something parasitic that needs to be fixed, I can't take you seriously about "how Google will be beat". Then I read the last sentence, quoted below. Sigh. Nothing serious here folks, carry on. > I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange itself can happen on a peer to peer basis (via a synergistic ecosystem of content curators, content providers, and content consumers).

QAPereo 9y ago
How is search advertising a win for consumers?
- tluyben2 9y ago
  Good question, when the ETH contract drivel appeared at the end, I hope he is somehow meaning to pay users Ether to see ads. ProofOfView whatever. People would fix Google if it had an API but it would mean censorship; I would add a ‘credible sources only’ button which is not good for the web but it is what I want. I do not care for traveldiscounters’ SEO or SO or Wikipedia scrapers; I care about the originals. That would greatly improve the experience, but in general it is bad for the internet because someone decides who is credible. Now there I see a place for Blockchain.
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    Forget about Ethereum for a minute. In the case of Wikipedia, no single company can produce the amount of content that they have on Wikipedia, especially with that reasonable standard of quality. Why is that? Wikipedia has a decentralized culture where principles are the main driver of decisions that are made. Wikipedia's collective Administrators, Bureaucrats, and Stewards do not compose a top-down management structure. It was not easy to do, requiring strong community outreach, culture building, and hard work. It is unlikely to be repeatable in the same fashion given that most Internet users feel they can find what they need online (the innovator in me disagrees with that sentiment, and I am very much aware that my opinion is a minority). Ethereum, in my mind, is merely a way to help automate, standardize, and enforce similar systems. If it can be achieved without any sort of blockchain, like in the case of Wikipedia, then great. But perhaps the barrier to doing so is just out of reach without the help of the technology. Yes, having a central authority decide who is credible is exactly bad for the Internet, and Ethereum is a possible means to facilitate alternatives. What other alternatives would there be?

thisisit 9y ago

Is it possible? Absolutely but it won't last very long. Google would have learned from Yahoo's mistake. They will acquire a company if there is even a whiff of serious competition. Whether that better algorithm will end up in Google search is another matter.

hildaman 9y ago

I switched to DuckDuckGo - it isn’t as good as google, but it is 90% of what I need. For the rest I have to slightly tweak my search criteria - but that is not a bad thing because it forces me to use my little gray cells. YouTube and Gmail substitutes and then I am Google free.

igorbark 9y ago
What do you use for maps?
- hildaman 9y ago
  Huh got me there. I have started to trust Apple maps - not as good as Google though. Hope this gets commodotized though.
- patkai 9y ago
  https://wego.here.com https://wego.here.com
- 477353468463695 9y ago
  https://www.openstreetmap.org/ https://www.openstreetmap.org/
surfparty 9y ago
Have you looked at protonmail and Vimeo? Both have somewhat of a free offering, although the main product is a few bucks. You know what they say about that though, you being the product and all. For maps, check out openstreetmaps. Not quite as good as google, buy pretty solid. And you can run your own instance. Heck, you could also run your own email without much hassle.
- Insanity 9y ago
  Protonmail does have a free offering as well if their mail service
- murukesh_s 9y ago

greglindahl 9y ago

As someone who tried to compete with Google in search, it strikes me that everything he brings up was also true, and well known, in 2007 when we started Blekko. Cuil, SearchMe, and Blekko didn't fall into the UI trap that he outlines. None of us succeeded that well, but that's a different issue.

ProxCoques 9y ago
I remember thinking "SearchMe" was a rather odd name at the time. But why, exactly? Search me.
murukesh_s 9y ago
What happened to Blekko? If you don't mind about sharing the "different issue"!
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Well, it's always hard to say why something didn't work, but we certainly tried a very different user interface with our Izik UI, in which ambiguous queries got up to 200 answers organized into categories.
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    I'm curious as to how it failed. Did people use the site, and hate it? Did people join and then not return, or were those metrics unavailable? Were the operating costs abnormally high? Did the company receive a lot of users, but fail to receive enough revenue to cover even a normal amount of operating costs? Seems like one could narrow it down with the help of today's analytics tools. I'm also curious if you have kept up with other web search technology efforts since then or whether you moved away to other things. There's definitely some things that don't add up.

richard___ 9y ago

I've been thinking for a while that a conversational search engine is the next iteration of search. If you query a human expert, you don't expect the correct answer immediately - it comes by filtering out possible answers with subsequent clarifying queries. The next gen search engine should be this way.

robotresearcher 9y ago
I just add another word to the original query and hit return.
- richard___ 9y ago
  Let's say you're reading this research paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05407.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05407.pdf I want to know: "In Rob Fergus' paper intrinsic motivation and self-play, how is it that the reward for agent A can be based on the time taken for agent B's task, when agent A and B are run sequentially, and agent B runs after agent A?" Can Google answer this? No. Is NLP smart enough to answer this? Probably not. But the question itself is hard to write in one sentence. Complex queries are best structured as conversations, with clarifying back and forth, Socratic method style, like if you're asking a professor a question about hard science.
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    Funny enough, I once was on a team that was working on this exact technology. Sadly the company was dysfunctional beyond redemption.

rdlecler1 9y ago

To get people to switch the new solution needs to be 10x better. It’s not clear how you could do this without Google’s day network effects. Someone like SoftBank would have to go out and bets $10b on a search startup, but even then, Google is not going to be outsmarted by a new algorithm or interface. We’d need to move to a whole new mode of computing. Mobile has been the biggest threat yet.

tluyben2 9y ago

I believe not; there is no need unless their ads become too intrusive. When we have issues with a technical issue in China, I start the VPN and search with Google. What takes my Chinese colleagues a lot of time, is immediately found in Google, even for vague components. Specsheets they did not receive are easily found on Google but not on the engines they have. It is not that we cannot think up a better Google, but I believe that means better NLP, not a better backend. Google would destroy anything that comes close, simply because it will be something they can bolt on in no time and then they have the data, money and infra.

nocoder 9y ago

I don't think Google search will be beaten. I think the whole current concept of search by going to specific URL/app, seeing a list of search result will become obsolete. We are already seeing that with voice based UI where you want an answer not a list of pages. The second part will be that lot of stuff that you care about will be known by google/Alexa and will be readily available so no need of searching. This also is already happening with google launcher on android where things like news and score about my favourite teams, travel times to airport or workplaces being shown nearing the time of travel along with routes so I don't have to search for any of these. This can be further integrated with a cab being available just when you need to leave. All of these earlier would have involved some kind of searches. iMho this will be the natural progression. So if you are creating a better google search please stop you will be out of business before you start. This is no longer about standalone search but a larger ecosystem around the information needs.

murukesh_s 9y ago

I switched to bing long time back and haven't felt any difference. They even copied google look and feel to great extend. I did it after google started showing more details in my search timeline than i wanted to see, with it's integration with gmail with which google started scanning my emails for ticket purchases, product orders etc and whenever i searched that product - it says you have purchased this product with order tracking number blah blah. I am sure bing/msft also does everything they can to 'understand' me, but at least they don't see my browsing history or emails. Now back to beating Google - I do believe it's possible, but Google will soon catchup with any potential competition. They will catchup because it's their bread and butter and they have perhaps the worlds biggest concentration of technical personnel. The best way to beat any product/company is to be considerably better than it in at least few areas, given the scale of web indexing, that is a very very tough job only few companies can pull through. Microsoft has/had a good chance to beat Google, but Microsoft is considered a bigger evil/corporate than Google, so they have a slim chance to emotionally overcome Google, not to mention technical capability. But they can perhaps open source bing in an effort to beat Google, provided they have the will and moolah to do so. When I mention open source, it's not the code, but the underlying search index, exposed as an API, free of use for anyone/any product. That will dramatically shift the emotion as well as the usage towards bing. I even mentioned this during an internal bing meetup event (I am part of a bing beta testers group), but of course no one listens. A startup can also try to beat Google in their wildest dreams if they can associate themselves with the younger crowd like snapchat did and the younger crowd somehow finds it hip/cool to not use Google and use that service instead, and provided they get a decent web search data/index from established competition like bing or they manage to index themselves. These are few of the possibilities.

nickelbox 9y ago
I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about Microsoft making their index public. Maybe among certain crowds like this, but what would it gain us? I couldn't just send a PR to help improve it; the only benefit I can see is transparency and perhaps a fun, maybe even useful visualization. Also, the image of a "hip" Google competitor like Snapchat seems tremendously unappealing, personally.

zilchers 9y ago

This was non-sensical...someone will compete with google because Blockchain? There’s no issue with current payment models, you don’t need a trustless peer to peer system to beat google, you need to significantly change the nature of what it is to search. If instead of finding q&a’s on stack overflow an AI took my question, looked at my code, and answered / fixed it, that would be a game changer. Using a different UI than google? Has happened, will happen again, not really relevant (google itself has revved it’s ui extensively).

Nuzzerino 9y ago
If you read through the rest of the comments here, you'll see these points were debated or addressed already.
- always_good 9y ago
  You may have responded, but I can assure you they were not addressed.

haglin 9y ago

I have tried not to use Google, but I always come back. Results from Altavista, Bing and DuckDuckGo are so much worse. Note, it's not that Google has personal information on me. I'm not logged in, my cache is cleared, I use a VPN and google.com/ncr when it was available. Not sure how they do it. Perhaps their tracker sees how long people have visited a page and then they give those pages higher priority. Perhaps other search engines can do a better job, but they had over a decade to improve their results and they are still far off.

RandomInteger4 9y ago
Perhaps it's canvas fingerprinting. [1] I saw an article from 2014 saying ghostery works to defeat it, but haven't looked further and I don't use ghostery, so not sure if that's true still. You can test it here: https://browserleaks.com/canvas https://browserleaks.com/canvas [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-sites-can-fingerprint-you-online-even-when-you-use-multiple-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-s...
477353468463695 9y ago
In my experience, the main-difference between Google and other search engines, aside from personalized results, is that Google tries very hard to interpret your query. For example, if you search for some programming topic, it will generally pull results more towards the top, if they reference the current or a recent version of whatever programming language/tool you're searching for. That helps, if you just want to type in "how do i do this? [programming language]" or similar. In other search engines, you'll instead first search "how do i do this? [programming language]", then possibly not really get any good results and then instead search for "how do i do this? [programming language] [current version]". This is how Google worked as well, some few years ago. Knowing what keywords to type in to get the right results was an actually valuable skill ("Google-fu"). Today's Google is instead designed to minimize the need for skill in phrasing your query. Great for the average user, but in my experience, if you do still possess Google-fu, then this interpretation actually hinders you. With other search engines, you get the results that your query asked for. You know immediately when your query was ambiguous or just bad and can adjust accordingly. And with that, you can more easily narrow down the results, given that you know how to narrow down the results. So, maybe give other search engines another try, while keeping that in mind. I personally very much prefer other search engines, because of that, even if I sometimes have to type one word more.

mevile 9y ago

When I'm doing an online search and the top results are from quora I know I'll be disappointed. The result will be on topic but the information will be the same kind of one person's faulty rambling kind of thing seen in this post here. There is somewhat good content on Quora, it varies, but it seems to be way more miss than hits. Information from Quora is usually about as good as a hit from some old PHPBulletin forum.

Nuzzerino 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype
- always_good 9y ago
  I can imagine you smiling smugly and whispering "checkmate" as you submitted an obnoxious comment of wikipedia urls. Doesn't surprise me coming from the sort of person who submits their own Quora ramblings to HN.
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    I tend to respond obnoxiously to comments that are themselves obnoxious. If you check my history on both Quora and HN, you'd see that I am much more active on HN than I am on Quora. I tend to use whatever medium gets the job done. Best tool for the job and all. When you actually start submitting things at all to HN, send me a message so that I can learn from the best as to what the "proper way" to do things are. The post got a lot of views, so I would call that a success. Not sure what point you were trying to make there.

Animats 9y ago

Yahoo tried to compete with Google. Yahoo was first with "vertical search", about fifty special purpose question-answerers for weather, sports, celebrities, etc. Then Google copied that. Yahoo switched to reselling Bing, and gradually became irrelevant. Cuil tried to compete with Google. Their idea was that their system was an order of magnitude cheaper to run than Google's. But they never developed a revenue model. Cuil went bust. I tried a system which trimmed most of the ads out of Google result pages. That got very little use. Google does have search customization. It learns from your queries what you ask about. At least if you're logged in, and possibly if you keep the same IP address. Google is already moving past search to question-answering. They're not very good at that yet, but they're getting better.

future31 9y ago

The Language Council of Sweden was adding the word “ogooglebar” to the Swedish dictionary during 2012/2013 with Google with great force and success stopped that from happening. When searching for answers which Google has no answer for the answer should be “this is ogooglebar”. So you don’t have to spend hours trying to refactoring your query for hours. This would be a great improvement and a great user experience. This is Google’s akilles heel - never able to admit that they don’t know.

Razengan 9y ago

There is nothing that can’t be “beaten” through research and technology. I mean, someday, we will be encasing entire stars in artificial shells and creating black holes of our own. What’s a single corporate entity that managed to get a lead in barely the first stages of a relatively new industry?* How about incorporating search tech into web servers themselves? Move it to the level of DNS And other core protocols. Make individual servers automatically index all content that passes through them. They could then populate special caching servers with the indexes and results. When a user searches for something, the query gets sent to successive search-cache servers, kinda like a DNS lookup, until match is found or up to a browser-specified depth. — * People generally did not care much about search engines at the beginning; they usually just had a small list of sites in their memory or bookmarks that they visited regularly, and found others through magazines, links or word-of-mouth. Search engines were merely a hit-or-miss convenience, often used for porn or “wares” I’d wager, then that convenience emerged to become the core way of discovering and interacting with the internet. Does anyone here remember the point when they “switched” to using Google? I personally can’t recall myself ever doing that. I think it just happened casually, through a browser that defaulted to Google. I remember thinking how ugly Google’s UI was, and preferred other engines for their “looks.” But at someone point, Googling just became faster than any other way to get to what I felt like looking up. For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for the default search. :)

jfk13 9y ago
> For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for the default search. :) Try Firefox: it's right there in about:preferences#search. :)

PyComfy 9y ago

I have ditched google in favor of Searx, a metasearch engine that anyone can host https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances

Feniks 9y ago

Lol. fonts.googleapis.com google-analytics.com googletagservices.com Remember when your dumb parents thought Google was the internet? Who's laughing now.

silverlake 9y ago

Google will inevitably become a blundering bureaucracy like every behemoth before it. The inevitable corporate politics will cause it to crumble from within. My bet is Chinese companies will outmaneuver Google outside western markets (US and EU). Also, Google is primarily an ad display company. Global marketing firms should support competitors to blunt Google’s dominance, especially outside the US. Finally, the EU will declare Google a monopoly. All this will take a long time though, just like Microsoft.