5 ms·

Bing's travel search is the best in the Biz as far as I'm concerned. Wolfram Alpha is phenomenal for certain types of queries. I find their results for compan

Bing's travel search is the best in the Biz as far as I'm concerned. Wolfram Alpha is phenomenal for certain types of queries. I find their results for companies pages to be so cleaner and more intuitive than either Google or Bing's. I think there are huge openings for competing with Google and Bing when focused on a specific niche. Google's revenue per search query in the US is $0.12.[1] And, I know I"m getting frustrated with their search results, and I find myself using multiple search engines for different types of queries. There's tons of room for competition in this market, and I don't know why more startups aren't taking advantage of it. <shameless plug> This is the reason that we're turning http://Newsley.com http://Newsley.com into a search engine for economic and financial news. The news sections of Yahoo Finance and Google Finance suck IMHO. We're trying to make financial news search suck less. We're focusing on building our index and results pages like crazy right now. We're currently indexing the Economist, NYT Business and BBC Business[2]. Bloomberg News should be online this week. After getting Bloomberg online, we're going to focus on getting the alpha version of our search released. We're making our results pages available as soon as possible, however, so we can start building a bit of organic search traffic to our site even before search is released. So far, it's worked great. Since we started releasing those pages 6 weeks ago, our traffic has tripled. In the meantime, each one of the keywords or tags below each article leads to the results page for that specific term. Feel free to click around. </shameless plug> ref: [1] http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1_of_search.html http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1... [2] http://newsley.com/crawl_stats http://newsley.com/crawl_stats

nostrademons 16y ago
What are the particular queries where you've been frustrated?
- iamelgringo 16y ago
  I'm finding Google less and less useful for queries about specific programming problems. I'm finding myself going to DDG and Stack overflow for answers to those problems first, just because I don't have to sift through results from crappy forums or Experts Exchange to get to answers for my specific query. I do prefer Google results to Bing's results for those topics, because I can query Google groups, which also tends to have higher signal::noise ratios. As I said, Bing has Travel search down pretty cold as far as I'm concerned, and I travel quite a bit. That may well change since you guys bought ITA, which provides Bing's data. Brilliant move, btw. I do use http://matrix.itasoftware.com http://matrix.itasoftware.com a ton after a quick overview search on Bing because of the domain specific language that itasoftware lets you use on your searches. Amazon does much better for shopping and product search. My first inclination these days is to go to Amazon and look for a product. If the price seems reasonable, I have Amazon prime and the product gets shipped to me for free in 2 days, or I can spend $4 and get it shipped next day. I found myself living over at Edmunds.com when I was searching for a used car to buy two months ago. I think that the results from Wolfram Alpha on company financials are much better laid out than Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. I'm much more likely to use Wolfram than GOOG or YHOO to get an overview of a companies financials. I think there's a lot that can be added when it comes to financial news search, which is why I'm building http://Newsley.com http://Newsley.com Looking for recipes on Google pretty much sucks. I'd much rather go to the Food Network. The reason that I think you guys are hurting at times in search results, is because your mission is to categorize "all the world's information". So, you're approach is to pull in as much information as possible, and then sift through and sort though what's important. If a site takes a semi-supervised approach like DDG or provides search over a specific silo of curated content like Stack Overflow, then I think you guys are going to be hard pressed to compete. And on a certain level, it doesn't make sense for you guys to try and compete with sites like Edmunds.com or Stack Overflow. You guys are looking for niches that can provide the next $0.5 Billion to $4 Billion in revenue. Small verticals like programmer searches, recipe search, financial news search etc... aren't really going to be worth a huge investment for you guys to dominate.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Thanks. Speaking for myself, I'm not really all that concerned if Amazon or Kayak is better at their specific vertical than Google. That's why they exist, they can focus much more tightly on a good user experience for that particular task than a generalist search engine can, and that's basically the economy working correctly. I do care when I can't do a particular task because Google's search results suck. That seems to happen more and more with programming-related queries, and I dunno if it's because I'm searching for harder, more narrow topics or if it's because Google's results are worse. I recently was looking for info on Haskell's FFI, so I searched for [CUInt]. The top result was "an Irish slang term for female genitalia". Not what I had in mind, Google. Again, the most useful info we can have is the exact queries that went wrong. It's like any debugging problem: if you can't reproduce the bug, it's maddeningly difficult to fix it.
  - nolite 16y ago
    umm..what's DDG? (yes, I googled it)
    - boundlessdreamz 16y ago
      http://duckduckgo.com/ http://duckduckgo.com/
- nitrogen 16y ago
  I think that Google's major shortcoming is that searches for specific subjects rarely lead to a canonical source of information on the subject. Instead the top results are full of forums, Usenet scrapes, and content-sparse SEO link farms.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    What counts as "canonical"? For some queries it's easy, like if I search for [amazon harry potter], I probably want either the Harry Potter Store or the Harry Potter books on Amazon.com, which happen to be the top two results. If I search for [llvm doxygen], I probably want the index page for LLVM's API docs, and that's what I get (even if it does have no snippet). If I search for [height of empire state building], I even get a little OneBox with the answer right on the results page, along with the sources it comes from. But what if I'm searching for an obscure error message, and the answer is in a forum posting that was mirrored across a dozen mailing lists? Which is canonical? The biggest? The one on the site for the project I'm searching for? The one with the fewest ads? Or what if I search for [can't read my poker face]? The #1 result is for metrolyrics.com, which sucks - it's a spammy lyrics aggregator with a popover ad. But at least it has the lyrics. Lady Gaga's official site doesn't. It's those latter cases that interest me, but it's not exactly clear what the desired behavior is.
    - nitrogen 16y ago
      As I recall I run into this when searching for Linux kernel internals or library documentation. I find lots of error messages and forum posts, but no documentation targeted at programmers. For common library calls a manual page will often be in the top results, which is helpful, but it seems that documentation from the official project site (if it exists), the git commit that introduced a function, or source code containing the function would be more useful. Next time I run into a search that would have a more appropriate best answer I'll try to post it here.
photon_off 16y ago
Best of luck with Newsley. In terms of competing with Google, Bing, etc, I'm on it. I'm incredibly excited about launching my latest service, which hopes to gain a decent market share of start page users. Basically, it's going to be a search portal. Not another one of those crappy multi-tabbed "search 10 engines at once" pages, but rather something much more... substantial. That's why I started to thread, to see which sites I should include in the index. I'm glad somebody else sees the same potential in the search market as I do.

nostrademons 16y ago

What are the particular queries where you've been frustrated?

iamelgringo 16y ago
I'm finding Google less and less useful for queries about specific programming problems. I'm finding myself going to DDG and Stack overflow for answers to those problems first, just because I don't have to sift through results from crappy forums or Experts Exchange to get to answers for my specific query. I do prefer Google results to Bing's results for those topics, because I can query Google groups, which also tends to have higher signal::noise ratios. As I said, Bing has Travel search down pretty cold as far as I'm concerned, and I travel quite a bit. That may well change since you guys bought ITA, which provides Bing's data. Brilliant move, btw. I do use http://matrix.itasoftware.com http://matrix.itasoftware.com a ton after a quick overview search on Bing because of the domain specific language that itasoftware lets you use on your searches. Amazon does much better for shopping and product search. My first inclination these days is to go to Amazon and look for a product. If the price seems reasonable, I have Amazon prime and the product gets shipped to me for free in 2 days, or I can spend $4 and get it shipped next day. I found myself living over at Edmunds.com when I was searching for a used car to buy two months ago. I think that the results from Wolfram Alpha on company financials are much better laid out than Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. I'm much more likely to use Wolfram than GOOG or YHOO to get an overview of a companies financials. I think there's a lot that can be added when it comes to financial news search, which is why I'm building http://Newsley.com http://Newsley.com Looking for recipes on Google pretty much sucks. I'd much rather go to the Food Network. The reason that I think you guys are hurting at times in search results, is because your mission is to categorize "all the world's information". So, you're approach is to pull in as much information as possible, and then sift through and sort though what's important. If a site takes a semi-supervised approach like DDG or provides search over a specific silo of curated content like Stack Overflow, then I think you guys are going to be hard pressed to compete. And on a certain level, it doesn't make sense for you guys to try and compete with sites like Edmunds.com or Stack Overflow. You guys are looking for niches that can provide the next $0.5 Billion to $4 Billion in revenue. Small verticals like programmer searches, recipe search, financial news search etc... aren't really going to be worth a huge investment for you guys to dominate.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Thanks. Speaking for myself, I'm not really all that concerned if Amazon or Kayak is better at their specific vertical than Google. That's why they exist, they can focus much more tightly on a good user experience for that particular task than a generalist search engine can, and that's basically the economy working correctly. I do care when I can't do a particular task because Google's search results suck. That seems to happen more and more with programming-related queries, and I dunno if it's because I'm searching for harder, more narrow topics or if it's because Google's results are worse. I recently was looking for info on Haskell's FFI, so I searched for [CUInt]. The top result was "an Irish slang term for female genitalia". Not what I had in mind, Google. Again, the most useful info we can have is the exact queries that went wrong. It's like any debugging problem: if you can't reproduce the bug, it's maddeningly difficult to fix it.
- nolite 16y ago
  umm..what's DDG? (yes, I googled it)
  - boundlessdreamz 16y ago
    http://duckduckgo.com/ http://duckduckgo.com/
nitrogen 16y ago
I think that Google's major shortcoming is that searches for specific subjects rarely lead to a canonical source of information on the subject. Instead the top results are full of forums, Usenet scrapes, and content-sparse SEO link farms.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  What counts as "canonical"? For some queries it's easy, like if I search for [amazon harry potter], I probably want either the Harry Potter Store or the Harry Potter books on Amazon.com, which happen to be the top two results. If I search for [llvm doxygen], I probably want the index page for LLVM's API docs, and that's what I get (even if it does have no snippet). If I search for [height of empire state building], I even get a little OneBox with the answer right on the results page, along with the sources it comes from. But what if I'm searching for an obscure error message, and the answer is in a forum posting that was mirrored across a dozen mailing lists? Which is canonical? The biggest? The one on the site for the project I'm searching for? The one with the fewest ads? Or what if I search for [can't read my poker face]? The #1 result is for metrolyrics.com, which sucks - it's a spammy lyrics aggregator with a popover ad. But at least it has the lyrics. Lady Gaga's official site doesn't. It's those latter cases that interest me, but it's not exactly clear what the desired behavior is.
  - nitrogen 16y ago
    As I recall I run into this when searching for Linux kernel internals or library documentation. I find lots of error messages and forum posts, but no documentation targeted at programmers. For common library calls a manual page will often be in the top results, which is helpful, but it seems that documentation from the official project site (if it exists), the git commit that introduced a function, or source code containing the function would be more useful. Next time I run into a search that would have a more appropriate best answer I'll try to post it here.

photon_off 16y ago

Best of luck with Newsley. In terms of competing with Google, Bing, etc, I'm on it. I'm incredibly excited about launching my latest service, which hopes to gain a decent market share of start page users. Basically, it's going to be a search portal. Not another one of those crappy multi-tabbed "search 10 engines at once" pages, but rather something much more... substantial. That's why I started to thread, to see which sites I should include in the index. I'm glad somebody else sees the same potential in the search market as I do.