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VCs would throw money at a new search engine if they thought it could be 10x better than Google, but so far no one is trying to run with an idea like that. Goog

VCs would throw money at a new search engine if they thought it could be 10x better than Google, but so far no one is trying to run with an idea like that. Google doesn't have to be the best after it owned the market, just not lag so far behind that it's significantly worse. They keep improving to keep the barriers to entry high in search.

666lumberjack 8y ago
What does 10x better than Google even look like? The only thing I can think of is really good NLP and semantic searches, but Google has data and AI talent that's impossible for a startup to compete with there so it's a dead end.
- Loic 8y ago
  Not really. The real problem with a search engine is surfacing to much "content farm" at the top. Once you are able to weed out all these content farms it is relatively easy to bring the right answer within the first 10/20 links, that is, on the first results page. It is effectively hard if you want to do all that with instant results about current events, but for 99% of my searches, a 1 month old answer is perfectly fine. For the weather, I go anyway on a dedicated weather website.
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  > What does 10x better than Google even look like? Well that's easy - just relevant results, no ads being stuffed down my throat, no sponsored links, fake pages mimicking official ones, just relevant info. Easily 10x better for me. You know, how google used to look like in the beginning.
  - 666lumberjack 8y ago
    So, DuckDuckGo with Pagerank?
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      DDG before they started ignoring what you searched for. edit: I'm getting downvoted, but it doesn't make it less true. Without quoting, some terms (not stop words) get silently dropped (even Google tells you when they drop terms). example: workbox wizard doesn't work None of the results contain workbox anywhere. And recently they started "optimizing" and correcting terms in quotes. example: google "amp" modal I quoted "amp" because otherwise it only searches for map. Yet most results are still for "map". I really liked DDG, but they seem as intent as google in making their services worse for me, so I dropped them.
      - Semaphor 8y ago
        > None of the results contain workbox anywhere. Actually, by now some do. Further down the list. Doesn't really make it better.
distant_hat 8y ago
Actually, the problem with many of these markets is the winner takes all nature of them. Google is significantly better at obscure searches as compared to Bing or others. A large part of the reason is that Google gets a lot more rare search terms being the default, and it improves by learning on which links do users click on and what following searches do users do to fine-tune their search. A less frequently used search engine misses out on this data and consequently doesn't improve.

666lumberjack 8y ago

What does 10x better than Google even look like? The only thing I can think of is really good NLP and semantic searches, but Google has data and AI talent that's impossible for a startup to compete with there so it's a dead end.

Loic 8y ago
Not really. The real problem with a search engine is surfacing to much "content farm" at the top. Once you are able to weed out all these content farms it is relatively easy to bring the right answer within the first 10/20 links, that is, on the first results page. It is effectively hard if you want to do all that with instant results about current events, but for 99% of my searches, a 1 month old answer is perfectly fine. For the weather, I go anyway on a dedicated weather website.
saiya-jin 8y ago
> What does 10x better than Google even look like? Well that's easy - just relevant results, no ads being stuffed down my throat, no sponsored links, fake pages mimicking official ones, just relevant info. Easily 10x better for me. You know, how google used to look like in the beginning.
- 666lumberjack 8y ago
  So, DuckDuckGo with Pagerank?
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    DDG before they started ignoring what you searched for. edit: I'm getting downvoted, but it doesn't make it less true. Without quoting, some terms (not stop words) get silently dropped (even Google tells you when they drop terms). example: workbox wizard doesn't work None of the results contain workbox anywhere. And recently they started "optimizing" and correcting terms in quotes. example: google "amp" modal I quoted "amp" because otherwise it only searches for map. Yet most results are still for "map". I really liked DDG, but they seem as intent as google in making their services worse for me, so I dropped them.
    - Semaphor 8y ago
      > None of the results contain workbox anywhere. Actually, by now some do. Further down the list. Doesn't really make it better.

distant_hat 8y ago

Actually, the problem with many of these markets is the winner takes all nature of them. Google is significantly better at obscure searches as compared to Bing or others. A large part of the reason is that Google gets a lot more rare search terms being the default, and it improves by learning on which links do users click on and what following searches do users do to fine-tune their search. A less frequently used search engine misses out on this data and consequently doesn't improve.