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Respectfully, I think you are definitely overestimating the cost of building a search engine. Do you have experience in search specifically? Asking in good fait
by arthurcolle 7y ago
Respectfully, I think you are definitely overestimating the cost of building a search engine. Do you have experience in search specifically? Asking in good faith here.
I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial, but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if all living expenses were paid and you could just lock yourself into your apartment with no distractions, with maybe a team of 1-3 other extremely talented engineers.
- seattle_spring 7y agoWouldn't there be a ton of search startups if it were actually this easy?
- arthurcolle 7y agoThe only honest answer to that question depends entirely on one's interpretation of the strong efficient market hypothesis.
- pier25 7y agoI think competing with Google would actually be a more difficult problem
- metastart 7y agoIt's not so much the difficulty, though yes it is hard, but it's generally extremely difficult to raise capital as a late entrant into an established industry. Unless there's something disruptive. That said, it doesn't take that much capital to build a new search engine with today's computing infrastructure so a few have tried over the past 5-10 years but none were as good as Google (a minimal benchmark). They found a lot of initial interest then died out quickly (sorry I'm forgetting the names, maybe Powerset, Blekko and another). Without doing any "heavy lifting" and also thus not requiring much capital, these so-called "private" search engines have gotten some traction.
- ummonk 7y agoYou will need data on relevant results for a broad swath of queries to fine tune your ranking models against, and will need to spend millions on infrastructure just to crawl and store an index of the entire web.