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One company's plan to build a search engine Google can't beat
- magedqwani 6y agoit subscribe model is OK for a starter but what are the search algorithms employed should produce open source technology if its want vast adoption
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- omarchowdhury 6y agoThey use Bing API.
- 8organicbits 6y ago> putting search results back at the top of search results Watching Google slowly fill more and more of the search results with ads, this is an obvious and very welcome idea.
- imustbeevil 6y agoWhy watch? uBlock origin [1], the most recommended browser extension in the history of the internet, blocks the ads on Google. You can also right click and block any element you don't want in your search results, like "Top Stories" and "Videos". You're still getting the search results, if there's content in your browser you don't want to see, you have more control over that than Google does. I haven't seen an advertisement in 10+ years. I don't really understand why anyone chooses to see them when they don't have to. And sorry if this comes off as confrontational, I just see so many people talking about advertisements and it's difficult to have to tell each individual that adblocking extensions have existed for close to 15 years [2]. I wish there was some better way to spread this information so no one would have to see ads or comment about their existence ever again. The internet is so much better without them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus
- chickenthirty 6y agouBlock Origin is great but doesn't work on Safari, which a lot of people use since Chrome is an incredible battery hog and Firefox is significantly slower on Mac. None of the choices of content blockers in Safari successfully block the majority of ads on the internet. Furthermore, it's not just about the surfaced ads. Even if you use uBlockOrigin, search engines like Google optimize for ad clicking, which will affect the search result ranking even if you have ads blocked. As a result, search quality has been steadily decreasing over the past decade (there have been hundreds of highly ranked HN discussions on this in the past). Finally, uBlockOrigin is an amazing tool developed by 1 person. There is always the chance that, in the future, there are developments in browsers or ad-serving technologies that render it obsolete (e.g if Google decides to make a breaking change to the Chrome Extension API, like Safari did). In that case, it would be worthwhile to have alternatives.
- imustbeevil 6y agoI totally agree, and there are already multiple options on both desktop and mobile for different adblockers. As to the search quality decrease, that's definitely more of a reason to desire an alternative than seeing ads is.
- chickenthirty 6y agoYeah, I think the search quality problem is often brought up here on HN because we're mostly engineers here, but article writers seem to always talk about the visible ads problem since it's easier to explain to non-technical users.
- mi100hael 6y agoThis is changing in the next release of Safari. They will support the standard WebExtensions API so Firefox/Chrome extensions will be easily portable. https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/25/apple-will-let-you-port-google-chrome-extensions-to-safari/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/25/apple-will-let-you-port-go...
- alexhaber 6y agoRelated: https://hammer.lol/ https://hammer.lol/
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoIs this a joke?
- alexhaber 6y agoProbably
- chickenthirty 6y agoIt's from George Hotz, so it's probably both a joke and serious at the same time.
- BbzzbB 6y agoLooks like it's by George Hotz/Geohut, so half-joke half-serious perhaps?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- atlgator 6y agoIt is a joke, sort of. George Hotz of comma.ai wants someone to start a Google alternative and charge a monthly fee instead of invading user privacy. He made the hammer.lol page on a live stream last week.
- freeopinion 6y ago"If you want to replace google, send an email to this gmail address." No, I think George is completely serious.
- ve55 6y agoEven if they make a superior product, how will they get users to use it anywhere near the scale they use Google?
- devmunchies 6y agoThey don’t need google scale, they just need profitability. A premium search engine can have a place with professionals. Maybe they could sell enterprise licenses.
- omarchowdhury 6y ago> They don’t need google scale, they just need profitability. Oh? They did take money from Greylock and Sequoia. Don't those guys aim as high as possible?
- devmunchies 6y agoThey’d get acquired by google before they get google scale.
- qqii 6y ago> Rather than try to build a search infrastructure from scratch, Neeva instead opted to use Bing's search API for its basic results. So it's another UI over bing like duckduckgo? I'm not too optimistic, at the moment there are fundimental issues with how search engines interpret text and rank results.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- RyanShook 6y agoWhat’s the point of using Neeva if it’s just going to serve me Bing results with fewer ads?
- nmstoker 6y agoPresumably it's a matter of how they combine aspects of the results, focusing on being more useful, as the article explains. A distinct focus isn't just "Bing without ads", in a similar way that Bing isn't just Google with different ads. They can have different focuses, qualities and utilities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bad_user 6y agoThe value of a search engine it's in the size of its index and the ranking it does. The UI is less important. Those 3-4 ads appearing at the top of search results can be filtered out by browser extensions. Bing isn't just Google, because it uses a different index and a different ranking algorithm. The results are vastly different. If a search engine is just a shell over Bing, then there isn't much point in using that over Bing. Note DDG provides some niceties over Bing, plus the pledge that they won't share your searches with them, but you basically have to take their word for it.
- tech-historian 6y agoWell, you get to pay for the privilege. That seems to be the difference.
- rcardo11 6y agoSearch engines are such a big thing they should be open sourced and distributed over the community. It's like the most basic infrastructure the internet needs to work and we are outsourcing it.
- jeffbee 6y agoPlease describe in detail how you will distribute crawl, index, and ranking as basic infrastructure.
- rosstex 6y agoSounds like a lovely PhD dissertation!
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoThe same way you decentralize anything else. You can do crawling by using an extension that allows you to create a new tab, crawl data on your current url and send it up to the mothership. You can actually do even better because you don't get SEO-hacks like disabling certain javascript when Google is on the page to improve speed.
- jeffbee 6y ago> do even better You just traded SEO as we know it for a scheme in which any rando can just upload the supposed contents of any URL.
- stelonix 6y agoSo, couldn't you keep a database? Many people would upload the same url, whichever ones are bogus would get a low score, like shadowbanning. Say, use a dht with proof-of-work and things should work? Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but I see it as a solved problem by using a blockchain. Also, ethically speaking, aren't we at the point of considering the idea of trusting random people smarter than trusting huge corporations whose only goals are to make more and more money?
- c3534l 6y agoIf you could return search results that actually contain the keywords I entered and not waste 5 minutes of my time returning irrelevant results because you only found 3 relevant results (you know, the ones I was actually looking for) to pad out the results, that would be a massive improvement. Search has gotten so bad that I feel like the only reason no one has toppled Google at it is because search engines are almost passe. No one cares about them much any longer because people go to a handful of site for specific types of content rather than find data scattered and unorganized across the web.
- non-entity 6y agoThis! So much. I'd rather have a search be truthful and return no results than return shit I dont care about. This applies to many things outside google as well.
- Ozzie_osman 6y agoI hope this works out. I'm a big believer that companies eventually take the shape of their business models, and if you're free but serve ads, you're an ads company, not a search company. So it'll be interesting to see how a company without the ads tension ends up evolving. That said, search is a really hard problem to solve (even if you can take shortcuts like using Bing's API).
- protomyth 6y agoUsing Bing's API isn't really going to help with some of the problems. One thing that would be really helpful, stop counting the words appearing on links on the sidebar or other non-content part of the page as important for my search. It's amazing how many searches go astray because someone has some words on a sidebar that don't have anything to do with the content of the page. You would think with all this ML someone would teach a search algorithm to ignore it.
- Twisell 6y agoWas filled with hope at the start of the article and it faded away pretty quickly while reaching the part about Bing. Thereafter hope suddenly fell from a cliff... >Neeva's most unusual feature is its ability to also search users' personal files. In a demo, Ramaswamy searched for tax documents and photos, all surfaced within his search results or available in a Personal tab in the Neeva interface. Privacy focused my a$$!
- kasabali 6y agoThat, and forum post signatures. Search results for hardware problems üs a total garbage landing you in forum topics of totally different hardware, just because some show off poster listed every single electronic equipment he's ever owned in his forum signature.
- sushshshsh 6y agoHow would somebody write their own search engine? I'm imagining some access patterns like this: If I know what site I want to get an answer from (youtube), i can just download lots of text from youtube and search those text files for the string im looking for, making a map of files that match that string (or youtube could expose an API for me to use of course) if i dont know what site i want an answer from, well this becomes harder, and presumably if i dont have the space to store a text only copy of the internet for me to grep through, then a 3rd party web copy (such as wikipedia) is probably a good starting point???
- titzer 6y agoHey, this is great. Sridhar was my VP for 3 years of my tenure at Google. Hell of a nice man. Great that he got out of the ad business and I absolutely think this a great thing to be working on!
- person_of_color 6y agoAre you still working on ads?
- titzer 6y agoNo, I worked 6.5 years more, on V8 and WebAssembly and I quit Google last August.
- person_of_color 6y agoAnd went where?
- lettergram 6y agoHaving actually built a different kind of search engine (see https://hnprofile.com https://hnprofile.com) I’m kinda miffed that all these posts use bing. I’m sorry, that’s not a new search engine, it’s a new UI.
- moralestapia 6y agoHow to build a good search engine: 1. Actually return the results matching the words that people typed in your search box. The more they match, the more they go up. More and more, it has become extremely disappointing what you get back from Google (and others as well). Verbatim search (where you surround exact terms in quotes), seems to have vanished in the last year or so. More often than not I have clicked on a result, only to find out that my particular query is nowhere to be found on the site, but some "related stuff" does.
- sixQuarks 6y agoI don't rely on Google anymore when I'm trying to find good information. I actually have much better results searching Reddit and HN for specific information.
- electrograv 6y agoI was not aware that HN had a search feature. Link?
- grzm 6y agoSee the footer.
- jsnell 6y agoThe search box is at the bottom of this very page.
- deelowe 6y agoType "[search term] news.ycombinator.com" or "[search term] reddit.com" into Google. If that doesn't work, you can reverse it "news.ycombinator.com [search term]" if you really want to limit to just hackernews. The former seems to work better for me most of the time.
- anon9001 6y agohttps://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 you actually want "site:".
- sixQuarks 6y agoThese paid services never seem to get off the ground. It's asking too much for someone to pay for something right off the bat. Not saying paid services will never work, but I feel something like this could only work if they make it free from the beginning, actually offer better search, build a rabid fanbase, then start charging for it.
- harikb 6y agoI would think it is better to start with a smaller amount - not zero just to make sure you are getting users who would be willing to pay the real (higher fee) later. Subsidizing to zero only works for those which either have a network effect or ad-supported.
- sixQuarks 6y agoStudies show its at least 20 times harder to get a paid conversion than free conversion regardless of price (example being free app vs 99 cent app downloads) I think it will be easier to convert more than 1 out of 20 from free to paid once they see the value of the search
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ridaj 6y agoThese two guys are super smart. But, how are they planning to make money?!
- okaleniuk 6y agoI'll pay them some.
- cutler 6y agoAsking users to pay for something they've been getting free for 22 years is a poor business model. Look at news websites.
- puranjay 6y agoBut people are still willing to pay for news when it's done right - see NYTimes as an example
- freediver 6y agoI have to admit this has a great title. I am familiar with Neeva and listened to the podcast with its founder which I recommend to people interested in the field. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sridhar-ramaswamy-your-search-history-is-incredibly/id1011668648?i=1000480087638 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sridhar-ramaswamy-your... I am a bit skeptical about the whole thing for two main reasons: - Sridhar spent 15 years building the behemoth that is Google's ad business. It has to be hard to shrug off 'don't be evil until you do' culture and mindset that easily. - I think they can do a good job at specialized searches (like the one illustrated in the article). But the problem is that the web search is general, not specialized. They can not expect the users to pay $30/mo and still go to Google for general searches. Bing API results are subpar to Google results. I do welcome a paid model for a well executed search engine. I would personally pay $100/mo for one that meets my needs.
- niftylettuce 6y agoYet another startup with product that doesn't fit the market.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoWant to build a superior search engine? OBEY YOUR FREAKING BOOLEAN OPERATORS (search syntax, whatever) - something Google, DDG, Bing, et al, no longer have any interest in doing.
- vogre 6y agoThat will bring you like 17 loyal users.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoWhy would you assume only 16 other people have ever had to search for something precise? I think that number is a lot closer to everyone.
- toohotatopic 6y agoGoogle can beat them by also offering a paid-for search engine. People trust Google with their mail and phones, they will also trust google with privacy-respecting search. On the other hand, how come Cliqz has been shut down instead of being sold?[1] Are there no companies with deep pockets who are interested in containing Google's revenue besides MS? E.g. since Cliqz was so privacy focussed, wouldn't that have been a great start for Apple to have a privacy respecting search engine? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23909484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23909484
- sterlind 6y agoI think Apple Maps probably left a sour taste in their mouth about running such a service. Search engines are never done; it's a wide-open problem domain with diminishing returns and investment in many directions. I think Apple also realizes they're not a services company.. they sell hardware and support an OS and app store; everything else is a value add to bring people into the fold.
- the_other 6y agoApple is absolutely building core business around services, and has been for several years. Siri has search and its top hits are surprisingly helpful. Maps is getting slowly better, and has both native and web clients. Apple TV+, iCloud Drive has paid tiers. Shortcuts and Messages look like apps, but they’re really UI around services, as is Siri.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y agoApple does have a search engine. Lots of the search suggestions that appear when you type in the Safari omnibar are Apple-sourced.
- marmshallow 6y agoLately I find myself inserting "site:reddit.com" at the end of my Google searches. Most of the stuff that shows up by default is pure garbage that is riddled with ads and doesn't answer my question quickly.
- kannan_ak 6y agoSame here. From basic questions to daily struggles, I go to reddit. Maybe I can relate more to the opinions of common people than the so called expert advice in the websites.
- redisman 6y agoIt’s all blog spam these days. Feels like reading AI generated junk that tells me nothing of value
- izacus 6y agoFunny enough, people on specialised reddits can be much better experts than random blog spammers.
- pvida 6y agoYes, same here. I noticed reddit is much better at providing (useful and direct) answers. I think part of the reason for that is that off-reddit there's so much emphasis on SEO and analytics (trying to hit all the right keywords, linking to other pages/sites, tricking people to stay on a page/site longer etc.) that everything becomes very cluttered very quickly.
- prox 6y agoI switched to DDG mostly, and nowadays its results are great for most cases. Imo Google is a habit to break.
- LoSboccacc 6y agoI switched to DDG a while back when I jumped out of chrome when was threatening adblockers, but I'm not always satisfied with the search results: it's great if I know what I want to search (i.e. I know the field and the keywords and I need the specifics) but when I don't know what I want to search I can't use it for discovery (i.e. when learning new things and I lack the terminology)
- m-i-l 6y agoNot mentioned in the article or in the comments so far, but Neeva has raised $37.5m in funding[0]. I'm curious how that money will be spent, if they're not actually spending it on building a new search engine. Is it going to be mostly spent on buying the results in from Bing, and/or on advertising their new ad-free search, and/or something else? [0] https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/startups/76494545?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=ETRSS https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/startups/7649...
- ganafagol 6y ago> See, Google's business model won't allow it to compete with Neeva. It can't get rid of ads because ads are its whole business. That may sound great, but it's just not true. Everybody working at a company that pays for gsuite knows this. Gmail in gsuite is not part of the ad-financed services. Instead, you pay. Google could any day offer the same thing to consumers with search. Pay some fee every month, opt out of ads. Facebook could do the same thing, btw. Boom, there goes the "novelty" of Neeva's business model. Now comes the question why don't Google, FB etc have such offerings yet. Many people would choose them. My guess is that they would need to have quite steep pricing, if they would want to 100% compensate for lack of ad income for each user who pays instead. Nobody would want to pay FB 50 USD every month just to see their uncle's Trump propaganda. That would be quite the eye opener about how much each user is really worth to FB or Google in money terms. Maybe services like Neeva create a market though and push FB and Google to at least consider it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Now comes the question why don't Google, FB etc have suh offerings yet. They don't have them because the people that would pay anything at all for them are largely also the people that are most valuable to advertisers, and they wouldn't pay enough.
- SomewhatLikely 6y agoIt's a very intuitive explanation, yet the costs to remove ads from Hulu or YouTube are quite reasonable. It's possible search is a different beast I suppose. I know a lot of the search ads I click on are actually defensively purchased. The number one organic result bought the top ad slot just to defend their position. That feels far more like rent seeking than the ads on the video platforms.
- simonkafan 6y agoWhy another general purpose search engine? How about a niche, for example a search engine that can be extensively controlled by using Boolean algebra, Regex, first-order logic? Googles results got less and less reasonable over the last years.
- wongarsu 6y agoGoogle used to understand Boolean algebra, like (hackernews OR reddit) AND search engine
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoGrep through your HD. How fast? Now imagine grepping through the internetz. As for FOLogic, IIRC RDF was related to that (or was that, can't remember) and it takes the sites investment to get that working on their site ie. you can't expect formal relationships between objects to appear magically, someone has to do it. And FOL if it existed may be computationally expensive. And once you've got all that, how easy would it be to use? Probably most would go back to keyword searches.
- sawaruna 6y agoMaybe the pendulum could swing back the other way slightly and we could have room for an older Yahoo-style indexed search engine. This wouldn't be something that would be browsed instead of search, but if you had a general categories list indexed, say 'finance' or 'graphic design', users could enter those sections and search sites categorised accordingly. Perhaps some ranking could be done based on search terms used within a category and what site a user ends up visiting (e.g. many users end up visiting a certain stackexchange link when searching for 'parsing json in python' within the 'computer programming' category, and so its rank increases). Heck instead of ads, maybe each category page could have a list of 'popular / trending sites on this topic' section at the topic that pages could pay to be placed in. Not sure if this solves any user problem to be honest, and the idea is only appealing to me because I think some amount of domain expertise and human curation could go into categorising pages. While this sounds (and no doubt would be) labour intensive, if we consider the number of domains that users actually visit when conducting a search (i.e. ignoring anything past page 1 of google) then perhaps it's not so extreme.
- eric4smith 6y agoBack in the good old days of Dmoz, this was the way, but then it became extremely limiting, and I remember wanting to rank in the directory for something and I "knew" one of the people in charge of a section. There was even some accusations of "pay for play" too. Eventually Dmoz died when Google came on the scene. But I get what you mean.
- nine_k 6y agoSo, finally a paid search engine that does not have to rely on ads for revenue. So far it's based on Bing, which does. This makes it a bit a hard sell, compared to an intelligent ad blocker. The most important problem of search engines is SEO spam. Google themselves sort of have a moral hazard to not be too stringent on SEO spam, because it shows ads by Google, increasing Google's revenue. OTOH I wonder if the subscription revenue is going to be sufficient to have access to a reasonably good search index and enough processing power to efficiently combat SEO spam while returning relevant results. This takes your own data centers run frugally, because fees of something like AWS or Azure will just be exorbitant for a global search engine and a global search index. I wonder if companies aiming to provide alternative search engines will cooperate on maintaining a common index, to distribute the massive costs of doing that. They could even publicly sell access to it, at a point where running a competing search engine won't be practical; e.g. researchers would buy it.
- ma2rten 6y agoI am actually wondering if search engines really need such a large index. The vast majority of sites in Google's index are crap. If you were able to better select which sites to index it might help search quality and improve efficiency.
- nine_k 6y agoHow can you tell what is crap while crawling, is there enough time? How can you tell what is crap for the next person, and what is not crap? It's not an easy question.
- nwienert 6y agoPeople! Let the users help. All the best content sources on the internet are either experts or communities with voting / submissions.
- sah2ed 6y ago> People! Let the users help. All the best content sources on the internet are either experts or communities with voting / submissions. There are over 1.7 billion websites [0], so the task of ranking content, the way algorithmic search engines do it in a matter of milliseconds, is not as easy as it sounds when you add humans into the mix. It would only end up the way Mahalo did [1]. [0] https://www.statista.com/chart/19058/how-many-websites-are-there/ https://www.statista.com/chart/19058/how-many-websites-are-t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
- narrator 6y agoThere's already a paid, curated search engine Google can't beat in certain verticals: Westlaw and LexisNexus, but they are based on vast curated and annotated data sets of legal case law that deliver enormous value to end users of those services.
- scoutt 6y agoThe more I think about it, the more I think the search engine problem has no (currently known) solution. The options are: 1) Word-based crawling/indexing: quickly abused by spammers. 2) IA/ML-based: I think this is the current model (?), but after a while the machine got "clever" and it makes Google to think it knows better than me about what I am looking for, and returns result for "most people" tastes. The problem is when you are not "most people", and/or you are looking for some niche topic/work related/tech stuff/etc. Simply trying to discover new things like an interesting blog or a small shop it's impossible. 3) Paid-based: as in the article, and might be a good idea. But I think it has to run on a custom indexer. Why would I pay for Bing results? 4) Aggregators: a search engine that returns results from a bunch of other search engines, like DDG and others. 5) A mix of the above? So unless new ideas come to the rescue, I think it's always going to get worse.
- eitland 6y ago> 1) Word-based crawling/indexing: quickly abused by spammers. I guess that ends quickly once spam means you get blacklisted no matter how many Google ads you serve ;-) A large piece of this article hints at how they have some interesting options that Google doesn't have.
- amanzi 6y agoI want to share a recent search I did through Google -- at work I wanted to look up how to implement conditionals in Microsoft Forms (i.e. the next question in the form is based on the previous answer). I searched for "microsoft forms conditional" (without quotes) and the first search result on Google was this page on how to "use branching in Microsoft Forms" - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-branching-in-microsoft-forms-16634fda-eddb-44da-856d-6a8213f0d8bb https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-branching-in-... That page doesn't contain the word "conditional" at all - the word that Microsoft uses is "branching" but Google deduced that it was the best result, which was perfect. The same search in either Bing or DDG produces results that all have the words "microsoft", "forms", and "conditional" in them and none of them link to the page I mentioned above, which I consider to be the best result. Moral of the story? Search is hard, but Google does it better than everyone else. Also, I learned via this thread that DDG is just a wrapper around Bing, which explains why the search results between DDG and Bing were near identical - they even have the matching video suggestions.
- dunefox 6y agoI never understand why people seem to like the DDG results so much. I often have to go back to Google.
- sshagent 6y agoI was moaning about this elsewhere on this site, how searching for exact phrases in quotes seems to now be a dead thing. Google and Amazon both just pick a couple of the words and shows you that. Dammit, if i put multiple words in a quote search for that phrase. If you don't find much, then sure show the other thing.
- popinman322 6y agoJust a comment: Sounds like the results of a neural network: roughly approximating your intent and searching around that intent, in continuous space, to find other viable search terms and phrases. (This is one possible approach, given in broad strokes.) That's a massive barrier to entry. You need enough data and compute to train a massive language model, more compute to run the model against all incoming queries, and then even more compute to handle the extra search load precipitated by use of the language model. Not to mention the years of R&D that go into these models and their associated tooling.
- habosa 6y agoI just can't get past the narrative here. Sridhar basically builds Google's massive ad business from the ground up and then decides "ads are bad" and takes his ad money over to profit on the other side by selling a new search engine without ads. Reminds me of "The Prodigal Techbro": https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/ https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbr...
- kwhitefoot 6y agoWhat I want is a search engine UI that will guarantee that my search terms appear in /all/ of the hits. And allow me to specify terms that must not appear and guarantee that the hits do not contain those. I'm semi-seriously considering writing my own.
- moritonal 6y agoNot to seem rude, but do you know about "https://www.google.com/advanced_search" https://www.google.com/advanced_search"?
- kwhitefoot 6y agoHow do you find it if you aren't aware that it exists. There is no longer a link to it on the Google search page as far as I can see. And, as soon as you hit the search button you are back in the ordinary search so refining the search is tedious. The UI stinks. However, I am grateful for the reminder.
- est 6y agoSearch engines are dead because public websites no longer carries useful information. Tons of user creations are on mobile now, in walled gardens. We need hostable websites on mobile phones. Or data will be centralized to few big corporations.
- cecja 6y agoIf the youtube search is any indicator where we are going there won't be search for much longer it's only "recommendations" from here on forward.
- shafyy 6y agoFrom their website: > Neeva finds exactly what matters to you, whether it’s on the web, buried in your emails, or deep in an impossible-to-find document. Why not stick to just a good search engine? I don't want to hook up my email accounts cloud storage accounts to this. Usually people know if they need to search on the world wide web or in their own emails or docs, don't they?
- tomxor 6y ago> it felt like a product being made worse by its business model. Something even worse than this has has forced me to ddg out of necessity: fucking CAPTCHA. Which is essentially discrimination against anyone with a mobile internet connection who blocks google's tracking. I just can't use google search anymore, it's a special kind of torture, after years of getting used to using google for everything and now getting this thrown in my face every single fucking time - way to permanently train users away from your search engine. It's time we had more competitors, google search is a monopoly and it's only going to abuse it's users more.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ur-whale 6y agoA few things you need to build a search engine: 1. something that *understands* the question 2. something that *understands* content (web pages) 3. something that can match the output of 1 and 2 very fast and at scale 4. a way to generate revenue out of the whole thing without bothering the user or perverting the output of 1,2 and 3 In the case of Google, they have a fairly good implementation of #1,#2 and #3 and they used to have found a decent compromise for #4. In the last 5 years though, they have completely eff'd up #3 because of the pressure that comes standard with large US-based corps: the next quarter EPS is the only thing that matters, and long-term growth is not something wall street is interested in. Burn a patch of forest, grow something on the ashes-fertilized soil for a few years and move on to the next patch when the soil is permanently dead.
- m3kw9 6y agoOnce I saw subscriptions based search, I cannot bet on it just because when I search I can filter the ads myself from google pretty easily, and it is quite hard to beat googles search accuracy.
- amelius 6y agoI'd like to see a curated list of papers for building a search engine.
- Aeolun 6y agoThey’re not building a search engine at all. They’re another duckduckgo, but charging a subscription fee. They’ll get my money when they’re actually building a search engine.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoIf it weren't for Duck Duck Go, I would absolutely consider paying a small monthly fee to Neeva for ad-free (and hopefully tracking-free) search service. I might anyway. Interesting that both Neeva and DDG build on Microsoft's Bing service. I also use Bing search for small personal projects. Search APIs are useful for many automated information extraction use cases. There are paid for Google services that I really like (GCP, Play Music, Play Books, Play Movies), but I now avoid search and gmail.
- hliyan 6y agoIf only the early Internet had a standard search protocol RFC alongside the others, so that each website could implement it, and there would one day be search aggregators with content quality filtering.
- phenkdo 6y agoI think "search" needs a paradigm shift, in fact keywords -> links paradigm needs radical change. Something akin to a GPT-3 model but with interactivity and self-customization.
- jhoechtl 6y agoI signed up but I fear that it is going to be shopping-centric. So results are bought instead of intelligentely mined.
- yalogin 6y agoI agree with the sentiment that google search results are not what they used to be. And its google's fault. Not as much because of their search algorithms as it is their ad business. Talking pure about tech articles on the internet, Google's ads have corrupted the previously benign and even helpful blogs and other sites and turned them into ad peddlers. I mean who wouldn't want a recurring revenue stream? That kind of reached its zenith (or nadir) when companies started sucking in articles and employing people to write tutorials just to get ad dollars. Every one of the tech articles. I am sure the other fields are the same way. So unless you know a site you want to search in, the results are all ads not real content.
- bhartzer 6y agoThe problem is ads and ad revenue, but Google is increasingly scraping content from websites in order to put that content on their own site—To keep users on google properties as long as they can.
- ralmidani 6y agoI would gladly pay $5 a month for a totally ad-free and tracking-free search engine that lets me easily block sites and/or downvote results that aren’t relevant to me. I already pay for Apple hardware and Protonmail, and use FF and DDG whenever I can, in no small part to avoid Google and MS. I would love to see DDG or someone else offer a no-nonsense, “premium” search engine.
- LockAndLol 6y agoThey could be using YaCy, setup their own infra and provide premium access to fast and more reliable YaCy results. That would at least make them a competitor and not just a Bing UI. I mean, sure, it's cheaper, but it doesn't really set them apart from any other Bing UI. Actually running something they own, especially something opensource and federated, would distinguish them and warrant whatever fee they deem necessary.
- wackget 6y agoThis website (protocol.com) hounded me with a newsletter subscribe popup as soon as I landed on the page. I hadn't even had a chance to read the first line of the article and the site's already asking me to sign up for their marketing trash. Why in the world would anyone think that's acceptable? I have never seen the site before and have no idea of the quality of its content so what on earth makes them think they're going to get a subscriber out of me?
- XCSme 6y agoI agree, I usually insta-close a website when I get an unexpected pop-up. Pop-ups should only be used as a result of a direct user action (eg. click on delete account, receive a confirmation pop-up).
- sid- 6y agoI think we should have subscription products that respect privacy and data for all successful products; Maps, Youtube, Search, FB, etc.
- 135792468 6y agoAs an SEO, I’m embarrassed how accurate the comments in this thread are. I’ve had this conversation with with peers but the search results are utter trash and it makes me feel bad to be part of it, finding good information is so hard. Until Algos get smart enough to understand text at a deeper level we will not get anywhere. We really need more competition. I know Apple gets billions from google for being the default search but if they were to buy DDG which results are mostly goof enough, they’d be a viable competitor. Until something big like that happens, Google will continue to be below average
- IndexPointer 6y agoSo, another Bing API wrapper to add to the list?