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You're missing the most novel technology: ranking. Without that everything else is pretty much useless (which is why DDG primarily republishes Bing results).

You're missing the most novel technology: ranking. Without that everything else is pretty much useless (which is why DDG primarily republishes Bing results). You're right that drawing users is a big challenge, but privacy gives you a way in there (again DDG). It just isn't enough if you can't provide better results. Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos. Which is extremely expensive in engineering time because ranking isn't static but rather a constant war with gaming.

mgreg 6y ago
Thanks for pointing out ranking search results as a technology investment required; I tend to think of it as part of indexing but a good call out. I purposely didn't want to go down the "quality" rat hole because that tends to devolve into subjective opinions (see DDG threads throughout HN). My personal, subjective opinion is that blind tests would likely reveal very little differences and thus justify their major investment in brand advertising made by Google. (not blind but compare https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+wallpaper https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+wallpaper with https://www.google.com/search?q=best+wallpaper; https://www.google.com/search?q=best+wallpaper; do you really want 3 pinterest results to this query; this is the burden of being the dominant search engine - you're the one people will game) --edited for typos
- jeffbee 6y ago
  That seems like a search result not worth comparing. It is, as they say, a stupid question with only stupid answers. Let's compare the last search I actually did on Google: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+into+k-many+equal+weighted+areas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+into+k-ma... https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+into+k-many+equal+weighted+areas https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+int... DDG results aren't "bad" as such but they're not as good as the Google results. The three videos that DDG gives me at the top of the SERP are totally irrelevant and the Wikipedia panel DDG offers is while not completely unrelated still doesn't address my query. The google results contain no irrelevant videos, no knowledge panel, just ten research papers. Much better results.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I'm not sure either matter, ultimately. It's the industrial structure, rather than the demands of the job (provide a good search engine) that matter here. In order to be a sustainable google competitor, you need to be a competing search business, not just a competing search engine. The business model is such that market share affects unit value. A search business with 1% of google's traffic (or 1% of fb's social traffic) does not make 1% os google's revenue. More scale, more unit value. Meanwhile, the way most/many small search engines monetize is via adwords. Adwords has already been found guilty (EU court) of abusing this nasty grip on their (minimal) competition's revenue avenue.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  I actually don't see 3 pinterest results, maybe there is some personalization at play. However you can't compare results based on just one search query. Not to mention that your query is probably quite common. It's easy for a search engine to return good results for common queries. The difficulty of search is in the long-tail. Bing invested billions of dollar into search. They had traditional advertising including celebrity endorsements. They were unable to compete with Google on quality. Google has large team of engineers working on search quality and they evaluate each change using human raters.
feanaro 6y ago
> Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos. I've seen this repeatedly brought into question in recent years and I've also observed it myself. Google's search quality is suffering horribly and it seems at least partly related to them moving away from the PageRank-like algorithms that made it famous (or, more reasonably, including many new additional components to it which are unrelated to PageRank and which are drowning out the signal).
- post_below 6y ago
  PageRank stopped working when black hat SEO figured out how to game it. They had to evolve PageRank (into things like hubs and authorities, etc..) to maintain quality. If you think their results are bad, try a rudimentary search query on the raw data from one of the open web index projects. Google sucks in a lot of ways but they're still really really good at search.
  - higerordermap 6y ago
    Yeah, I too often think that Google search quality is decreasing. But I am not sure anyone can do better given current tech, because search engine metrics are almost always gamed. There are some limited solutions. If they allow to filter out pages full of tracking and ads, it will filter out lot of shit content, but that probably harms their business model. They might have allowed to exclude some sites from search, too..

mgreg 6y ago

Thanks for pointing out ranking search results as a technology investment required; I tend to think of it as part of indexing but a good call out. I purposely didn't want to go down the "quality" rat hole because that tends to devolve into subjective opinions (see DDG threads throughout HN). My personal, subjective opinion is that blind tests would likely reveal very little differences and thus justify their major investment in brand advertising made by Google. (not blind but compare https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+wallpaper https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+wallpaper with https://www.google.com/search?q=best+wallpaper; https://www.google.com/search?q=best+wallpaper; do you really want 3 pinterest results to this query; this is the burden of being the dominant search engine - you're the one people will game) --edited for typos

jeffbee 6y ago
That seems like a search result not worth comparing. It is, as they say, a stupid question with only stupid answers. Let's compare the last search I actually did on Google: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+into+k-many+equal+weighted+areas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+into+k-ma... https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+into+k-many+equal+weighted+areas https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+partition+a+plane+int... DDG results aren't "bad" as such but they're not as good as the Google results. The three videos that DDG gives me at the top of the SERP are totally irrelevant and the Wikipedia panel DDG offers is while not completely unrelated still doesn't address my query. The google results contain no irrelevant videos, no knowledge panel, just ten research papers. Much better results.
dalbasal 6y ago
I'm not sure either matter, ultimately. It's the industrial structure, rather than the demands of the job (provide a good search engine) that matter here. In order to be a sustainable google competitor, you need to be a competing search business, not just a competing search engine. The business model is such that market share affects unit value. A search business with 1% of google's traffic (or 1% of fb's social traffic) does not make 1% os google's revenue. More scale, more unit value. Meanwhile, the way most/many small search engines monetize is via adwords. Adwords has already been found guilty (EU court) of abusing this nasty grip on their (minimal) competition's revenue avenue.
ma2rten 6y ago
I actually don't see 3 pinterest results, maybe there is some personalization at play. However you can't compare results based on just one search query. Not to mention that your query is probably quite common. It's easy for a search engine to return good results for common queries. The difficulty of search is in the long-tail. Bing invested billions of dollar into search. They had traditional advertising including celebrity endorsements. They were unable to compete with Google on quality. Google has large team of engineers working on search quality and they evaluate each change using human raters.

feanaro 6y ago

> Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos. I've seen this repeatedly brought into question in recent years and I've also observed it myself. Google's search quality is suffering horribly and it seems at least partly related to them moving away from the PageRank-like algorithms that made it famous (or, more reasonably, including many new additional components to it which are unrelated to PageRank and which are drowning out the signal).

post_below 6y ago
PageRank stopped working when black hat SEO figured out how to game it. They had to evolve PageRank (into things like hubs and authorities, etc..) to maintain quality. If you think their results are bad, try a rudimentary search query on the raw data from one of the open web index projects. Google sucks in a lot of ways but they're still really really good at search.
- higerordermap 6y ago
  Yeah, I too often think that Google search quality is decreasing. But I am not sure anyone can do better given current tech, because search engine metrics are almost always gamed. There are some limited solutions. If they allow to filter out pages full of tracking and ads, it will filter out lot of shit content, but that probably harms their business model. They might have allowed to exclude some sites from search, too..