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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

by 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.

by mgreg 6y ago

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.