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I'm glad to see more competition, but I'm disappointed to see that it's basically a clone. There is so much room for differentiation that nobody is exploring, I

by Mizza 6y ago

I'm glad to see more competition, but I'm disappointed to see that it's basically a clone. There is so much room for differentiation that nobody is exploring, I'm thinking about taking a shot at it.

atty 6y ago
I’m curious, what would you want to differentiate in? As far as I’m concerned, Google achieved an almost perfect search engine maybe 5-10 years ago, before they started pushing their ads harder, hiding the page address, and all these other user-hostile behaviors they’ve been taking in the near past. I just want a service that gives me the most relevant result as the first option, with no distractions.
- ratww 6y ago
  Not GP but: would be nice to have a search engine that penalises content marketing and ad-heavy websites. The web is flooded with bad content, and Google doesn't seem to care, since it brings money to them. There's also too much duplicate junk: it would be nice to search for a song title and not being given 20 pages of copycat lyrics websites. Or 20 pages of copycat guitar tab websites. Also: software aggregators, Wikipedia mirrors, Stack Overflow mirrors, Github mirrors. I mean they're all the same, maybe just aggregate them together? Would also be nice to be able to filter out, or at least de-emphasise things like: piracy download sites, fake download sites, fake ebook sites. Of course that would need some curation.
mprovost 6y ago
I spent a few years working at a search startup. I would say Google is ready to squash competition like a bug but really you're more like a bug getting splatted on their windscreen. Most of the time they don't even consider you to be competition. Maybe in some ways that's a good thing - if they don't consider you to be a threat then you've got some room to innovate. Until you get big enough that you show up on their radar... then they can just copy whatever you've been doing differently.

by Mizza 6y ago

I'm glad to see more competition, but I'm disappointed to see that it's basically a clone. There is so much room for differentiation that nobody is exploring, I'm thinking about taking a shot at it.

atty 6y ago

I’m curious, what would you want to differentiate in? As far as I’m concerned, Google achieved an almost perfect search engine maybe 5-10 years ago, before they started pushing their ads harder, hiding the page address, and all these other user-hostile behaviors they’ve been taking in the near past. I just want a service that gives me the most relevant result as the first option, with no distractions.

ratww 6y ago
Not GP but: would be nice to have a search engine that penalises content marketing and ad-heavy websites. The web is flooded with bad content, and Google doesn't seem to care, since it brings money to them. There's also too much duplicate junk: it would be nice to search for a song title and not being given 20 pages of copycat lyrics websites. Or 20 pages of copycat guitar tab websites. Also: software aggregators, Wikipedia mirrors, Stack Overflow mirrors, Github mirrors. I mean they're all the same, maybe just aggregate them together? Would also be nice to be able to filter out, or at least de-emphasise things like: piracy download sites, fake download sites, fake ebook sites. Of course that would need some curation.

mprovost 6y ago

I spent a few years working at a search startup. I would say Google is ready to squash competition like a bug but really you're more like a bug getting splatted on their windscreen. Most of the time they don't even consider you to be competition. Maybe in some ways that's a good thing - if they don't consider you to be a threat then you've got some room to innovate. Until you get big enough that you show up on their radar... then they can just copy whatever you've been doing differently.