4 ms·
Is there room for another search engine?
I am developing a structured search engine to help web searchers find user-contributed information (yes, I know about network effect) in a way that is easy to perform sophisticated queries such as 'a list of jobs in industry A where the company has branches in B, C, D states and is founded by someone whose name consists of E'.
(the given query is just an example, though; it is not restricted to jobs)
The concept is similar to Freebase but not exactly a clone as I don't do clones.
I bounced this idea to a local (I'm Singaporean) forum and the typical response is "Why should users use your search engine and not Google?" even though I have stated that it is not meant to be a replacement for Google.
I am curious to the response of the HN community.
Is there room for such a search engine?
What kind of queries do you not use Google for?
- arkitaip 15y agoGoogle is... lacking when it comes to vertical or specialized searches, millions of database specific search interfaces on the web are a proof of this. Furthermore, I would never ever gauge the viability of an idea simply based on feedback provided by random users on a forum, no matter how biz/tech savvy they might be. You need a more robust process for evaluation your ideas that's based on actual customer data. I suggest Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Good luck with your idea.
- nurhafiz 15y agoThank you for the words of encouragement. I appreciate it.
- revorad 15y agoThere's certainly room for another search engine. Have you ever tried shopping searches on Google? They're painful and I'm building something to fix that. Another horrible search experience is site-specific search. Try looking for some techcrunch articles about a topic or company. You'll get a ton of results, but filtering them is nearly impossible. I think there's great scope for innovation on the UI, as hipmunk has clearly shown. Touch-based interactions, instead of typing and clicking, are going to be important. Is there any specific vertical you're thinking of?
- nurhafiz 15y agoI have figured out a way, which I can't share for now, on how to make it as vertical as it is horizontal (if that makes sense to anyone).
- ig1 15y agoAre you familiar with Sparql ?
- nurhafiz 15y agoYes, but I won't touch that at all because I figured a way to make the search engine usable for non-geeks (no offence to geeks). I think sometimes we need to take a step back and see things from a non-geeky aspect in order to come up with a practical solution.