7 ms·
>This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try wri
by hammock 5y ago
>This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam?
>You might need to do a lot of manual spam fighting initially. That could be both the thing-that-doesn't-scale, and the thing that differentiates you by being alien to Google's DNA. (They must hate manual interventions; so inelegant).
Is he describing...Yahoo circa 1994? A manually curated directory service.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI'm starting to think Yahoo circa 1994 might be better than Google today.
- behnamoh 5y agoI wouldn't just complain about Google. Google search results mostly reflect a deeper problem with the web today. I do miss the simplicity of the 2000s.
- edoceo 5y agodmoz! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
- matt_heimer 5y agoI always used DMOZ more than Yahoo! Directory. It looks like [dmoz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ) became https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/ which is still active.
- loceng 5y agoAnd makes me think that StumbleUpon had a similar curation ability, in that the value qualifier is how often [hopefully] real people interact with content - tracked by who's using SU and agreed to allow tracking; can't remember if sharing that was optional or not? The gamification of the system then would have to come through onboarding fake users, pretending/mimicking real user behaviour to send that signal into the system; not sure if SU ever ran into that problem or was actively paying attention to trying to identify and removing fake or suspicious signals from their output? I feel a much better system is easily within reach, it's simply getting the right structure to it, the right foundation, and then it will quickly take off due to the quality difference. I've already figured out a design pattern that Twitter and Facebook has indoctrinated us with, making us think it is normal - and keeping us blind to an actual normal way or organizing or communicating, but that isn't conducive to control or ad revenues - and so extending my future plans to include a better search-directory system would fit snugly into my efforts.
- visarga 5y agoSU was a great way to surface random interesting stuff. I bet most blog entries today could be picked from Twitter, even if they are unlinked.
- gorbachev 5y agoSome of the examples used in the Twitter thread Paul was referring to would be better served by a manually curated directory service with a possible addition of a search engine only surfacing content from the sites in the directory. For health information and recipes in particular there are only a handful of really high quality sites that have quality content for 95% of the information most people need. I bet if you wanted to increase the coverage to 99%, that list would expand to less than a thousand sites. At those numbers manually curating the information would be easily achievable. How to get people to use your top notch Google replacement instead of Google, however. That's the hard problem.
- llaolleh 5y agoIt's really hard to get people to use something other than Google. If you were to launch such a product, it would have to be so much better that people recommend it organically to other people.
- visarga 5y agoShould be able to run on top Google in a browser extension to insert itself only when the topic allows.
- Rastonbury 5y agoThat was what Google was to Yahoo/Altavista back in the day, a 10x improvement. Reading this thread, people feel pain enough do all sorts of hacky stuff - appending 'reddit 'or 'forum' to queries, blacklisting spam domains, switching search engines depending on topic. If G keeps declining and a new product does things better, the penny will drop and people will swap. Siebel and PG see blood in the water no doubt, they see G's market share and want to fund companies to take some of this.
- basch 5y agoIsn't that what google Programmable Search is? https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=dc408db269da4e769 https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=dc408db269da4e769 (try searching for something you want a review of) Make a search, whitelist the domains. Every time you run into a good review site, add it to the searchable list.
- noduerme 5y agoHe's right as often as he's wrong
- sillysaurusx 5y agoWhat has he been wrong about?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- noduerme 5y agoOkay. I was gonna respond with something snarky about what a crappy mod he was, or how he was a Saint and you don't deserve to worship at his functional feet. But I'll tell you what he was wrong about: He was, as a leader and a human and a mod, petty. He pied pipered himself into a sweet spot and no one would deny he's a good coder, but there the ego took off and forever left behind a skidmark. The cool exterior, the sense of self-importance, the punching down, above all the love of spreading one's revelatory wisdom to the poor little guy; you can love that sort of thing too much, and he did. Perhaps you weren't here or didn't interact with him directly. In my view he became dismissive and derogatory toward people who worshiped him (like you) once he acquired a small degree of fame.
- Jorengarenar 5y agoWhat in the world are you babbling about? Who here does worship who?
- Arbalest 5y agoI'm going to guess Paul Graham, who wrote the tweet. One of the founders of YCombinator and HN (just in case people who read this don't know).
- aaron695 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]