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Some 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

Some 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 ago
It'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 ago
  Should be able to run on top Google in a browser extension to insert itself only when the topic allows.
- Rastonbury 5y ago
  That 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 ago
Isn'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.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  That's all fine and dandy, but the goal isn't to just make some good sites a bit easier to find, it's to keep the top of your search results from being interspersed or superseded by SEO spam. Unless I misunderstood your suggestion.

llaolleh 5y ago

It'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 ago
Should be able to run on top Google in a browser extension to insert itself only when the topic allows.
Rastonbury 5y ago
That 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 ago

Isn'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.

DangitBobby 5y ago
That's all fine and dandy, but the goal isn't to just make some good sites a bit easier to find, it's to keep the top of your search results from being interspersed or superseded by SEO spam. Unless I misunderstood your suggestion.