7 ms·

I fully understand your point and defaults are very strong. That being said, I try new search engines from time to time and always get back to google, because

by daanlo 5y ago

I fully understand your point and defaults are very strong. That being said, I try new search engines from time to time and always get back to google, because non of the others have worked for me (in a professional context). I probably do 200 searches per day and google is most likely to give me relevant info on my first query (maybe 80-90% success rate). All others I have tried have been around 40-50% win an avg. of 2-3 search queries to find my result. That is a huge daily time sync on 200 searches per day. I will also test your search engine. And before having tested it, I have some unsolicited advice ;) At least these are things that would make me switch: 1) you are strong in my vertical. 50% of my daily search queries are professional. Probably 10-20% are programming related. If you were better 20% better than google at delivering results for that subset, I would probably use you. 2) If you had very strong support for my locale. Based in Germany, 50% of my private searches are in German. Most search engines, apart from google, suck in German. My assumption is their market share is so small that they don‘t put effort into any language specific search syntax understanding. German or large language groups like Spanish, Hindi, French come to mind. 3) If you can‘t become a default search engine on safari, maybe you can role your own browser (chromium fork or something) where you are the default. You could package it as: MySearchEngine App. It is actually a fully functional browser, but users really use it because they want to use your search engine. That might give easier access than having to manually navigate to your website in safari. </ end of unsolicited advice />

masa331 5y ago
Have you tried Kagi.com? I switched to it and i'm very happy even with searches in my native language for example
jedwhite 5y ago
The ultimate test of any search engine is always the results. While the project I'm working on is definitely still an alpha, I'd love to chat with you when you try it out. I don't want to take the conversation here off-topic. To your general points though, there are definitely opportunities to provide better results within specialist areas of knowledge, and for local markets. I think most of the search startups are doing their own mobile app. On iOS, the system search and browser remains Google/Safari (and the App is essentially just a wrapper on Safari for browsing). But at least it is something. I think you'll see more people doing desktop apps, although the dominance of Google through Chromium forks for this isn't a coincidence. It feels like the bad old days of re-packaging Internet Explorer with a custom homepage all over again.
Mezzie 5y ago
Multi-lingual search results in general; Google (and FB) just for some reason cannot comprehend that someone might have reasons to search in multiple languages or even regions. For instance, I at one point was an editor/fact-checker for an academic publisher and one project involved checking a lot of information from official government sources around the world, and Google did not know what to do with that. Hell, I'd love to have the option to make the search results be completely language agnostic.
- greggman3 5y ago
  Don't you just set the region and language at the bottom? I also search in multiple languages but I also know that's an exception. The majority of the people in the world likely would only use a single language and it's easy to believe that search results are better for those users with languages separated.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Yes, hence why I'd want an option for language agnostic results. It would be a terrible default. There are cases when I'd even like REGION agnostic results, or least ones not bound by national boundaries. For example, I have an interest in my state history (MI), and there's plenty of relevant articles/commentary from the Canadians.
- eru 5y ago
  I sometimes have similar issues. But I can understand why Google might not want to cater to the multi-lingual market: perhaps it's just too niche?
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    I don't think it's too niche, I think they're just American. A Canadian/Indian/EU-based Google probably would've ended up with multi-lingual support, whereas a China/UK based one probably wouldn't have. By the time Google got big enough for international considerations, there were already a bunch of baked in assumptions about their users, like them being monolingual.
abecedarius 5y ago
fwiw I use solution #3: the Brave browser, set to Brave search. So that option is not unrealistic now.
- jedwhite 5y ago
  Also a fan of Brave browser here. The more people trying new things the better! I know some people don't like the crypto-angle with it, but I think it is a positive to test new economic models to support online content, personally.
the_one_jay 5y ago
Metager.org is my go to google search replacement. I imagine (although my German is non native) that the German search results are quite good. . . it being a German search engine. To be honest it the only search engine to get me off google - DDG is OK, as is searx, but I kept going back to the dirty G until Metager.
btilly 5y ago
How much of the German challenge do you think is due to German being an inflected language? So a search engine that can't figure out the inflected variants of a word are going to potentially miss out on a large number of the relevant search results.
- mbg721 5y ago
  In addition to inflections, another factor may be the tendency to use compound words, so that a relevant word in context might not have a space at each end.
  - eru 5y ago
    In English, Google is pretty good at figuring out when to add spaces in your queries (if you have a typo with your spaces). Similar technology should help it with German? There's nothing magic about putting a space between words or not. Similar to whether you hyphenate or not.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      Maybe it isn't a big deal; my thought was that if you're crawling a website and trying to associate its contents with search terms, parsing an uncommon compound word into the correct parts is going to come up more often in German than in English, especially if you're smaller than Google and German isn't your main focus. Are search engines good enough now to know that a string like electricovenmonitor is about ovens but not covens or Venmo?
int_19h 5y ago
At least in part this seems to be due to the profiles that Google has built. Whenever I try to use Google in anonymous mode, the results become noticeably worse. Which, of course, means that it is yet another barrier to entry for any would-be competitors.
- jedwhite 5y ago
  This could also be a perverse incentive reflected algorithmically (whether on purpose or not). Google has better data and makes more money when users are identified. So they have a vested interest in making users think that they will get worse results in Incognito mode. Personalization is a double-edged sword. @pg once wrote about Google results becoming "what's true for you" rather than what's objectively true. And filter bubbles and subtle "personalization censorship" are also dangers. I think it's possible to have high quality results and privacy/anonymity, and it's not a binary choice. It's a challenge worth figuring out.
  - debschi 5y ago
    Totally agree that personalization is a double edged sword. Problem is getting people to actually want to change their personalized feeds/results. Most people have no clue what they’re missing and this issue has huge “Medium is the message” like implications.
anothernewdude 5y ago
I disagree about google being the best. For a start, their image search is massively behind bing. They do 0 work to remove pinterest spam. And DDG is way ahead of google on normal adhoc search.

by daanlo 5y ago

masa331 5y ago

Have you tried Kagi.com? I switched to it and i'm very happy even with searches in my native language for example

jedwhite 5y ago

The ultimate test of any search engine is always the results. While the project I'm working on is definitely still an alpha, I'd love to chat with you when you try it out. I don't want to take the conversation here off-topic. To your general points though, there are definitely opportunities to provide better results within specialist areas of knowledge, and for local markets. I think most of the search startups are doing their own mobile app. On iOS, the system search and browser remains Google/Safari (and the App is essentially just a wrapper on Safari for browsing). But at least it is something. I think you'll see more people doing desktop apps, although the dominance of Google through Chromium forks for this isn't a coincidence. It feels like the bad old days of re-packaging Internet Explorer with a custom homepage all over again.

Mezzie 5y ago

Multi-lingual search results in general; Google (and FB) just for some reason cannot comprehend that someone might have reasons to search in multiple languages or even regions. For instance, I at one point was an editor/fact-checker for an academic publisher and one project involved checking a lot of information from official government sources around the world, and Google did not know what to do with that. Hell, I'd love to have the option to make the search results be completely language agnostic.

greggman3 5y ago
Don't you just set the region and language at the bottom? I also search in multiple languages but I also know that's an exception. The majority of the people in the world likely would only use a single language and it's easy to believe that search results are better for those users with languages separated.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Yes, hence why I'd want an option for language agnostic results. It would be a terrible default. There are cases when I'd even like REGION agnostic results, or least ones not bound by national boundaries. For example, I have an interest in my state history (MI), and there's plenty of relevant articles/commentary from the Canadians.
eru 5y ago
I sometimes have similar issues. But I can understand why Google might not want to cater to the multi-lingual market: perhaps it's just too niche?
- Mezzie 5y ago
  I don't think it's too niche, I think they're just American. A Canadian/Indian/EU-based Google probably would've ended up with multi-lingual support, whereas a China/UK based one probably wouldn't have. By the time Google got big enough for international considerations, there were already a bunch of baked in assumptions about their users, like them being monolingual.

abecedarius 5y ago

fwiw I use solution #3: the Brave browser, set to Brave search. So that option is not unrealistic now.

jedwhite 5y ago
Also a fan of Brave browser here. The more people trying new things the better! I know some people don't like the crypto-angle with it, but I think it is a positive to test new economic models to support online content, personally.

the_one_jay 5y ago

Metager.org is my go to google search replacement. I imagine (although my German is non native) that the German search results are quite good. . . it being a German search engine. To be honest it the only search engine to get me off google - DDG is OK, as is searx, but I kept going back to the dirty G until Metager.

btilly 5y ago

How much of the German challenge do you think is due to German being an inflected language? So a search engine that can't figure out the inflected variants of a word are going to potentially miss out on a large number of the relevant search results.

mbg721 5y ago
In addition to inflections, another factor may be the tendency to use compound words, so that a relevant word in context might not have a space at each end.
- eru 5y ago
  In English, Google is pretty good at figuring out when to add spaces in your queries (if you have a typo with your spaces). Similar technology should help it with German? There's nothing magic about putting a space between words or not. Similar to whether you hyphenate or not.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    Maybe it isn't a big deal; my thought was that if you're crawling a website and trying to associate its contents with search terms, parsing an uncommon compound word into the correct parts is going to come up more often in German than in English, especially if you're smaller than Google and German isn't your main focus. Are search engines good enough now to know that a string like electricovenmonitor is about ovens but not covens or Venmo?

int_19h 5y ago

At least in part this seems to be due to the profiles that Google has built. Whenever I try to use Google in anonymous mode, the results become noticeably worse. Which, of course, means that it is yet another barrier to entry for any would-be competitors.

jedwhite 5y ago
This could also be a perverse incentive reflected algorithmically (whether on purpose or not). Google has better data and makes more money when users are identified. So they have a vested interest in making users think that they will get worse results in Incognito mode. Personalization is a double-edged sword. @pg once wrote about Google results becoming "what's true for you" rather than what's objectively true. And filter bubbles and subtle "personalization censorship" are also dangers. I think it's possible to have high quality results and privacy/anonymity, and it's not a binary choice. It's a challenge worth figuring out.
- debschi 5y ago
  Totally agree that personalization is a double edged sword. Problem is getting people to actually want to change their personalized feeds/results. Most people have no clue what they’re missing and this issue has huge “Medium is the message” like implications.

anothernewdude 5y ago

I disagree about google being the best. For a start, their image search is massively behind bing. They do 0 work to remove pinterest spam. And DDG is way ahead of google on normal adhoc search.