22 ms·

Ask HN: Why isn't there a Google competitor emerging?

• MichaelRazum 5y ago
  brave.search is pretty good. BUT it is not the default search engine on most devices. AND google is still better for some specific queries. A competitor must be not as good but much much more better. Don't see it coming, especially it is very expensive to query the whole web.
• steve76 5y ago
• tonymet 5y ago
  Some platforms are complicated enough to require at least $100m to compete. search engines , OS , autonomous vehicles , voice assistants
• gyulai 5y ago
  ...because antitrust authorities have been asleep at the wheel.
• cupofpython 5y ago
  I believe a competitor would need to be such a better experience that by saying you are "googling" something, as in the common word for searching, an essence of the competitor is left out. If bing was successful at it, for example, it would cause the sentence "I tried to google it but ended up needing to Bing it" to make tangible sense to someone who has used both services. Even if you create a better search engine, there is too much of a marketing gap to compete on that alone. "use bing because the results are better!" simply doesnt motivate enough people to switch off google. Quite frankly, it is rare that google does not deliver expected results for the generic use case.
• y42 5y ago
  First you need to ask, why everywo is using Google: Habits and ignorance. The casual web user is just fine with what Google has to offer. And besides that: Google is convenient and everywhere. To get rid of it it requires not only the will but also the technological skill that the common user just does not have. And that leads to the answer of your question: Create an alternative that is easy to use,ofcourse, that can be implemented by just "a click" and is has to be everywhere. On your phone, TV and computer.
  • simonh 5y ago
    > Habits and ignorance. The casual web user is just fine with what Google has to offer. I think that’s a contradiction. If it’s just fine for their needs, the they have all the relevant information they need. They know perfectly well finding another service would take considerable effort, might well lead to a worse experience, and there’s a high chance they’d switch back anyway. That’s an informed decision, not an ignorant one.
  • azangru 5y ago
    So why did everyone start using Google when before that everyone had been using Yahoo or AltaVista?
    • robin_reala 5y ago
      Because Google at the time was a dramatically better experience than AltaVista, and Yahoo was more of a directory than a search engine.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  Google’s advantage over competitors isn’t that the search is great it is that they are much better at montesization.
• Decabytes 5y ago
  Because imo it would require being more than just a search engine. Google has Chrome, Gmail, YouTube and Search. People like having a lot of their services consolidated, just look at the Apple folks. Also while the quality of search has declined it is nowhere near the point where casual users would be bothered enough to switch
  • shantara 5y ago
    And Android, that keeps users tied to Google services through the power of defaults.
• limeblack 5y ago
  Bing is becoming fairly popular in the US https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/deskto...
  • GuB-42 5y ago
    Microsoft is pushing extremely hard for it. In Windows if you miss a barely visible button you will find yourself switching to Edge and Bing without realizing it. That Google is still at 85% show that people really want to use Google, it is not just "whatever comes with the computer".
    • InCityDreams 5y ago
      ..."you will find yourself switched* to...." Ftfy.
• johannes1234321 5y ago
  What you need as a competitor is awareness by users. But it's hard to beat a dominant player with lots of cash. Google owns one of the major mobile platforms, where it is the default search engine. It pays competing Browsers like Firefox to be the default and is so tied in public perception that "to google" is a verb. Also Google is fast and mostly reliable. Also Google search integrates with other services like Maps for localized search so that one is torn back to them easily. And if you were to get close to it they have tons of money to fight you. The interesting aspect is that outside the broader search domain their approach often enough doesn't work. They didn't get social networking, they didn't get messaging (except mail) ... so they way to beat them likely is to find new segments and occupy that space (like Zuckerberg wants to do with "Metaverse," whatever that shall be)
• resoluteteeth 5y ago
  Because google's search engine is still better than all of its current competitors and the barriers to entry are extremely high.
  • junon 5y ago
    It used to be, at least. As years pass, Google's search quality deteriorates. It's been quite dramatic in the last few years especially - I won't pretend to know why. A lot of it started happening when they took away the ability to search for exact terms, etc.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      >when they took away the ability to search for exact terms You can still do this. Put quotes around the terms.
      • junon 5y ago
        This doesn't work like it used to.
        • Ivoirians 5y ago
          It does work. In the past when I mentioned it, someone provided an apparent counterexample, a search with a term in quotes that wasn't found on the page. When I reported it to the search team, they found that the quoted term was actually in a hidden submenu on the site. So the term was still on the page, but not findable with ctrl-f, except in the source. Try it out and if you find a counterexample, let us all know.
          • zo1 5y ago
            Okay, I had this issue today and looked it up. Sure enough the term I had to quote and add a plus sign infront of was in the linked page after clicking through. But that's it, it was just "there" near the bottom. They put in all this fancy AI understanding and ML and NLP effort but when I go out of my way to tell the search that "this word right here is super important and critical", they just go ahead and append "page.includes(word)" as a filter to their super algorithm. Instead of using that signal to drive the search. No better than when sites used to stuff their html pages with keywords to trick search engines. #grumpy
• MMS21 5y ago
  Kagi keeps showing up here, perhaps check that out. https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
  • sanderjd 5y ago
    I can't figure out what their business model is. Do you know?
    • poxrud 5y ago
      Yes they are planning to charge a monthly fee.
    • libraryatnight 5y ago
      https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq How much will Kagi cost? Kagi will be completely free during the beta-test period for all users. Once we officially launch, we are dedicated to providing the best possible search experience to our users at a reasonable price. We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, unlimited plan at around $20-$30/mo as well as have bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), organization/team plans, family plans and annual payment discounts available. We understand that for some user this may sound prohibitively expensive, but unfortunately we are not in the position to set the price point by consensus or market expectation, but by realistic cost of providing the service at a given level of quality in a way that potentially ensures sustainability and serving our customers long-term.
• ergonaught 5y ago
  They would need to be Apple, they would need to understand how to write software for this purpose and then deliver it, and they would need to be able to make this the default search engine for iPhones without antimonopoly distractions. Beyond that, Google’s dominance isn’t going away due to their own “monopoly-like” positioning, their business relationships, the inertia of their massive public adoption, all of these applied within three or four other vital areas (ie: YouTube), their ability to pivot in response to anything novel that appeared to undermine their position, no apparent stories of Google executives hosting puppy kicking parties for the entire company to Satanic Panic everyone away from their products, the problem of promising companies being acquired because the owners (VC or founder or otherwise) are happy to be bought, the general “ick” factor of someone like Facebook attempting to enter the fray, some other things none of us have ever considered, random luck, and the initial conditions of the universe. You have to have good results against the inconceivably vast amount of content out there, you have to be easy to use, you have to be free, and you have to be able to do all of this and more for the yeeeeeears it would take to wiggle into the space and expand while resisting the pressures above. Doable, wildly improbable.
  • elnygren 5y ago
    Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning market. However, I guess big tech companies have become part of the superpower games (USA vs. China etc.). Breaking up Google might just mean a Chinese company takes over. Can't trust the other governments to enforce similar market conditions. So yeah, like you said, conditions of the universe :)
    • smitty1e 5y ago
      > Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning market. Well-crafted arguments showing where Google (or ilk) are anti-competitive are likely to gain some traction.
    • x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
      >...Sounds like a government intervention is needed and the monopoly should be broken down for a better functioning market. You can break up the phone systems because the child companies can provide similar levels of service. But how do you break up a single search algorithm?
• jasode 5y ago
  >, what would a competitor need to defy Google? One thing a competitor needs is a new and innovative technical algorithm. Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting back links instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This created a noticeable improvement in quality of results. Nobody seems to have The Next Big Idea for a better search engine yet. Somebody did a Shown HN of a new search engine based on whitelisted curated domains such as reddit discussions. But there are many technical problems with that (e.g. Goodhart's Law & Hawthorne Effect creates bad feedback loop of gaming the reddit discussions which then poisons the search engine.) Another technical idea of crowdsourced decentralized search index creates a very slow query engine which is a hard sell when web surfers are used to Google results appearing in less than 1 second. DDG's idea of "privacy" is interesting, but being (mostly) based on Microsoft Bing's search engine doesn't actually create a quantum leap in better search results. What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good signal from all the noise of a trillion web pages?
  • santiagobasulto 5y ago
    There’s a potential technical improvement with Vector Search. Specially for the type of queries that are more “human” (“how do I…”, “where can I…”. At least for me, I find myself adding “site:Reddit.com” all the time I need a good answer and not just a SEO-tricked ad page. Vector Search could be a technical solution for this. Although it’s fairly new and there is still a lot of research to do.
    • mountainriver 5y ago
      Yeah Google does this already though
    • JKCalhoun 5y ago
      I like the idea of "crowd sourcing". When the SEO-tricked ad pages come up and I either scroll past them or, if I do click on them but come right back to the search results and continue scrolling/clicking ... rank downward those brief or passed-over links. Seems like with enough actual humans I should never have to see another geeksforgeeks page come up in my search results.
• durnygbur 5y ago
  Google's competitor in what? As far as search goes they pay billions to device manufacturers and software vendors to have Google as default search everything, how would you compete with this? The actual search functionality, its speed, intuitiveness, etc. of any competitor is irrelevant.
  • robinsoh 5y ago
    > how would you compete with this? The implication of OP's question and perhaps the heart of the matter is whether Google is unfairly applying some impediment or anti-competitive behavior. My personal opinion is that they're not. I'm not a software guy so maybe I don't know the facts. I would very much like to be educated on that here, the same way I've tried to educate people here about display industry facts on the ground.
• 02020202 5y ago
• amelius 5y ago
  Because nobody is writing good benchmarks for search engines. You can't improve something if you can't see what you're doing.
  • 3825 5y ago
    I find it interesting that you mention the word benchmark because reviewers used to rely on benchmarks for new phones and such but then iirc at least OnePlus and Samsung devices have been caught and banned from multiple benchmarks.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      Banning them is silly. The benchmark programs reported unthrottled speeds, but when the phone has per app throttling (to save battery) you may not get the speed you measured in each app.
      • IIsi50MHz 5y ago
        I seem to recall that some manufacturer's have been found to programmatically alter behaviour of hardware & background programs/services when a benchmark is running, creating results that are not achievable otherwise in other programs.
    • amelius 5y ago
      You can use benchmarks to sell a product, but you can also use them to improve your product. I'm thinking of the latter. The absolute no 1 prerequisite for building a good search engine is having good benchmarks.
• KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  The complaints regarding google's quality isn't because google is being bad or doing something anti-consumer it's just that spam and ranking has become harder and harder over time. A new competitor wouldn't be free from those issues.
  • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    I vehemently disagree with this. Gmail is an excellent example of worst-in-the-business spam filtering today. Literally everyone else is better at it now. Google is getting worse at things that were originally their core competency.
  • zo1 5y ago
    Spam is only hard if you're accepting low-quality content and not pruning it heavily. But Google can handle the scale of the spam, they just don't want to reduce it because the spam increases their ad real-estate. That's one theory, the other I would argue is that once you peel away the genuine spam and the blogspam, there really isn't much content left on the web (besides a small handful of big sites like Reddit) and Google knows this.
• fassssst 5y ago
  TikTok algorithm applied to search. “I’m feeling lucky” but with quick swipe up/down user feedback on results.
  • jasinjames 5y ago
    I think this is a neat idea. Google has tried a lot of products and models, but "gamifying" (at least in this sense) search itself isn't one I can recall.
    • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      Google Discover is the closest they have to this. As a side note, I'm a publisher and Google Discover traffic alone has made me about $1k in the last week alone to just one single article by itself
      • ntauthority 5y ago
        Thanks, now I know this 'personalized feed' seen in the Google apps on mobile actually has a product name! https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/mobile/google-discover https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/mobile/go... Some of the content on there is, however, fairly obvious clickbait, but there's also a super easy (working!) 'not interested' button in there.
  • gman83 5y ago
    So Stumbleupon
• adventured 5y ago
  You can't be just a bit better than Google and you certainly can't be worse. It's very difficult to be better than Google, that's an enormous challenge unto itself. That's greater than a billion dollar problem just to get warmed up if you're talking competing with them at large scale. If you listened to HN, Google sucks and it's easy to produce a superior search engine because of how bad they are now. That's false; even if Google's quality has eroded, they are not a mediocre search engine. That notion comes from the same place wherein people proclaim they can create a serious Uber competitor in a weekend (and mysteriously these people never do anything of the sort). You're going to need a quantum leap improvement over Google to unseat their positioning. It has to be very substantial to overcome all the various moats they have, not least of which is consumers being used to using Google, the brand awareness. The next great search engine will emerge from a niche and conquer one segment after another from there. It won't be a massive general search engine that shows up one day (which is what the Google watchers have been waiting for forever - that new behemoth comprehensive competitor is never going to arrive fully formed). There's a decent possibility consumer Web search will be a later stage addition to said new niche competitor, consumer Web won't be its primary or initial target. They'll add on general consumer Web search as a "we might as well" offering once they conquer enough niches.
  • 3825 5y ago
    > The next great search engine will emerge from a niche and conquer one segment after another from there. It won't be a massive general search engine that shows up one day (which is what the Google watchers have been waiting for forever - that new behemoth comprehensive competitor is never going to arrive fully formed). There's a decent possibility consumer Web search will be a later stage addition to said new niche competitor, consumer Web won't be its primary or initial target. They'll add on general consumer Web search as a "we might as well" offering once they conquer enough niches. I love this because I want it to be true. However, iirc Google wanted to sell itself to Yahoo! for a million dollars and about five years later again for a billion dollars. I know there are quite a few millionaires here but for me, five million dollars would change my life. I can’t imagine being able to turn it down.
  • webmaven 5y ago
• dazc 5y ago
  DDG simply needs to raise awareness that they have a good enough alternative that most people would be happy with if only they knew it existed.
  • ck2 5y ago
    DDG is just a Bing front-end/proxy. They do not have their own crawlers. If microsoft quit search for some reason, DDG would go away with them.
• spicymaki 5y ago
  The problem with monopolies is they can easily purchase serious competitors. That is why we need the government to regulate these companies and spur competition.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    Even if the competitor tries to hold their ground and refuse to be bought, the monopoply can still bend the competitor to their will in other means.
• eveningtree 5y ago
  I have a broader answer for this: By the very nature of solutions: a new company cannot beat google at general search. Google was and is search. Like a tree that has grown up and shadows the entire land around it. There will be random small pockets of sunlight with smaller plants in it. But the big tree owns the area. There can be a short term competition via extremely specialized search engines, but they will not rise to the same dominance. Google, in a way, is the entire idea of searching the web. The next dominant generation has to be from a new paradigm, that makes web search obslete. --- A relatable current example could be: youtube being dwarfed by tiktok. The nature of the new thing is such that it very naturally dethrones the old thing, without directly competing with the incumbent. There will be specialized providers like vimeo, But at this point, youtube IS the idea of video on the internet. --- Just note the context of this understanding: This understanding came from struggling to change the education system of my country. And then it seemed to apply everywhere I saw. I'll round-off my reply with this quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller
  • joel-bikebus 5y ago
• SpodGaju 5y ago
  I will argue that he fact that Google is a monopoly is the only thing holding back competitors. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monopolist-google-violating-antitrust-laws https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop... The only thing that would have a chance is if Apple developed a search engine and used it as the default instead of using Google. People are busy/ignorant and do not care and will eat whatever search results they are given. But this might be a risk to Apple based on how many people use Gmail on their Apple phones. It is not about quality anymore, it is only about market domination. The only thing that will bring about new search engines will be anti-trust legislation.
  • missedthecue 5y ago
    How does anti trust action solve this? Forcing to divest cloud and Gmail will not make competition have an easier job with their search engines. Google search itself is irreducible, at least in any productive way.
    • SpodGaju 5y ago
      I don’t know, that’s for smarter people than me to figure out. But they are a monopoly so anti-trust action is called for.
      • missedthecue 5y ago
        If you're not sure how it can solve the problem, why does it even cross your mind to recommend it in the first place?
        • SpodGaju 5y ago
          I do not know how to cure cancer, but I am sure it is not good for me. So I go to someone who might know more about how to get rid of it. You can know there is a problem without knowing how to fix it. That should not stop you from talking about the problem.
• borapdx 5y ago
  The principal step will be to move on from keywords and indexing, which are now a legacy technology, almost 26 years after Google started it all. Returning blue links is a thing of the past, as the Web of yesterday is long gone. Blue links always were about surfing i.e. following hyperlinks just for the sake of it since the main premise was most of them were of high quality and quickly proliferating. All that is gone now and the links are a promotional thing how to get paid in one way or another. This is why Google results have been deteriorating, regardless of tens of trillions of archived pages on the Web. Google has lost the principal ranking signal years ago. The next huge scale smart information system will be based on dense vectors (a few hundred dimensions) such as in AI but the key will be much bigger scale, of (tens of) billions of vectors. Contemporary AI works won datasets 4-5 orders of magnitude smaller, getting bogged down in gigantic transformer models such as GPT-3 with 175B+ parameters that take weeks and millions of dollars just to train. One might wonder what is innate knowledge of such a huge model, and it is not much as one can see for themselves as GPT-3 is now open (until Apr 1). The future will be based on embeddings that are NOT contextualized i.e. no separate vectors for different senses in superpositions. Such systems will not be based on ads nor tracking as the resources required will be orders of magnitude less than what is currently required at Google.
• omnicognate 5y ago
  Because Google is the best you're going to get with ad-supported search. If you're willing to pay for search there is an alternative emerging: Kagi. It's not a Google competitor, though. It's a niche product for people (like me) who are willing to pay a significant amount of money for access to a search engine whose creators make money by providing value to their users rather than by providing their users to advertisers.
  • Closi 5y ago
    Kagi’s pricing strategy is ridiculous. A single search can cost 5 cents in charges if I click through a few filters. IMO Kagi can only appeal to people who care about search enough to pay and don’t search enough to make it too expensive, which is probably a contradiction.
    • omnicognate 5y ago
      From https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq, emphasis mine. > We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, *unlimited plan at around $20-$30/mo" as well as have bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), organization/team plans, family plans and annual payment discounts available. I don't know where you're getting 5c per search from, but that unlimited plan would cap it at something I could live with and I doubt I'll need it.
      • Closi 5y ago
        > I don't know where you're getting 5c per search from, but that unlimited plan would cap it at something I could live with and I doubt I'll need it. I said a single search 'can cost' 5 cents, but in reality it depends on the search and how many filters you apply. You can view the cost of your searches on your account. Each 'user search' can be multiple 'charged searches', which is why the cost can be >5c for some searches (e.g. if you search Dog, then click images and size -> large this is 3 searches charged to your account not one, and if you click through various options to refine your image search each click is chargable for instance). If you click on the top result, find out it's not what you wanted so hit back, then click on the second result, this is charged as two searches if your browser prompts a reload - which depends on the page you visit (even though I would class it as a single search).
• MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
  I vaguely recall part of an interview with Warren Buffett, where he was talking about tech investments. At the time he was interested in cloud providers and not interested in search. He said that "search is winner-takes-all," while infrastructure-as-a-service is not. Maybe that's part of it.
  • gyulai 5y ago
    Actually, I don't think that search is winner-takes-all. Rather the piece that is winner-takes-all is monetization of search through advertising. Because advertising networks are winner-takes-all. ...so the path forward leads through monetizing search in a way other than through advertising. And this is precisely what the next generation of challengers like Neeva and Kagi are doing. Another alternative might be public funding.
• weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  You really think DDG gets 2% as much traffic as Google? There's no chance
• e-clinton 5y ago
  I think there may still be a quality issue. Every then and again I change my search engine to Bing. Bing works perfectly fine for most of my searches. However, every few hours there’s one search that reminds me “you’re not on Google” because I don’t get the results I expect. I tried DDG as well with a similar outcome, although it doesn’t perform as well as Bing for me. I realize I am a sample size of one, but I run this exercise about twice a year, and sadly always go back to Google.
• indymike 5y ago
  > Apart from Google's monopoly and the big technical challenges, what would a competitor need to defy Google? Which monopoly? Email? Search? Regardless, the answer is time. It took Google a decade to win the search war completely. It will take a competitor time to dethrone Google.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  > Despite all the posts about the declining quality of Google We assume people in general are dissatisfied with Google, because there are blog posts about it, and some people on HN agree, and because we have certain strongly held beliefs and technical knowledge that lead us to this conclusion. What we have not validated is whether people outside the tech community are as dissatisfied as we are. If they aren't willing to switch, then there won't be a notable competitor to Google.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    I'm dissatisfied with google for my normal use cases too... But that is more with the state of the Internet in general. But on other hand I hate fuzzy search, trying to help me... Those keywords are there for reason and might even be spelled right...
  • dylan604 5y ago
    No, I don't buy that at all. There are way more factors that play in to this. To me, the biggest one is humans just are lazy. In face of factual evidence, people continue to ignore it. This plays out in many different facets. We know that Big Tobacco maniuplates their formulas to make things unnaturally addicting and are incredibly bad for people's health. People continue to smoke. We know that processed foods are just not healthy for people, yet because of it's readily being available and cheap prices, people continue to eat it. We know that the Earth is not flat, but people continue to believe that it is. Just having the knowledge that [Google|Facebook|TikTok|$socialMediaPlatform] is manipulating what you see/read/consume in ways that benefit them and at times is actively harmful to the users doesn't mean people will stop.
  • sidibe 5y ago
    I don't know anyone outside of HN who talks about bad google search results. The ones I know using other search engines are doing it for privacy or anti-monopoly reasons. Only HN seem to remember the glory days when Google always delivered exactly what you need before the continuous decline that warrants several of these 100+ comments threads a week for 10 years. For me today as in yesterday it is just a decent search engine that works as I expect
• lettergram 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo just ended their value proposition: https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 Not that there are many great alternatives, but the whole point of a SEARCH ENGINE is not censoring results. I understand ranking makes it searchable, but omitting views / results based on politics is self-reinforcing and makes anyone using the service blind to views and in a sense reality. I think search can’t really be “improved” until it’s decentralized and uncensored. The quality decline IMO has to do with the social networks and “trusted news sources”, which I also think is a walled garden limiting accuracy of info. See “trusted news initiative”: https://www.bbc.com/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/ https://www.bbc.com/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/
  • notsound 5y ago
    The main reason a lot of people use DDG is privacy, not uncensored search results. I do think that this move could have been handled better.
    • celdon25 5y ago
      Both go hand in hand with trust. When you compromise one you poison the other due to lost trust.
    • lettergram 5y ago
      I think your mistaken, the only reason DDG took off, at least in the circles I’ve visited (open source communities, privacy focused, politics, etc) is the freedom to research anything in a safe way. Think of it another way, “who cares about privacy?” Probably those searching for “unacceptable” ideas. If they censor, who’s to say they wouldn’t turn you into the authorities for “wrong think”. Their value proposition of privacy was damaged by this BECAUSE they want to limit your search results.
      • aghilmort 5y ago
        thank you for articulating this properly -- privacy & censorship are intricately intertwined, like yin & yang
• celdon25 5y ago
  My opinion hasn’t changed much since writing this (just disregard the blockchain commentary at the end): https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-beat-Google/answer/Mark-Nuzz?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-beat-Google/answer/M... A few competitors such as you.com are in the works. I think there’s a lot of potential, but the ranking algorithm is going to need to be decentralized (aka user-configurable) in some way. This configuration would also need to be sharable, maybe something akin to an App Store, because not all users can be asked to be technical enough to configure everything. There is an enormous amount of wasted value stemming from the disconnect between what Google thinks the user wants to see, and what the user actually wants to see. If I had to guess why this happened, I’m betting that Google and others had a notion that AI and other advances could eventually approximate a user’s needs to a degree that would keep up with the demand. But the monopoly set in and there was no longer an incentive to innovate that far. I’m sure Google tried, but not to a degree that would have happened if the competition had really stepped it up, or even existed. However, I’m sure by now there’s less optimism that the above effort is even a solvable problem, or one worth solving. One-size-fits-all is extremely suboptimal, but that paradigm is Google at its core. Without a paradigm shift, it’s diminishing returns all the way. What Google is good at, however, is monetizing what they do have. If you’re trying to challenge them in the monetization game, with the same business model competing for the same customers (advertisers), you most certainly will lose. Seriously, don’t do that. Get to unicorn status first. Focus on the tech, make sure the business model isn’t competing with the giants, and say no to any buyout offer from Big Tech.
  • p1esk 5y ago
    the ranking algorithm is going to need to be decentralized (aka user-configurable) in some way What do you mean? What configuration options would you like?
    • celdon25 5y ago
      Okay, one example: Suppose you're a gamer - You could configure search results related to gaming to be limited to games you own, games you want, the subset of platforms or genres you care about, games your friends own, and so on. It wouldn't be a priority for most search companies to make something like that, but it would certainly provide some value for certain people. Decentralized configuration would allow for communities with given interests to configure and distribute customizations for that audience, in a way that would appeal to that audience. It's not that farfetched of an idea, very realistic both from a tech and adoption POV. You.com is starting the building blocks of such a thing, but I don't know how far they're going to push the envelope. https://about.you.com/apps/ https://about.you.com/apps/
• kkfx 5y ago
  Resources matter: you can craft few better services, but if you do not have Alphabet resources your better service can't compete. For instance how can you offer a better maps for PND if you can't elicit traffic data from the density and speed of android smartphones that are around of 80% of phones traveling around the world? To defy Alphabet you do not need a better Google, you need a different kind of solution, for instance instead of competing in modern web crap to lock down users and surveil them you can propose classic desktop computing with decentralized tools. Try looking for instance at Jami, Retroshare, ZeroNet, you can integrate them in a suite and say "hey, instead of depending on Zoom, Meet or Teams, proprietary services with limits that might change, surveil, etc use this system, there is no SPOF, no service behind". Some have tried something, for instance DeltaChat seems to be a WA clone, but it's actually a MUA, in that case it doesn't took off much because most people simply do not care, you have to know your public. Starting from CS and humanities courses [1] to attracts students and plant the seed of something new, being prepared to face years before a success simply because no empire born quickly and when some are against you it's even more complex. The old adage: people have the power, but they do not know how to use it it's unfortunately very true, you can only bend people, use them, to elicit a slice of power :-) [1] most CS students haven't enough skills to comprehend the world, they just explore few aspects ignoring the rest and that's why dictatorships like STEM, because they help to generate "ancient Greek's 'useless idiots' to be employed" instead of Citizens (disclaimer: I am an engineer, I learnt than personally in years)
• tomohawk 5y ago
  Who would fund you if you said you wanted to be a competitor? A competitor would need to avoid being bought by one of the tech oligarchs. That's pretty hard to avoid. If by some fluke, you find a breakout opportunity, you would need to somehow avoid getting crushed like Parler. The tech oligarchs will use any excuse to crush any competition. That episode basically shows that to compete you would basically need to build your own internet first, and also your own banking system.
• pxue 5y ago
  Here's a thought, if Reddit fixes their terrible search engine, they would steal a large chunk of my search. I've been attaching url:reddit.com to my Google searches to bypass all the blog spam thats taking over Google.
  • gimmeThaBeet 5y ago
    The realist in me knows google would likely not be allowed to just buy reddit for anti-trust reasons. I guess the, pragmatist(?) in me thinks, "google kind of legitimately provides a solution to a problem that reddit has had like, forever. And reddit provides an organic source of knowledge that I feel google is at least trying to get back in the mix. Why should that combination not be allowed to exist?
• togaen 5y ago
  Everyone complaining about google’s “declining quality” is living in some fantasy world where there’s something better to compare google to. Its results are significantly better than any competitor, check for yourself. If you think you can do better, go for it.
  • festive-minsky 5y ago
    “declining quality” means current google vs past google, not other search engines
    • jpalomaki 5y ago
      This is also not a fair comparison, because Internet is changing constantly.
      • tyingq 5y ago
        Seems fair to me. They did improve quality for quite a long time. The quality only seemed to start dipping when shareholder expectations started driving what SERP pages look like. Or, roughly, "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users"
      • tetris11 5y ago
        Yeah, and large near-monopolies grow complacent.
    • bostik 5y ago
      In 2014, I was cursing the shitty search results of GDrive - and asked aloud why can't a company known for their search engine make all their search systems equally good. It's 2022, and Google search is just as shitty as their GDrive search.
  • keiferski 5y ago
    “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow [search engine]; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” - Ernest Hemingway, paraphrased
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  Google seems to have optimized its search engine with the goal of making it as easy as possible for potential consumers to connect with Google advertising customers. Google also collects data on consumer search patterns again with the goal of connecting the consumer to the advertiser. That's the business model as far as I can tell. If you don't want to be sucked down their engagement hole, you have to clear your cookies after every search and probably going through a VPN is better. There is an obvious problem here - companies who don't advertise with Google could easily find themselves blocked from appearing on the first pages of Google search results. Would anyone really be surprised to find that the internals of the Google search algorithm have a weight factor that assigns better scores to sites that advertise with Google? Hence requiring Google to expose the internals of the algorithm to public scrutiny really seems like the only way forward. Yes, those are 'trade secrets'. So are the contents of your favorite hot sauce, but government regulators require those contents to be displayed on the product label (for good reasons). On top of all that, Google's also under pressure from governments and media corporations to push their information content (aka propaganda, influence, etc.) to the top of search results, burying anything like independent content in those areas (world events, domestic politics, etc.) far down. This is particularly obvious on Youtube incidentally, but Google has the same problem. Some of this can be avoided using the 'verbatim' option and some interesting word choices in your search string, but it's a fairly tedious exercise. Again, exposing the internals of the Google search algorithm would be interesting here, as it seems clear certain 'authoritative sites' are assigned better scores in the search ranking - not because they have more backlinks or more accurate content, but merely because of governmental and media pressure.
• daniel-cussen 5y ago
  How many Larry Page competitors are there? How many Sergey Brins, to listen to an idea without any validation, and judging it with independence? Why do they have to do everything?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• samwillis 5y ago
  Ultimately I think it’s because the internet is just too big! Google were only able to do it because they had the right algorithm early in the age of the internet. They were then able to grow with it to achieve the scale required. Starting from scratch now on a general internet search engine would be close to impossible without 10s, if not 100s, billions of investment. And you would need that to build the index before even beginning to be competitive. No one is making bets that big on search, especially when the online advertising industry (which is the only way to fund it currently) is in danger of massive regulation. I think there is massive opportunity for domain specific search engines though, imagine a search engine specifically designed for software engineers and developers, or one for academic research (not just papers but all online scientific content, news and discussion), or one targeting the arts. I think it’s these verticals that could be incredible. You then potentially move towards a building “meta” search engines (if your are older than about 35 you will remember these) that work out what you are searching for and uses a domain specific engine. Edit: Just to add to this, people who say that “decentralised” search engines are the only way to compete with Google are not completely wrong, it’s just that it’s not about protocols and distributed indexes. It’s about a community of smaller search engines working within specific domains and collaborating (commercially) on meta search engines, prompting people to search on each others engines if it would be better for that search. We almost need an “Open Search Co-Op” which smaller search engines can join to share technology and refers users to each other.
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I think your post is key. I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google. Pretty much the one company that has done it at scale (Microsoft) isn't exactly eating Google's lunch (though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better). It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to challenge Google at generic Internet search, and the few organizations with that capital are pretty clear they don't think it's a good bet. For example, Amazon is quite content just being the place you want to go to first for the things you want to buy, as that is obviously the most lucrative area. Even in niche areas, I think it's still an enormous task to challenge Google. Despite the fact that 90% of my searches for "WTF does this stacktrace mean?" end up on StackOverflow, I invariably start my search on Google because every now and then it gives me useful non-StackOverflow tidbits, and I know I can always drill in more with specific tags on StackOverflow later.
• julialaroche 5y ago
  You.com is one new entrant to the search engine space. It's ad-free, private, and customizable with preferred sources.
  • telesilla 5y ago
    I've been a happy kagi.com user a couple of months now. It's like lo-fi Google, less results, no ads anywhere and similar to duck duck go bang commands if you want to use other search engines to check different results.
• gutitout 5y ago
  For search I think a big issue is you can’t crawl the web like you used to. Cloud flare and others have made that difficult.
• ck2 5y ago
  Google has a TWENTY year head-start of building server farms all over the world and hiring PhDs to develop the complex algorithms and software to do the indexing. Can't just buy time on someone else's cloud network and hire a couple of coders to compete with that. You could throw a lot of money at it but not compete on years of investment. My brain is swiss-cheese these days, I wish I could remember the name of that one-man startup a decade ago that actually had a lightweight high-speed crawler and was making a serious attempt at competition. Was covered around here several times. But obviously they didn't succeed if I can't remember the name.
• elorant 5y ago
  People don’t seem to realize how good Google is in regional results. I live in a European country and every other search engine I’ve tried in the past is lacking when searching for local content. I can search for news articles that date back two decades in Google and get results.
  • ColonelPhantom 5y ago
    DuckDuckGo does quite well here for me, as long as I enable the button for localized results. I very much like that it's an option there.
• jws 5y ago
  What would a competitor need to defy Google? – A billion users who have not already chosen a search engine. I slightly better experience should get a larger portion of new users, but existing users do not say "Today I will develop a methodology to conduct a survey of internet search engines and select the best one for me." At this point everyone has either chosen a search engine or had one chosen for them.
• patientplatypus 5y ago
• retrocryptid 5y ago
  well... i've been "binging" and "DDGing" things a lot more often in the last couple of years. Bing isn't the perfect google replacement as it seems to have gone the google route of not returning hits for things you search for, but for things it thinks you wanted to search for. Maybe the "site:reddit.com" hack works well enough for people who care about search results.
• daqhris 5y ago
  Google built a moat around its essential product: searching on the Internet. Speed of access, an Internet browsing engine , contracts with non-GGL browsers, cloud data centers, maps/locations/navigation, fiber cables/internet pipelines, social networks and personal management software, AI/ML research, personal devices OS ... Impossible is nothing, but any incumbent will likely take in capital linked to Google. GGL is dominant across the world's hundred and something countries. Excpect places where it is banned(China) or shunned(Russia), anywhere it is equivalent to a monopoly of internet services. From a technical perspective, a challenger can rise up. From an economic standpoint, a challenger would not last long (maybe locally if favored by regulation). Even the most successfull others: Apple or Amazon would not dare take on Google's Ads or Search Engine. Microsoft tried with Windows Phones and Bing, then ended failing to dominate the market. Google is not singular business. It has so many tentacles in the tech sector that wave a web of interlocking tech products. Growth numbers in Search are boosted by integration in all of Google's own products and the rest of internet users and companies. To answer your question is to figure out what advantage it has on any competitor starting from zero... Sadly, its network scale is too large to allow an equal challenger.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• yokoprime 5y ago
  DDG is absolutely emerging, usage year over year is rising rapidly. I’ve personally switched over to ddg after years of jumping back and forth. It’s finally good enough. For the Indernet as whole to switch over will take time. One thing that keeps customers coming back to google is the integration across their applications, i.e. email, collaboration (google docs) video (youtube) etc. That being said, I don’t really feel theres much of a benefit being logged in when searching, so I think search engine traffic could switch over to e.g. ddg while people still are heavily invested in other google services.
  • go_prodev 5y ago
    Their Android browser is great. It kills ads and floating videos, and has excellent features. However I just can't rely on the search results. It's rare for me to get a decent result for a search so I switch between chrome. I'm not sure why because I thought DDG used Google search.
    • ditsuke 5y ago
      DDG uses Bing (like most other alternative search engines). I believe Brave's new search engine uses its own index though.
      • merlinscholz 5y ago
        Exactly, they use their own index, which AFAIK can be seeded by other search engine results. Here's an overview: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-What-is-the-Web-Discovery-Project- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    despite the HN party line on this subject I think DDG is practically useless for long-tail searches. I was reserving the history of a city owned property in Oakland, California on DDG, using the address and the assessors parcel number. DDG results were all unrelated real estate advertisements in other cities. Google returned many pages of official city records. It’s almost as if Bing is not capable of indexing PDFs? Whatever the cause, this put me off Bing for the time being.
• taeric 5y ago
  The biggest barriers to competing with Google, IMO: * Google (and all of FAANG) have a stupid high percentage of the worker pool. * Google's biggest asset is that they are Google. Kind of like competing with Coke. Intrinsic quality of what they do is kind of irrelevant. * General lack of value in most things internet. Google is getting a lot of value out of what they do, but they are having to put stupid levels of manpower into squeezing out that value.
• CyanLite4 5y ago
  Bing.
• modeless 5y ago
  There are some. Neeva is one I've heard of, and there was another similar one mentioned on HN just recently that I've forgotten. There was also Cuil. Bing exists of course. And then there are the language specific ones, Yandex, Naver, Baidu, and others I'm sure. And that's just the ones that make their own index, there's a sea of competitors like DuckDuckGo and StartPage that mostly license results from someone else (including Google). And there are also verticals with competitors like Amazon for products or Yelp for food, which Google very much considers as competition. As much as people claim otherwise, it's not that Google has no competition. People are trying! Google's product is legitimately good, despite the widespread perception of declining quality.
  • vmullin 5y ago
    Add Brave Search to your list: https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ Private, anonymous and independent search index. Generally, search has a lot of attention on it right now, lots of great efforts to compete with G.
  • richardsocher 5y ago
    you.com has a lot of useful apps for developers.
  • shafyy 5y ago
    Kagi is also good, in fact I get better results on Kagi than on DDG.
• jimmar 5y ago
  > what would a competitor need to defy Google? A competitive business model. You can create tech that is easier to use and more powerful than Google's services, but you won't last unless you actually make money.
• Stealthisbook 5y ago
  Search is kind of an investment dead zone. Even if you've come up with a completely paradigm-breaking method, getting money to develop the idea at scale would be tough since Google (and others) have so many patents that litigation risk would drive off funders. If you have a great idea and access to deep enough pockets to develop it, there's still the problem that much of the information people want to find are behind various walled gardens and not suitable for public search. Incrementally more helpful arrangement of the same publicly available data that Google already has, isn't worth the effort of challenging the behemoth
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  A business model.
• prismatix 5y ago
  I've been using Kagi as my default search engine on my phone to test it out. Honestly, it just doesn't hit the convenience mark. when I search for a restaurant + hours, Google shows the hours in a card at the top of the results. Kagi can't or doesn't do that, and often doesn't even find the restaurant. I haven't used DDG so I'm not sure if they're similar, but for the average user Google just consistently hits the mark (of convenience)
  • lessname 5y ago
    Thats because many companies directly type in their data on Google My Business to make their business easier to find. There is also a community doing this (same with facebook). Smaller competitors could do the same with a community or at least manually typing in the data at least for bigger companies.
  • freediver 5y ago
    This is because we are still in beta and simply do not have local search developed yet. Work in progress. Glad you are comparing a year old startup to a 20 year old, $2T company - keep us honest!
  • shafyy 5y ago
    I also use Kagi and I think it's good enough for most things. But you're right, for local search results Google still is better.
• binwiederhier 5y ago
  So I agree that the quality of Google search is declining, but long story short the others are still worse (IMHO obviously). I tried DDG for a couple of weeks and it was just awful. For almost all non-trivial searches i had to result to !g. I finally switched back after two weeks or so and suddenly I'm much happier with the quality of Google search results. Obviously this is just one man's opinion. I think the technical challenges are big enough to make this a really difficult task.
• nunez 5y ago
  because they Peter Thiel'd 10x'ed search and ads and competing against them would require extraordinary cost and a breakthrough in either.
• blihp 5y ago
  A viable business model. DDG has done a spectacular job of navigating the search space with arguably a very good product and look at how long it has taken them to get as far as they have. There isn't likely room for a 2nd DDG-type approach. Setting aside all of the specifics related to building and running the engine itself, how do you make money doing it? Unless you are servicing a very specialized and lucrative vertical that doesn't mind paying, everyone else gets their search results for free so you generally can't charge users for it. This typically leaves advertising (which Google arguably owns the market for re: search) and/or selling user data (which is both unpopular with users and depending on jurisdiction, illegal). Figure out a new way to monetize search and you may have something... This is a problem with today's world dominated by mega-tech companies: to compete in many areas of it you need to essentially be a monopolist in some other area so you can afford to compete in something like search as a loss leader at least until you get established. Look at how much Microsoft spent on Bing[1]... and they got how much of the market? Facebook wasn't initially profitable either, but they had a distinctly different approach to aggregating a pool of data Google couldn't search and users they couldn't monetize. [1] https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/index.htm?source=cnn_bin https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/i...
• onion2k 5y ago
  Google pays Apple ~$10bn a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. They pay Mozilla a significant percentage of Mozilla's revenue to be the default in Firefox. Obviously Google is the default in Chrome. You can't compete with that by building a better search engine. Even if you had the infrastructure, capital, and you offered Apple and Mozilla more money than they get from Google, Google could beat your offer. The only way someone could beat Google, or even just compete with them, would be if they could make everyone understand that they can change their default search engine and give them a reason to do it and have Google screw up how they respond. I wouldn't bet on it happening.
  • pronlover723 5y ago
    You could lobby the govs to require search engine selection in browsers / device on first install. I don't think that would change anything though. Google's results might be declining but they are still arguably better than their competitors and ATM at least the majority of people would still choose them.
    • lawwantsin17 5y ago
  • ransom1538 5y ago
    You could beat them in a small segment market though. EG: A group tired of being banned by google.
    • metadat 5y ago
      > EG: A group tired of being banned by google. Huh? I don't understand what this means.
  • Justsignedup 5y ago
    Duckduckgo wrote about this a decade ago. So much investment needed to just get on their list of search engines. Meanwhile on Android, there's no practical way to completely move towards ddg for searched info unless you basically get rid of some voice and search features. Without laws, Google set up an ecology of everything search related hits google one way or another. On Apple there are ways around it because Apple isn't a search company. Having said that......... Most people don't care. It's why Microsoft pushes so hard for ie. Because they get to set the default which nobody will change.
• wenbin 5y ago
  When google got started, they indexed ~25 million web pages. Then they grew together with the web, compounding over ~30 years. Today, it’s totally possible for a single person or a small team to build a domain specific search engine that indexes 10s or even 100s of million documents. Building the index v0.1 that kind of working is not hard. But maintaining the index to handle countless edge cases is tedious and need non-stop investment (eg, infrastructure + paying salary for talents) Also, a search engine is more than “keyword matching”. You need to do search result ranking. And it gets exponentially difficult to do as # of indexed documents increases.
  • a9h74j 5y ago
    Empirical question: Can any kind of cluster analysis result in identifying robust selected subject-domains/content-areas for search specialization, still allowing for good coverage with a set of these? This could fight what you identify as an exponentially difficult problem. It could also allow for selective marketing and mind-share.
• jdrc 5y ago
  You are comparing google with other search engines but they are instead an ads monopoly. If someone else invests big on an ads marketplace, a search engine will spontaneously form around it
• sanderjd 5y ago
  I've been using Neeva, it works well.
  • randomsilence 5y ago
    That's funny: Their slogan: >try Neeva, 100% ad-free search engine, Totally private Their founders: >Neeva was founded by Sridhar Ramaswamy (ex-SVP of Ads at Google) and Vivek Raghunathan (ex-VP of Monetization at YouTube). They met in the early days of search ads at Google, and came up with the idea for Neeva over hikes and coffee. They have founded a company that explicitly doesn't need the knowledge that they had acquired in their job. [1] https://neeva.com/about https://neeva.com/about
    • sanderjd 5y ago
      Yep! It is ironic but also makes sense in my opinion. I know more about why the things I'm an expert in are bad than most people do. That doesn't necessarily mean I know how to fix the issues though, but at least I have a good sense of the problems, which is a start.
• mindvirus 5y ago
  I think the way you'd compete is unbundling it. Building a general search engine better than Google is probably a non starter, but... Could you build a better image search for graphic designers? Could you build a better search for specific document types, such as academic papers or legal precedence? I think that's what we'll see - similar to how nothing replaced Craigslist, but a bunch of startups unbundled features in Craigslist and made companies around them.
• subb 5y ago
  Because I believe a search engine for the internet should be nationalized, like the internet itself. Google "solved" the internet search engine problem. Other competitors are just replicating it poorly. There's nothing good for the consumer here.
• cryptica 5y ago
  No Google alternative will be able to raise funding because top VCs own Google stock and they have no interest in seeing their Google shares lose value. Secondly, the media would not allow it because many top media executives own Google shares. If a better Google competitor came along, media companies would do everything to suppress information about it so that nobody would know it exists.
• productceo 5y ago
  Google Search enjoys multiple economies of scale. To list several: 1. Data about what the population is interested: More people use Google today, giving Google more data to train its AI with. 2. Server capacity: It's cheaper for Google to store 1 image than for me to store 1 image, because it stores many more images. Same for compute, such as training AI. Google can get one A100 GPU cheaper than I can. 3. Ads: If I had the exact same search quality and even the exact same number of users, Google will make more money from the same operation, because it has more advertisers. They set up their business well!
• grumpopotamus 5y ago
  I never see this one mentioned: Google crawls the web at a high rate and is able to index new content rapidly. This is possible because every site lets googlebot through. But if you are not already an established search engine everyone will throttle your crawler, and you will have no chance to compete with Google on keeping up with the latest content.
• jollybean 5y ago
  Why isn't there an Amazon or Microsoft or Boeing competitor emerging? These are systematically entrenched monopolies of sorts.
• sotu 5y ago
  google competitors already exist they're just not obvious - When you want to find a place to stay you dont search google you go to airbnb.com when you want to buy random stuff you go to amazon, even coming to hackernews is a competitor. You are seeking something and find it. I do get your point tho about a direct competitor, at the end of the day - all the innovation around search is happening in that we are unbundling the search engine and turning each category/search result asset into a monetizable marketplace. My .02
• nightski 5y ago
  I wonder how much of the declining search quality can be attributed to the rise of walled gardens and social networks. It probably was a lot easier to index blogs and personal websites back in the day vs. TikTok/Snapchat/etc.. today. It's ironic that Google itself directly contributed to this.
• bkav 5y ago
  Have you tried Brave Search? It’s not 100% yet but it’s better for many searches. I made it my default and only use Google as secondary now.
• rmbyrro 5y ago
  No one is going to beat Google at their game. But the game will change. And Google is unlikely to win the next one, if past similar examples can teach anything. There will be a dramatic change in how people ask questions and access information. Maybe it will be personal assistants. I doubt it. Perhaps these kinds of Neuralink implants? Could be... Whoever nails it, will be one of the near-future trillionaires.
• keyme 5y ago
  The internet is too different now to what Google (or any SE) was designed to index. Too much of the up-to-date high value information is posted onto semi-public channels. Like facebook groups, instagram posts, telegram channels, etc. At the same time, too much of the publicly available websites are becoming clickbait and mindless marketing drivel. Just try to research anything slightly obscure that has to be up-to-date information (from the last few years). Like "how to get from Nairobi to Kisumu by bus". Google maps doesn't have this (not surprisingly), but what about the SERPs? Nothing there. 90% of the results are useless bus ticket sale websites that have no info, just SEO. (You can't buy this ticket online anyway). Is Kenya just such an off-the-map destination that no backpacker has ever written about taking this route? No! The information is out there. You'll find it inside the related facebook groups for travelers in east Africa. And if not? That's where you'll ask. But the answer? It'll never reach a SERP in the future. Even more sad, is that if you keep looking on Google, you may find buried results from years ago. From travel forums and such. What's sad is that the info will be 10 years old, since no one uses public forums anymore. (Unless it's on reddit, pretty much the last public forum with any reach).
  • arrakis2021 5y ago
    This. Whenever I search anything informative, I append “Reddit” to the phrase to get the top Reddit threads about the topic. Everything else in the SERPS is usually SEO trash
    • chx 5y ago
      Try https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojagelicdlhnmldaiplbppfbolnnag?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag... then.
    • tmh88j 5y ago
      Is there a way to provide a date range when specifying a site? I frequently append reddit to my google searches as well, but the results often include outdated posts. I don't want restaurant/service/whatever reviews from 7+ years ago.
• sjg007 5y ago
  The thing that replaces Google won't look like Google at first. This makes it hard to predict who will dethrone them. In the past we use to say how do you beat Microsoft? Or why isn't there a Microsoft competitor (besides Apple etc...). Now we have Google and chromebooks and android. That's a big step beyond a search engine and competitive w/ MSFT. Amazon basically owns cloud computing. Arguably there are competitors in different markets. These challenges to MSFT happened due to the massive force of the Internet which basically reduced consumer costs by transferring it to advertisers. If we are talking about search then it will likely be something AI based probably operating under a different model than Google search. AI is a huge force probably akin to the Internet.
• jakub_g 5y ago
  This article has insights from folks who actually tried: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-from-scratch.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-fr... TL;DR you need a lot of money and users (catch-22). Also, massive scale and massive noise. You can also search HN for 'cliqz' for discussions about Cliqz shutting down.
  • vmullin 5y ago
    Cliqz' blog is really insightful. In case you weren't aware, Brave Search is led and built by key team members from Cliqz: https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ The growth and usability of Brave Search this past year has been strong, with some significant features planned throughout 2022.
• kmt-lnh 5y ago
  A possible alternative was discussed on HN half a year ago:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 Check it out, it's great!
• sudhirj 5y ago
  Lots of competitors have emerged or are emerging. No single one can or maybe even should take over the mantle. Google’s death will come not from some upstart search engine, but from many walled gardens that each have perfectly good topical search inside them. We’re already in a case where different kinds of information are checked at different destinations. Google will keep trying valiantly to more aggressively turn into a knowledge base instead of a search engine, and ultimately will probably settle at being an interactive encyclopaedia. The internet has moved past search engines. Now if you want information you need to know or figure out where to ask the question.
• lil_dispaches 5y ago
  Did you notice Google's monopoly over online ads? Competitors can't make money. It's literally called anti-competitive.
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  I think that has more to do with the information source than the market. It's possible HN is an unreliable guide to Google's actual prospects.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Method-X 5y ago
  Brave Search [1] is the best alternative I’ve come across so far. They have this concept called “Goggles” [2] on their roadmap, which I think has incredible potential to disrupt the status quo. [1] https://search.brave.com https://search.brave.com [2] https://brave.com/static-assets/files/goggles.pdf https://brave.com/static-assets/files/goggles.pdf
  • schleck8 5y ago
    Brave Search is really impressive indeed. There is also Kagi https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
    • Closi 5y ago
      Kagi is just showing google and bing results mixed together. Also there is no actual path for them to be profitable (their pricing strategy isn’t viable imo) and they are currently loosing money on every search.
      • hobofan 5y ago
        > Kagi is just showing google and bing results mixed together. It's not _just_ that: https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from Anyways, Kagi results vastly outperform Google results in quality for me. I'd happily pay the rather steep price they are currently targeting, should that end up being how expensive it is.
      • freediver 5y ago
        Kagi founder here - this needs to be corrected. We have a path to profitability. Indeed, the entire business model is engineered to be sustainable. Whether the price will be accepted by the market (we do not need many users to be profitable, maybe around 50,000) is another matter. I am sorry if you do not feel like on. But one thing we will not do, is loose money on every search.
        • Closi 5y ago
• halotrope 5y ago
  One can be doubtful that googles downfall will come from another search engine.
• janmajayamall 5y ago
  What do you think of a p2p marketplace for search queries? You post your query to the p2p network that consists of indexers. Indexers interested in servicing your query would place a bid (i.e. the charge), from which you select one. The selected indexer would then service your query. I think this would allow a competitive market for indexers in different verticals to emerge. Most probably you wouldn't want to use it for every small query. But in situations when you need high quality results in some domain, the p2p marketplace would be a good choice.
• rytill 5y ago
  Are people funding founders who want to make new search engines?
• bigcloud1299 5y ago
  Have you all used presearch? Presearch decentralized search engine, powered by blockchain technology. https://presearch.org/ https://presearch.org/
• Mikeb85 5y ago
  Willpower and technical ability. It's a hard problem. Look at how many resources Microsoft has thrown at it with limited success.
• flowctrl 5y ago
  The network effect, the Lindy effect, and the Schelling point. If you wanted to learn about these concepts, what is the first thing you would do? :P
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  One strategy might be to monetise Googles failure/difficulty/broken business model with regard to SEO, promoted, and brand sites. How might one do this? Create a market for filter add-ons to Google’s results. A market for quality filters (subject to different user groups subjective view of what quality means). For example, let’s say I am a specialist in some particular area, and I’ve devised a “quality filter” or “screen” for my specialism. A user, an ordinary user might choose to pay for my filter to cut down the firehouse of junk normally coming out of a google search. The platform owner, for this value added search market might have an App Store for filters and skim off some of the recurring subscription revenues for the 5, 10, or 50 filters the user might subscribe to.
• satellite2 5y ago
  Contrary to many posts here, I think that Google completely controls the quality of the results. The feeling is that quality has gone down because a lot of top ranked website are SEO ads filled websites. I think this is true and on purpose. Two years ago top results were very often Wikipedia, Stack overflow or reddit. Sending users to those websites is not profitable for Google. I also think that's why it's very hard for competitors to compete. As soon as one is going to get credibly menacing they'll improve on the quality again to preserve their position. I think that has happened with McDonald's for instance. A few years ago the quality was at it's lowest, the food definitely started to feel fake, air filled and not satisfying. Since the small local competition of hand crafted hamburger popped up a bit everywhere, and credible international competitors ramped up (5 guys, in n out...) they had to improve the quality. And my impression is that it's been a bit more than a year that the quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers actually taste like food again. I think it's simply the quality versus profits cursor and it can be adapted any time.
  • technothrasher 5y ago
    > And my impression is that it's been a bit more than a year that the quality dramatically improved, and their hamburgers actually taste like food again. Huh, maybe I don't eat there enough to notice differences, but on the occasions lately that I've had a McDonald's burger, I haven't noticed the quality being anything but terrible. Not entirely unpleasant, but just not at all a high quality meal, even compared to some of the other fast food burger places.
    • satellite2 5y ago
      Well it's still McDonald's we're talking about, it's still going to be 3mm thick patties and very sweet sauce. But with less soy derivatives, non caloric sweeteners and corn instead of wheat I have the impression.
  • randomhedgehog 5y ago
    I don't quite understand what you mean when you say "sending users to those websites is not profitable for google" - referring to Wikipedia, Stack, Reddit etc... Organic search results only ever profit Google if they answer the user's question, because it makes that user more likely to use Google again and click an ad in the future. If a user searches something and the top result doesn't answer their question, then Google hasn't done it's job and the user is less likely to use Google again and therefore less likely to click an ad in the future. Surely the most profitable option for Google is to answer people's questions quickly and easily, whether you think these questions are answered by Wikipedia instead of a business site targeted to answering that question is a different story. I just don't understand how Google's goal of "answering people's questions" is somehow opposite to "providing quality" for users. I think for most of HN, they have a very narrow view that "quality" means antiquated wiki-type sites.
• calltrak 5y ago
• heybecker 5y ago
  A super tight mobile os. Search, Maps. Excellent developer tools. Long term vision. This 10+ year android user is disappointed recently.
• johnqian 5y ago
  Google's search results are bad by default because they're hijacked by SEO farms. Despite this, I find that there's almost always a way for me to find what I want with Google. If I want thoughtful discussion about a topic, I'll append "from:news.ycombinator" to my search. This also often surfaces great personal blogs or old documents or other things that don't rank high in search results. If it's not covered on HN, I'll append "from:reddit" instead (they're not always wise but as at least they're not getting paid per word written, and the upvote system gives me a sense of what real people think). If I want a broad survey of a topic, Wikipedia or some other wiki are usually great. If I want a really deep dive, I'll append "book", usually in conjunction with "from:news.ycombinator". Lastly, I sometimes add a time filter, e.g. "after:2021". Clearly this is an awkward pattern. But it really works, and I'm having trouble thinking of something that would be meaningfully better. I suspect most people have found ways of using Google that work well enough for them. So I'm afraid Google Search will stick around for awhile.
• janto 5y ago
  Chrome is currently a major component to Google's hold over its users' web experience. When it is measured in terms of market share, it appears to me that the browser wars and search engine companies fight in the same battles.
• tom899 5y ago
  The internet has become from being a source of information to a marketplace everyone wants to make a quick buck instead. The times where you can just search for information without being tracked what and when you search, is over. I never received spam or when, i had known it came from the shady website i signed up with. Today, my whereabouts, my age and sex are exploited as information for useless and silly spambots. They are not even trying to entertain me. And all that because using a mobile phone, goole knows where you are and where you are working. That estimates the income, making more stupid wine offers possibel, im non-alcoholic, that info they didnt get because i called help hotlines and those numbers are not listed and info is not legal to share. But well. If one wants to build a free search engine and knowledge base, has to fight with users not knowing that the world is round and alternatives available. It starts in school, kids end up in front of Windows Computers, Word is a text processor and google-ing stuff is the way to go. It goes to that extent that recommending alternatives, people refuse it, even if its better because they dont know it. Humans are sometimes stuck in their behavior.
• davnicwil 5y ago
  It's kind of a facile answer perhaps, but I think the answer is as simple as 'you cannot out-Google Google'. The declining quality of Google results seems pretty clear, but only in relative terms. That is, Google now compared to Google in the past. In an absolute sense the service remains pretty great. A confounding factor is that maybe the quality decline is in fact in internet content in general. That is, Google per se is as good as ever, it's just it's become much more difficult to find good results. So, simply, the answer is perhaps that no matter the effort a competitor could put in they simply cannot outdo Google at their core competency. Perhaps for fundamental reasons, but even if not in some niche, surely then for sheer funding and scale reasons when trying to expand beyond that niche. If a competitor to Google emerges, it'll be in some non obvious thing that is not core web search. Basically, when core web search becomes less important and Google can't pivot quickly enough to the new more important thing to compete.
• tormock 5y ago
  > what would a competitor need to defy Google Google is hiding important information on purpose... so don't do that.
• helph67 5y ago
  User privacy should be #1 and some search engines do provide it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Privacy_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Privacy... Another not listed above is StartPage which may use Google https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/
• sytelus 5y ago
  I had worked out some costs. If you want to build an index-based search engine that is at least competitive on coverage, if not relevance, it would cost you about $2B/yr for at least a period of 4 years just to boot things up. So, that is at least $8B of upfront investment. This is similar to the problem of if someone wanted to match TSMC on 5nm feb. This cannot be achieved by traditional VC funding and startup model. Remember, search is not just web search. It includes vast array of things such as maps, images, videos, knowledge datasets, discussion groups, real-time news and so on. Each of these segments is an enormous effort on its own requiring massive capital investments. Relevance algos these days are mostly driven by thousands of tweaks, ML models and legions of rules. It’s a complex beast that takes thousands of PhDs and years to perfect. Even than performance is pretty subpar than most expectations. So, what chance do you have as a new entrant in same game? The key is that you don’t want to play same game if you want to win. A lot of companies have came and gone announcing themselves as Google competitor and trying to play same game. Things like DDG survive only because they can lower the COGS by offloading real work to other people like Bing which itself is fine example of what you might be able achieve if you only had a tiny fraction of Google’s budgets. If you consider dollar for dollar capital investment, Bing is actually quite good. This is not to say there will never be a viable competitor for Google search. I just don’t think it can be through the traditional framework of index serving. No one really knows what other alternatives can arise in future. One very possible thing is language models. If we can figure out how to scale up serving of massive language models that effectively “memorizes” whole index in them, they can provide quality, capabilities and experience that cannot be matched by simple index serving. If this is viable route, I think we are still at least 3-5 years away.
• webmaven 5y ago
  All the posts here suggesting that the thing that is needed is some technical advantage, or a business model, or a niche, are all true, but miss the point; a competitor that actually beat Google due to one or more of those "ingredients" would simply be acquired by Google, or crushed in the marketplace with due application (mostly fairly, prima facie) of Google's warchest (which may be inherently unfair). Managing to grow enough in an unappreciated search niche while staying under the radar in order to better withstand that kind of eventual attention seems unlikely. Targeting a segment that Google has been burned on (like social search) may help, but that probably just draws attention from a different MANGAM. Eventually, someone will be both smart and lucky enough to carve out some of the search space, but don't hold your breath, it is going to take so much luck it won't be soon, and may look accidental.
• Tozen 5y ago
  Bing and Yahoo (who is pulling from Bing) are supposedly competitors. The problem is that Google is kicking their butt. Even if Bing became more of a true challenger, Microsoft is doing much of the same, so just replacing one name with another. Most would agree that Microsoft doesn't have any more respect for user privacy and would trample (ban, shadow ban, violate, spy, sell date of) users just as much. Probably the only hope is some type of peer to peer search engine, that actually catches on and works well.
• robch 5y ago
  Duck duck go, and bing are two alternatives off the top of my head. You just need to look for them.
• RaSoJo 5y ago
  I don't feel the need for another Google. Individual search engines of the major sites are proving decent enough. The search engine within StackOverflow, Reddit, Twitter have been good enough for me. For arcane stuff, DDG is ok. For images, I use Bing. I sort of know which site can answer which query of mine, hence I rarely use GOOG these days, unless it is some mass-market, in-the-news kind of thingy.
• 0x20cowboy 5y ago
  A better question might be, what do you want that Google doesn’t already give you? Personally I wouldn’t mind a search engine that was focused only on code results. Not only results that that showed code, but code focused results - tutorials, samples, books. For example, if I search for “c web server” in a private tab on on Google… well… I get exactly what I want. If I search for “water shader”… I mostly get what I want as well (youtube videos not code though). Hum, I think you might have a hard time with this.
• ricardo81 5y ago
  2 cents, With so many bots, a lot of sites run a whitelist process of user agents, so every new entrant is automatically blocked in those cases, and for the rest, any large scale crawling is quite likely to get blocked. Anecdotally it seems a relatively new search engine entrant is using Chrome user agents and follows Googlebot robots.txt directives so are impossible to block. If true, that's an absurd way for a new player to enter the market and just annoys webmasters. A recent anti-competitive report by the UK government estimated that it would take about $20bn dollars for a new entrant to compete on Google's level. Then there's how Google pay Mozilla/Apple very large sums of money based on their ROI/search which no one else can compete with, partly due to the invasive surveillance capitalism that Google follows. That ultimately means that anyone who wants to compete has to pay browsers and operating systems to enter the market in a substantial way. All that said, encouraging people to find alternative sources of information is most likely the best route to diversification with or without government(s) intervention.