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>, 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

• 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.
    • samarthr1 5y ago
      Heh, Geeks for geeks wasn't that bad when I frequented it a few years back.
• grog454 5y ago
  > counting back links Do the algorithms weight links based on visibility or relevance? A link at the top of a sorted content site HN should probably be worth more than one at the bottom, and one buried in invisible metadata somewhere should be worth 0.
  • ghgr 5y ago
    PageRank is a neat algorithm that recursively weights incoming links based on their own incoming links. So a link from HN has more weight than from a small blog. And how does it know that HN should have more weight? Well, because there are many important sites pointing back to HN. And how does it know that those sites are important? And so on... But AFAIK Google no longer uses PageRank, or at least not the same version as we know it.
• polote 5y ago
  > What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good signal from all the noise of a trillion web pages? To me this is going to be manual ranking, but the biggest issue with manual ranking is not that you have to do it manually, but how do you know if you can trust users who rank pages. The Wikipedia system is a good start but not enough, and the second issue is how do you prevent its business model to kill its quality
  • mgkimsal 5y ago
    You let the rank sources be selectable. Allow me to connect/select individuals or groups to include/exclude.
• quitit 5y ago
  It seems the problem of "search" is mostly well solved. What isn't well solved is the problem of "SEO gaming". Perhaps the advancement in search isn't by having an AI that chooses a better page, but rather an AI that is really good at identifying a good result from a gamed result. However as for Google, I feel like even merely surfacing a range of relevant filter options can help their search engine, since it's what informed users are already doing by structuring a query when the first one produces crappy results. E.g. These results mostly contain links to Pinterest.com, would you like to repeat the search with these omitted? (or even just being able to collapse these site-by-site.) Additionally I think modern search could be broken down into a range of sub-tools that exist beyond google or even online. One such example is searching our web history, perhaps browsers could produce a privacy-preserving way of storing information about each webpage and its images that the user can then search later (by either terms or images.)
• Beltiras 5y ago
  Read an article which mentioned that Google degraded the search service because good results no longer made financial sense, perverse incentive is that it benefits them better for a customer to pay money for ads than provide a good search (meaning that competition for keywords is now the algorithm). The next innovation in search then necessarily must be to find a different funding model for the engine besides ads, otherwise the same perverse incentive will arise.
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    This hits the nail on the head. I feel like Google results have gotten worse not because technical problems need to be solved, but because the financial incentives means that I'm now scrolling through tons of ads, little "tidbits" that have just gotten more annoying over time, AMP carousels, and god forbid I'm searching for anything that happened over 20 years ago that has any slight resemblance to a current event - all I get are pages and pages about the current event, and Google has "memory-holed" the past. IMO, all startups have a sweet-spot where they've figured out what the market needs, and they can be profitable, but they haven't yet sucked that bone dry to where they're forced to extend more tentacles to grow their revenue. For Google, for me, that was about the 2007-2012 time frame. Any other competitor would have the same financial pressures eventually. Long term, it's impossible to "not be evil".
  • pronlover723 5y ago
    That's ridiculous. Google's search dies if people stop using it. They stop using it if the results are poor. There are no perverse incentives here unless you believe Google is hoping to cash out tomorrow and close its doors.
    • amirkdv 5y ago
      It's not ridiculous at all. > They stop using it if the results are poor. These are not laws of nature. There are so many reasons why most people would still use $X even if the performance of $X was underwhelming.
    • robertlagrant 5y ago
• briandear 5y ago
  DDG also lost the plot when they started censoring results based on geopolitical opinion.
  • Batman8675309 5y ago
    In practice, it used to say that 2+2=5 and they blocked that. How is that wrong?
  • speedcoder 5y ago
    Evidence?
    • georgehill 5y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/duckduckgo-russia-disinformation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/duckduckgo-rus...
• klenwell 5y ago
  > What's the next breakthrough idea that extracts the good signal from all the noise of a trillion web pages? Here's another recent Show HN that demoed a new search engine: Show HN: Goopt – Search Engine for a Procedural Simulation of the Web with GPT-3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443738 I know this was offered as a bit of joke. But it prompted a really thought-provoking discussion and seemed to me to suggest a genuine paradigm shift in search or information organization. It is a novel way to extract a useful signal from all the noise. It brought to my mind "Dr. Know" from Spielberg's AI movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0QkgAuEPbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0QkgAuEPbk Will the signal be a good one? It will need to get better and inevitably will. The thing that worries me: will it even matter?
• akrymski 5y ago
  The only viable alternative to PageRank I know of is social search: show me results that my friends (and friends of friends and so on) liked/bookmarked. Delicious sort of tried it but never executed well on the search side. In a way it's a personalized PageRank algo with users linking to pages they like and to other users they follow. This always made more sense to me than a global authority ranking. When looking for a babysitter you want recommendations from friends you trust, not some global ranking of popular babysitters.
  • amirkdv 5y ago
    I've heard this a lot. I think there are two problems with this. First, you need massive adoption for the "social" part to be at all useful, hence only the few big social platforms can even try it. Second, even at maximum possible adoption, you'll probably run into the problem that actual human social networks have nowhere near enough branching breadth to help rank the behemoth that the web is today, i.e. for most queries and most possible hits, there's not enough signal coming from the social network.
    • akrymski 5y ago
      The benefit of this approach is that it's an addition to PageRank, not a replacement. You don't need massive adoption of the social part I think cause you can link to eg HN, which already links to other sites. It's simply extending the backlinking concept to add personal pages. Most long tail queries work well enough with Google and indeed most of the benefit of this approach would be in the head where ranking matters more. Furthermore nothing prohibits users from liking domains, not just individual URLs.
• mgkimsal 5y ago
  "next big idea" is probably "selectable algorithms". Create 3-5 different search algorithms, with names and understandable characteristics, then let me choose which one when searching. You may have some algorithm that prioritizes recency, or rapid changes, or more interaction, and others that prioritize longevity, citations/links, others that prioritize that type of information - prioritize regional or noteworthy events over historical info, etc. Have some algorithms that penalize spam/linkfarms more heavily than others. The git/so spam farms that come up when I search for an error message are simply useless, and would love ways to switch away and try other algorithms, without necessarily having to switch entire search systems. Have algorithms that explicitly take in to account the search/click behaviour of others. Let me choose to have the search behaviour of friends/colleagues/famous-folks explicitly included or excluded in search results ranking. Let people easily switch between multiple algorithms, and let 1000 gardens bloom (or something like that). Also, determining better ways to 'search' non-text stuff. If virtual worlds become a thing, finding ways to 'search' those (whatever that might mean) will be big. Image search still has a long way to go, IME.
  • antli35 5y ago
    This could be a niche search engine for advanced users, but I feel that to average users this would be a strictly worse experience because they have no interest in figuring out how to "select an algorithm." They expect to type a query and the result they want comes up at the top. The search engine should be able to infer whether the user wants results that are more recent, more interactive, more authoritative, etc. based on the query, past search behavior, and anything else that is known about the user. If that isn't happening, the search engine needs to be made "smarter." The way it's likely seen by many tech companies is that the more decisions you have to offload to the user, the less advanced your system is. An old car with a lot of knobs and dials and levers is not more advanced than a self-driving car with a single control, select destination. Some people will still prefer the old car, but it will be a niche market.
    • mgkimsal 5y ago
      3 big buttons at the top after search results "You're viewing through FOOBAR lens. Click here to view results from another lens". Doesn't have to be that complicated.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  Whatever Algolia is doing, it is amazing. Would it be possible for them to scale as a general search engine for the web?
• jollybean 5y ago
  It's not going to be 'search' that displaces search, it'll be impossible. It will be made irrelevant through something else. For example, someone comes up with a 'Finder' thing that's barely a comprehensive directory of the internet, and that, along with 'site search' aka for FB, Amazon, does better for the use case. Most people are not 'searching' the web, they're often typing URLs or searchers for things they want answers to. When I type a technical thing I'm really just searching 'stack exchange'. On mobile, we use apps, which are different than pages. Apple could come up with something that renders Google less than necessary. Google will not be replaced directly.
• zild3d 5y ago
  > One thing a competitor needs is a new and innovative technical algorithm. Not really, because Google can do algorithms. For a new competitor to really succeed they have to start with something Google can't do. Perhaps: - device/platform related. Google owns chrome & android but a competitor could emerge somewhere out of their reach, like only on iPhone, only on airpods, alexa, oculus, etc. - being worthless to 99% of the market to make it 10X better to a 1% audience (e.g. developers, nurses, or even more niche like college athletes, jewish moms, etc) - privacy/ad related