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You know, if that were the only roadblock, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups
by technobabbler 5y ago
You know, if that were the only roadblock, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the latest findings and queries.
Would happily pay for that... even if it only has 5% of the coverage of Google, that's fine because Google is like 95% noise anyway.
- jonshariat 5y ago+1 I see this repeated over and over in tech where an algo is great but why not manually craft the top value queries? Like with smart speakers, why not manually add a bunch of interactions? You can do it yourself in settings by adding a phrase and desired response, why not have the team adding a bunch they would want?
- Sujan 5y agoThe top 10.000 queries at Google are probably 99% brands, pop culture or current news things, one word or name only, that you would not care for at all. Have a look at the top 20: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265825/number-of-searches-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/265825/number-of-searche...
- achr2 5y agoI think there is an easy exclusion to be made for these types of 'too lazy to type a url' type searches (or 'weather' which is similar in getting a specific piece of data).
- heavenlyblue 5y agoI remember one of the top queries we worked at one company with was the number of the US form to fill your taxes
- jasode 5y ago>, I wish someone would take the top 10,000 Google queries and just manually curate them. Hire different interest groups -- outdoors, travel, cuisine, etc. -- and manually find the best hits buried deep in some subreddit. No fancy algorithms, just old-fashioned librarian-style research, but constantly updated with the latest findings and queries. It's not exactly your specifications but 2007 Mahalo attempted something like that and they shut down after a few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com The website is no longer there so you have to use Wayback Machine or image search to see what the landing page for Mahalo search UI looked like : https://www.google.com/search?q=%22mahalo.com%22+search&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=%22mahalo.com%22+search&tbm=...
- nr2x 5y agoYou just invented pre-Google Yahoo!
- technobabbler 5y agoI know. I remember and loved it then.
- nr2x 5y agoI also remember altavista and the like and how bad they were. When google came on the scene it was a total game changer.
- technobabbler 5y agoGoogle was definitely better than the algorithmic crawlers. But Yahoo often still had gems for a while, a few years maybe, before they gave up. It's too bad.
- mbg721 5y agoIsn't that more or less what Yahoo was supposed to be (an index of curated links)?
- technobabbler 5y agoYes. There was a period of several years when Google's results were better than Yahoo, but once the human search engines bankrupt, the algorithmic SEO just kept getting worse and worse =/ Too bad...
- shisisms 5y agoThe problem is, you probably won’t pay for it. Google’s revenue per user in the US underlines that point, taking a credit card out for an annual subscription for a $100 probably isn’t going to score a good conversion rate for anything beyond a very small userbase. The predicted economic/behavioural constraints are inhibiting innovation. You’re forced to play Google’s game.
- technobabbler 5y agoI'd gladly pay for a good search engine, but I'm probably in the minority.
- eternityforest 5y agoThat would be awesome!