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The next Google

• alphabetting 5y ago
  In my view Google could possibly be the next Google. They're leading in AI right now and if they can get the magic we've seen in some of their papers into products like Search or Google Assistant it would be major moment.
  • MockObject 5y ago
    People aren't complaining about Google because of a lack of AI, but because of product decisions they're intentionally making, presumably that increase their profits, but many of us would be overjoyed if they simply rolled back to their 2012 algorithm.
    • tdrgabi 5y ago
      2012 algorithm with today's advanced seo and spam won't give you good results. Nobody uses yahoo search today...
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Minus ads.
  • xiphias2 5y ago
    Pathways was the first time when Google got to a level where they could collapse multiple searches into one. They needed working chain-of-thought prompting to make deep learning useful for researching solutions for problems.
• qeternity 5y ago
  > Everybody has different preferences of how they want a search engine to look and feel. This sounds like it was written by the infamous Dropbox commenter. No, most people have never given a single thought to this.
  • masturbayeser 5y ago
    • kyrra 5y ago
      By what data? https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta... Android is 42% of the US market.
      • IshKebab 5y ago
        And 69% in third world Europe.
    • peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      putting aside the (idiotic) negative framing of third-world countries, that are called developing countries nowadays anyway, they also represent 3/4 of the World's population. Doesn't seem so bad as a market.
  • GoatOfAplomb 5y ago
    Agreed, but I think there's probably a profitable business to be made out of 1% of Google Search's users.
    • qeternity 5y ago
      I think you’re still off by an order or magnitude (or two). It might plenty to create a nice business, but a bit absurd to call it the next Google.
      • joering2 5y ago
        I'm longing for categorized YouTube site... When doing home project I can navigate with tabs: home -> security -> outside cam installation -> softfit mounted -> how to strip softfit / how to run cable / how to drill and patch cables hole etc. Could be Wikipedia-style cultivated if enough people know and care.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• seqizz 5y ago
  I signed up, got HTTP 502 on my first day. Deactivated the account.
• muddi900 5y ago
  There are two erroneous assumptions in this proposition: - People Want Customization - Searching for web content would be better if users did half the work. Both are ridiculous. See here: https://chapra.blog/search-is-still-dead-demand-side-woes-722/ https://chapra.blog/search-is-still-dead-demand-side-woes-72...
• JSONderulo 5y ago
  "DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google." "The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before." Could not agree more. Great roundup of some exciting search alternatives. Thanks for sharing.
• kristianpaul 5y ago
  Developing search engines and personal assistants are the way to go. Too much information these days to digest , what a better job for a computer that helps us with the literacy aspects of it.
• KindAndFriendly 5y ago
  "The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links" I think one strong contributing factor to Google's success is its simplicity. All the listed competitors add a lot of complexity imho. While all the customization buttons, knobs, lenses, meta crawling, code generation features etc might add some value for the advanced and technically skilled user, it provides rather little value for the average user who just wants to look up a cooking recipe. So maybe when searching for "the next Google" the interesting question is not "what search features can be added", but "how can search even be simpler than using Google".
  • u2077 5y ago
    I think they each capture different markets. Google is simple because for most people it is “good enough”. Google isn’t going to spend a ton of time developing new features for the (large) minority that find it inadequate. Google also has a few good things going for them: - it’s the standard when it comes to search and is setup by default on just about every platform - People use the brand name itself when talking about looking stuff up (no one says “just duck it”) - They control the ad market, the standards for what a “optimized” site is, and the web standards themselves.
  • darinf 5y ago
    Actually, just taking the ads out of the experience can make for a simpler and better search experience. I think the google founders knew this too (https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/rzr2n3/the_founders_of_google_about_why_ads_kill_search/ https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/rzr2n3/the_founde...). They just couldn't hold back the avalanche of revenue that search ads yields. I work for Neeva, and this is a big part of why I left Google to join Neeva. There has to be a better experience, and it doesn't start from another business that works just like Google. It has to be a different kind of business. Neeva does not make money from showing you ads, so it can provide a different search experience... a simpler search experience, like the original google even, but it can go further... With the Neeva app for example as you start typing in the URL bar, it will take your input as search suggestions (just as any other browser + search engine would) but instead of just showing you completed search suggestion, Neeva will show you the results from running those searches inline. The idea being that maybe those results will be helpful to you and make it so you don't even need to go to the search results page. You can just take the result right there from the URL bar suggestions drop down. Saves you time. Simpler. Stuff like that. There's a swim lane of innovation and ideas on how searching and browsing can be better that is just really hard for Google to build, even though many of these ideas are thought of inside the walls of Google. They just can't ship them if they are stuck being beholden to their search ads model. Another great example... ever wonder why Google isn't working to make it so Chrome doesn't have a million tabs at the top of your browser? It gets to the point where it is hard to get back to what you were doing. Me, I just end up closing the tabs, declaring tab bankruptcy. Google is okay with that because it means I have to search again. The Chrome team wants to fix this but it is hard to do so as it would result in people searching less often! Again, just means there is opportunity for a simpler better experience to be had and Google won't be the ones creating it.
• db1234 5y ago
  The problem with so many customization options is that it creates friction to users. We need something that just works out of the box. Just like Google did when it launched.
• sanxiyn 5y ago
  I mostly replaced my use of Google Scholar with Elicit. You ask questions, and Elicit gives answers, with citations. Elicit is powered by GPT-3 and it is amazing. Go try it. https://elicit.org/ https://elicit.org/
  • mahmutc 5y ago
    We cant even search without account.
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  The next Google should have less AI and be more deterministic. At least it should have a mode where it searches exactly what I specify instead of searching what it thinks I want. Also give me options to filter out certain domains. Again, let me tell the search engine what I want instead of the engine telling me what I may want. I feel a lot of modern software is becoming very authoritarian. “We know better than you what you need”.
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    Kagi can filter domains. Do try it.
  • kivlad 5y ago
    Google used to let you block domains a long time ago. I'm not sure why that was removed, but I have a feeling it had something to do with giving the expectation that you can block ads from a specific domain.
• Imnimo 5y ago
  >But right after that, we’re greeted by an “Interesting Finds” section, which has a fun blog post by Derek Sivers, an article filled with stories of Steve Jobs in Japan, and some other cool things you can’t find on Google. You can definitely find these on Google.
  • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    How? Really. I've tried and didn't find this, checked to 5th page.
• davidkunz 5y ago
  > The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    I'd prefer answers to links.
  • ezekg 5y ago
    Exactly. Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam. Don't correct my term, especially when I'm searching verbatim (which I almost always want). It'd also be nice to be able to downvote certain results.
    • egeozcan 5y ago
      > Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam I think achieving this would be worth billions, at least? We really tend to underestimate the amount of spam on the internet. Google does badly here: it overcorrects and you get only super safe results. Yandex? Unless you get lucky, lots of spam.
      • sanxiyn 5y ago
        I still get lots of spam on Google. Maybe it's better for English? I mostly search in Korean.
      • np- 5y ago
        The problem is that for every $1 someone is willing to spend to not have spammy results, a spammer is willing to pay $10 for you to see it anyway. And the more "trustworthy" a platform grows, then the going price for manipulating it will keep rising until they hire the right MBA who decides to squander the company's reputation for a quick buck. Seems to be a recurring theme at least.
      • Nextgrid 5y ago
        Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking signal. You'll still get spam if that's all that matches your query, but now all it takes is for someone to make a page matching the query without the aforementioned items to outrank the spam results. You wouldn't need to append "site:reddit.com" to your queries because the (mostly) non-commercial Reddit results would automatically outrank all the blogspam and listicles. If ads were downranked it would make a lot of spam/clickbait/listicles unprofitable overnight as they'd rank low enough that the costs of creating & maintaining the spam site/content would outgrow the returns from ad impressions.
• codemk8 5y ago
  This reminds me of the user interface for pied piper’s compression algorithm https://images.app.goo.gl/G1K7J8gZ135x98mz7 https://images.app.goo.gl/G1K7J8gZ135x98mz7
• boomer918 5y ago
  These solutions don't answer any of the fundamental problems with Google: - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available) - how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades) - how to personalize without invading privacy, e.g. Google had an option to search through your email in Google search...it's gone now, I wonder why?
  • chaostheory 5y ago
    Adding on to this, customization is nice but customization is not why DuckDuckGo isn't as good as Google. The reason nothing is as good as Google is because Google indexes way more content than every other service that I'm aware of
    • prawn 5y ago
      Is that the key though? There's a lot of stuff I'd be quite happy if they didn't index!
      • chaostheory 5y ago
        Imo Yes, because that’s the main difference between Google search and everyone else. Out index Google, and it’s possible to beat. That said, I do like the feature of ignoring entire domains. Google used to allow that
    • bobajeff 5y ago
      Lately Google has gotten so bad that I've even occasionally brought up Bing (which I've often referred to as the Zune of search engines) and gotten better results. It's looking more and more to me like Google has stopped trying to improve things and are simply milking their dominance for all it's worth.
  • _jal 5y ago
    Also important for anyone actually thinking of taking Google on, very few of the features listed are things Google can't easily do, too. Attacking their strengths is crazy. You better have something both crazy good and hard to replicate by someone with more money than god. Whatever replaces Google will be doing something that Google can't without causing them other problems. The first thing that comes to mind is make them choose traffic vs. advertisers (I don't know, if I had an idea of how to, I would not be writing this), but they're big enough that other wedges could start chipping away at their margins.
• amelius 5y ago
  Search is the wrong way to look at it. It needs to answer questions, like an oracle. Anyway, Google is getting less relevant because the technology is getting better than "good enough", and any additional tech that Google adds is not really all that useful. It's like PCs. You don't need a faster one because your old one can do word processing just fine.
  • rmah 5y ago
    I think this was called AskJeeves. Google rolled over them without breaking a sweat.
  • zarzavat 5y ago
    An oracle is how Google sees itself. However, their quest to be an oracle has come at the expense of losing their edge at searching the web. So now there is an opening for another service to be better at search than Google.
  • vasco 5y ago
    This depends on user preference and query. Some users want answers to a question, other users genuinely want to find websites. If I search for "what's the weather now" I probably want to get an answer "like an oracle" as you say. But if I search for "riaa vs napster" I don't want an "oracle answer", I want a list of several websites so that I can learn more about the case. I'd like a search result for court documents, but also commentary from news websites and blogs, and maybe wikipedia. I want to open those tabs and come out the other way with more information, but there was no "oracle answer" to be provided.
• Minor49er 5y ago
  > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google. I disagree. I use Bing for about half of my searching because Google simply struggles with things like exact phrase matching in many cases. Where Google falls off, Bing tends to succeed. Though Bing also sometimes lags behind, where Google tends to do better, hence my split usage.
  • spaniard89277 5y ago
    Why not just use DDG as an interface?
    • Minor49er 5y ago
      DDG is basically just a wrapper around Bing. I'd rather just use Bing directly
• the_common_man 5y ago
  Let's be honest.. If it's any good, it gets bought by Google :-(
• focom 5y ago
  > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google. Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great.
  • u2077 5y ago
    > Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great. For anything that isn’t the least bit obscure or technical. (Same with just about every search engine) IIRC, someone on hn said that search engines are only good for things you already know are there, not for finding new information or different perspectives.
  • spaniard89277 5y ago
    I use it as daily driver and I wouldn't say DDG is great, but it's good enough definitely. I rarely use !g, like <5% of the time I search for stuff. And I use it in two languages. Not bad. For other results I find myself reaching to a bookmarked searx instance. I thought it just agreggates results but somehow it gives me different stuff. And you also get magnet links :)
  • desiarnezjr 5y ago
    Almost. Annoying are things like geographic context in results that are terrible (for me) but it's more adapting queries. It's sad what today's web has become. Each year you see it degrade and there's no real fix I'm afraid.
• beamatronic 5y ago
  No search engine has tried to address the issue of the user's context for the search. - does my current location matter for the search? - am I trying to spend money (shopping), or trying to get information (facts)?
  • spaniard89277 5y ago
    These are variables taken into account by Google AFAIK.
    • sanxiyn 5y ago
      How do I disable location based customization for Google?
    • beamatronic 5y ago
      The user does not get a choice
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    You can configure Kagi to disable location based customization, which can be a big improvement indeed.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• darinf 5y ago
  Happy to answer any questions you all might have about Neeva. I left Google to join Neeva about a year ago. Got inspired by the opportunity to make a better product. AMA :)
• gotostatement 5y ago
  > Everybody has different preferences of how they want a search engine to look and feel. I will never ever ever ever spend time going into the settings of a search engine to customize my search experience. Not when Google does a good enough job for most of my tasks.
• throw8383833jj 5y ago
  My problem with google is that it often tries to figure out my search intent and then return results accordingly. the attempt might be commendable but for many types of searches they fail miserably. when they misread my search intent, the results are completely awful. and to make matters worse, 95% or more of the web isn't even being shown to users and so I keep getting the same stupid search results: which is fine for many cases but not all cases. sometimes I need more than just another post by NBC. I will say, google search is very good at technical searches, that's for sure. But, for example, they totally suck if you're looking information or doing research on financial matters or economics.
  • thfuran 5y ago
    >I will say, google search is very good at technical searches, that's for sure. Unless your technical search, for example, contains jargon with a similar spelling to or other sense synonymous with a common term that Google will helpfully also consider to match your query. I think it's actually rather mediocre for technical searches now that they've gone so deep into stemming and such and lessened the ability to use operators to refine queries. And, of course, the lack of support for symbols makes many technical queries extremely difficult.
• hubraumhugo 5y ago
  Google won because they started early and had a right algorithm. They then had the scale to grow with the internet. It would be very hard to start a new general-purpose search engine now (capital, monopoly, tech) Nobody seems to have The Next Big Idea for a better search engine yet.
  • thwayunion 5y ago
    LMMs are the next big idea for search.
    • riazrizvi 5y ago
      What's an LMM?
      • thwayunion 5y ago
        Sorry, a typo of LLM. gpt-3 et al.
        • riazrizvi 5y ago
          Oh AI is the future of search? Maybe. I think the bigger reason why search isn’t getting much better is that incremental technical improvements are being offset by Google trading their dominance for greater shareholder value. A safe business can take away or buy-and-bury features that are better for the customer but worse for the business’s top line. Things like the Power Search API, or search that integrates with other platforms that hurt Alphabet owned businesses. Traditionally big innovation breaks some socio-political constraint on market participation. I don’t see how AI will do that yet.
          • thwayunion 5y ago
            NLP generative models that you can interrogate with natural language prompts, and which generate coherent responses together with citations for sources, is definitely the future of search. I don't know anything about AI or the relationship between market participation and innovation. All I know is that LLMs are a useful tool that is already displacing search in many parts of my life.
• luckydata 5y ago
  Good luck with that. The approach is all wrong.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user chosen social graph, everything's abstracted away. And that's by the way why Google is still successful as well. Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers without needing to do anything else. The only way to beat that is to make it even better while not making it more complicated which is very hard to do.
  • retube 5y ago
    100% agree. Success = less configuration, not more.
  • spaniard89277 5y ago
    There are plenty of profiles for "people". This is the thing. I'm the power user in my circle. People comes to me for suggestions about pretty much anything involving tech. Sometimes just because they see me with different stuff. So if I'm not the average user I may look for other options, as other people like me may do. If I find such options reasonable for the average user, that will be my recommendation to them.
    • melony 5y ago
      Tiktok didn't dominate by appealing to niche tech power users.
      • ravi-delia 5y ago
        Tiktok optimizes for momentary engagement and fast-paced social content. It turns out that's a niche that people want filled, and the rapid bouncing of ideas between users has created some very fun content which sometimes escapes containment so I can watch it. But not everything is going for the same goal, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if more than a few players could really get in on that space. For other use cases, customization may well win out over a totally frictionless experience. A search engine is a tool, and benefits from more options much more than Tiktok does.
• Shadonototra 5y ago
  google is not just search anymore, why stuck with a title that pretends we are living in 2004?
• dogleash 5y ago
  > We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before. In the last few years, different groups of people came to the same conclusion, and started working on the next generation of [foo]. For this new generation, [bar] is necessary, and [baz] are not an option. But that’s where the commonalities end. Beyond that, they’ve all [zoz] in very different directions. This pitch voice makes me want to gouge my fucking eyes out.
• cmarschner 5y ago
  People don‘t understand that Google is in a game of user data: you can only win this game if you have the largest market share, plus a plethora of additional data sources like ads. Microsoft invested 10s of billions into bing to get to the level it is at. But more clicks and user behavior data means you would win against bing. The only company that could theoretically build a web search engine due to the amount of data they have is Meta. Search is one of the biggest moats ever built.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    Nope I think that is a popular myth heralded by large companies to make people think they are stronger than they are.
• bambax 5y ago
  Most of these features have been tried, and abandoned, by Google itself. It's possible Google stopped doing them because they hurt its ad business, but it's also possible (and likely) they confused users or were difficult to maintain and not actually used. (What's a "non-commercial website"? And what happens when it suddenly becomes commercial? And when there are millions of them? etc.) I predict that in 10 years Google Search will still be dominant, and we'll still be complaining about it.
• helen___keller 5y ago
  > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads are not an option. This is a red flag to me. I would like if this were true for a next gen anything, but in my experience truly next gen experiences - the kind that spread like wildfire and displace incumbents - have no reason to make promises about privacy or ads. Why would they, if they have a product that consumers want to use?
  • chakkepolja 5y ago
    Exactly. The person who asked 'is HN becoming an echo chamber?' would've got their answer by now.
• giberson 5y ago
  IMO the next Google needs to use AI to classify results as fact/fiction and supposition/exposition etc. It will identify bias and even classify it (religious, political, cultural etc). With the abundant sources of information (and misinformation) ever growing, the job of a search engine will be to inform you about the information you are viewing and alert you to key factors that may be coloring the information.
• hedora 5y ago
  The next google is to google as Craigslist is to classified ads. Google is ripe for disintermediation by a competitor that doesn't siphon cash off search to subsidize other things. Now, all we need is a technology shift that erodes their moat.
• uhtred 5y ago
  How is DuckDuckGo a worse version of Google? I get less ads, more privacy, and pretty much the same or better results. Plus I can use my down arrows to traverse the results list!
• superasn 5y ago
  Google can be the next Google if they just stopped being evil for a second: 1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome extension. 2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with what it thinks I want. 3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search results. Where I can narrow down the search results using additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to weed out spam and narrow my search accurately.
  • annexrichmond 5y ago
    Maybe they can include these features in a premium service, and call it... Google+?
    • superasn 5y ago
      I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but I happily pay for Youtube premium and it's truly an amazing experience compared to the ad-ridden non-usable free Youtube. If Google created a similar Google premium where it had such features and no pesky ads I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.
      • cpill 5y ago
        yeah, but then your just encouraging them to make the free version a bad as is acceptable, like YouTube, and possibility create classes like on commercial airlines. you want the world divided into classes?
        • airstrike 5y ago
          The world is already divided between "free" and "paid", so I'm not sure what you're getting at here
        • DocTomoe 5y ago
• johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
  I think the replacement of Google can't come sooner. Google invades our privacy and keeps users hostages for more money. Thanks to HN I am aware now how bad Google is. I always recommend people to switch to Amazon, Apple or MS. Google is EVIL.
• polote 5y ago
  None of the examples explained here impress me (with maybe the exception of Goggles by brave search). - The first example is not much more than Google with a styling chrome extension - The second doesnt bring anything more than Google when you are searching about webcontent. Some ideas on filters are interesting but this is not user friendly - You is powered by AI, so it is basicaly giving not what you want except when you ask for the general case (the case Google works pretty well for) - Andi is a chatbot. Which is basically Google + only the first answer Brave Search Goggles, (what most people call collections, what Pinterest calls a board, what Twitter call List) is for me what is going to be the real innovation of search Engine. They are a way to bring collaboration to enrich content, but nobody has cracked the UX to make it work yet
  • dannywarner 5y ago
    Did you try Andi search? It returns full search results alongside the answer and has full preview content for many of the websites, and the content is from the websites not Google or Bing's snippets. It's completely different to the way you described it. My biggest problem with it is that the alpha version still has errors and is weak for searches like local businesses. Also, big problem is I'm in Australia and everything is in imperial units. Having said that, however, I've been using it since it became available a few weeks ago and it has already improved a surprising amount. And the question answering if you ask specific-enough questions can blow your mind.
    • polote 5y ago
      It feels like the engine understand well the query, but for test searches it didnt show better results than Google, it actually gave me almost the same answers. So if they use their own index thats pretty good. But not the Next Google
      • dannywarner 5y ago
        You might be missing the point. Try a difficult question instead of a regular web search. Something like this. "Why did Twitter add Elon Musk to its board of directors, and what impact did that have on twitter's share price?" Then click on "View in Reader" on the results. This is not like Google dude. People on the Discord are trying crazy questions like that and reporting what it does good or bad on. It screws some up but it is cool. It finds stuff Google doesn't.
• legohead 5y ago
  I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple advice. I did a bunch of online research before I booked things, but man was it painful. There are so many copy-cat blogs who just throw together a bunch of basic information with no real research done in order to get those clicks/adwords. For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple enough. Circus Circus actually has a waterslide, but if you dive deeper (read a hundred reviews manually) you find out parts are often shut down, and the hotel itself is quite trashy and smells bad and has bad service (explains the really cheap room rate). But do you find that information on blogs? No way, they just include all the hotels with pools and copy in the verbiage directly from the hotel websites or other blogs. There's probably an actual traveler blog out there that tells you all this and has great information, but it's hidden by all the SEO optimized trash blogs. And this example can be applied to so many things we do all the time. Try to find a product you want on Amazon without spending half a day sorting through reviews and trash blogs. So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service. I'd pay a few bucks to call up a service to answer these questions definitively for me.
  • trh0awayman 5y ago
    There used to be a search engine in the mid 2000s that was just like this. It was called ChaCha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)
    • smlacy 5y ago
      See also Aardvark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) Acquired by Google in 2010 and ...
      • pooper 5y ago
        Fifty million dollars would change my life. I would take a guaranteed fifty million dollars payout over one in ten chance to get a billion dollars. What are the chances that I cumbents will stand by idly as the "next Google" just takes over? Best case I can think of is the incumbent imitates the upstart and becomes better.
• umvi 5y ago
  > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads are not an option Ok, so how does the new generation pay for itself? I couldn't find that anywhere in the article.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  The future search engine will look for content that is produced by humans . We don't need more info for the sake of having info. we need info that we can assume has been produced by an actual sentient being.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    Since it's difficult to determine whether a human produced a particular piece of content, a good alternative would be to determine whether there's any incentive for a bot to produce such content, and target that instead. Ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc. Sure, you could still make a bot that auto-generates blogspam without the aforementioned things and rank as high as before, but what's the point if you removed the very things that get you paid? There's plenty of things out there that are trivially spammable but outside of isolated cases (where the objective is to cause damage/annoyance rather than profit) nobody is spamming them because there's no profit to be made by doing so.
• sytelus 5y ago
  Next Google isn’t going to be index based search engine. Imagine a massive distributed neutral model which has digested billions of pages. The query isn’t going to be keyword-ish like “kids cough medicine” but rather question with all details like “what is least problematic over the counter good cough medicine for a 9 year old with asthma”. The results aren’t going to be bunch of links but rather aggregation, summary and organized composed information from various sources with citations. Imagine if a human had read all the pages and you asked him the same question. I would also predict search to be much more compute intensive and therefore more expensive. The ad model is likely not going to be sufficient to pay for compute resources.
  • ffwacom 5y ago
    How could you trust the responses though.
• simoneau 5y ago
  I want to pay for researched, impartial answers to my questions. Would someone build that, please?
  • potatoman22 5y ago
    Have you considered JSTOR /s
• abhinavsharma 5y ago
  The problem with trying to replace Google is that you have to.. 1. Do (nearly) everything Google does as well as them AND 2. fix Google's weak spots (usually in subjective queries) AND 3. offer something new and exciting. It's hard to do (1) well given Google's data moat and how good that makes them at head queries. It's rare that people stick with one of these alternatives because they struggle to be as good in the majority of simple queries. We built a few such search engines before choosing a different route — we made something that augments Google (or Amazon, or whatever other search engine you use) and improves it in areas that it's weak in. I posted our thoughts on this a few weeks ago on HN that generated some discussion as well — http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 The apps we built are a mobile browser extension for iOS and a desktop browser extension https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperweb/id1581824571 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperweb/id1581824571 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojagelicdlhnmldaiplbppfbolnnag https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag... It's one approach, but we're trying to be more non zero-sum about it, and consider that the search engine doesn't have to be replaced 1:1 with a better search engine.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    I dont think that's true. To replace Google, you need genuine sources (Githubs and Wikipedias) and non seo content farm sources. Just these 2 would be enough to replace Google.
• antishatter 5y ago
  I find ddg is an improvement on google because it’s more like google 10 years ago plus a quick !g tosses it back to google for the occasional topic google does better.
• mikehollinger 5y ago
  There's an opportunity for helping with enterprise data. There's: - Files (Box/DropBox/Google Drive/SharePoint) - Static(ish) Pages (Wikis/internal CMS's/Actual websites hosted on some random nginx/apache) - Web Apps (eg Internal Learning Platforms or helper HR apps or whatever) - Chat (Slack/Discord/Teams/??) - Email - Files stored on my actual laptop - Source Control (eg GitHub/GitLab/whatever ... which have their own wikis/pages/content) Is it just me? Anyone else feel like finding something across the above mediums is difficult?
  • ktsayed 5y ago
    I agree 100% but for corporate usecases many would be slightly uncomfortable giving Google (or a competitor) access to all of those to search though
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    Remember Google Desktop? I want Google Desktop back. (Google Desktop was discontinued in 2011.)
    • mikehollinger 5y ago
      I do too!
    • SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      I want Google 2011 back.
• api 5y ago
  I now use Kagi as my default and will definitely pay for it.
  • kegi 5y ago
    sorry for you :P
    • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
      Why?
• sam0x17 5y ago
  Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi has done a great job of solving some of the UX and privacy problems endemic in online search these days, but at the end of the day they could be snuffed out at the whim of the big search providers (Google, Bing) if they decide to kick them off until they can get their own indexing solution off the ground. If an alternative search engine reached Bing's level of popularity, this would undoubtedly happen. The same goes for DuckDuckGo and others. All of the above use the Bing search API for the majority of their web results which for most use cases is not economically sustainable. I do think there is a large swath of users who will pay a subscription for a truly great search engine offering, but indexing has to be at the core of this offering, at least for me. If users realized this is just Bing results with a few enhancements and additional result sources mixed in, they might not be as willing to pay for what they could technically get for free elsewhere, albeit with significantly less privacy. That said I wish Kagi all the luck in the world. As the original dev who planned out and built the initial backend implementation in Crystal and put together their early engineering team, I can at least say they are building on rock-solid, very fast and privacy-oriented foundations, and this is a truly web-scale product in terms of the infrastructure design.
  • guntars 5y ago
    Interesting, I actually think that the indexing and the infrastructure part of building a search engine is much easier now than it was in the early 2000s. It's the ranking that's the hard part. PageRank helped put Google on the map and they've battled the hordes of low-ethics SEO practitioners ever since. I think it's generally agreed that PageRank wouldn't cut it today. I tried Kagi as the default search engine for a few days and realized just how many little things Google does that I prefer, but never noticed until now. Not strictly related to search results, but things like converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. It's a ton of work to implement all that. For now I switched back, but I'll keep an eye out.
    • makeitdouble 5y ago
      > converting units (Kagi has this, but it didn't always work), getting a time in a timezone (same), shopping results, the QA answers, etc. Honestly I’d be happy with a search engine that does search well, and use dedicated tools for the other widgets. I think browsers could do a better work at using the omnibar as a command line tool to cover these cases. For instance I’d really wish it would be easier to map incantations like “/mtg intl” and have a predefined action executed. Bookmark keywords are already half the way there.
• lcnmrn 5y ago
  The next Google should be powered by AI/ML algorithms to go around SEO tricks. If lots of people pick a result from page 16 that result should be on the front page.
• jonathankoren 5y ago
  The problem with going up against Google isn't competing with features, or even relevance. No one cares about features beyond basic relevance, and relevance isn't enough to get people to switch. You have to provide an excuse, or perhaps an experience, that gets people to come back. Just one niche, is all you need. You're not competing with Google the search engine, or even Google company. You're competing against google the verb.
• Soupy 5y ago
  > The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. Hard disagree. I spent years of my life working on a "new way to search" (Graph Search at Facebook, ~2012) and the biggest takeaways for me from all of that time is: 1) people don't want to learn a new way to search, and they don't want to learn new tools, filters, lenses, whatever you want to call it. it must be a keyword-search based input because Google has trained billions to search (and to think) this way for 20+ years now. imo the next google shouldn't fight this behavior, but rather adopt it as part of the core strategy 2) ownership of the "search intent entrypoint" is key. people generally don't care what they are using to search, as long as it's easy and fast to use and actually works. google understands this and makes it almost impossible to bypass searching with google if you're on an Android phone. All of these alternative search engines have a huge barrier to entry not only on the technology and data side, but mainly on the entrypoint side. They can't reasonably expect hundreds of millions of the people to go through and manually update their default search engine on all of their devices. What about when I go to use Google Assistant? Google maps? All entrypoints that Google has used to lock up search intent. It's brilliant. I believe there are moves still available for a future Google assailant to overcome these barriers, but I haven't seen many that have directly touched on this point yet. new technical shifts may open up new entrypoints here (VR/AR?) 3) the search engine that has the lowest time between [query] -> [answer] for a user wins. any search engine that adds additional cruft through forcing more clicks, usage of advanced tooling (filters, lenses, etc), visualizations, etc will lose out because they are getting farther and farther from the core problem a user has - "find me x". this is the thing that is driving the hero/knowledge units on Google, further cementing their leadership 4) the one brightspot - verticalized search intent is a huge area of untapped potential in the search arena. Google is great at general search (and honestly also at a huge number of verticals that it's developed over time), but there are many verticals that google honestly sucks at. I do believe there is a potential entrypoint here for a "new google" if they can take on a vertical-by-vertical expansion strategy. Owning the intent entrypoint would still be as important as ever, but this play would look a lot like the early Yelp vertical expansion strategy from the early 2000s. It's anybody's guess what the actual right starting vertical and entrypoint match is though tl;dr Google won't go down easy, and a Google killer may actually look incredibly similar to Google in it's end-state
  • 5y ago
• einpoklum 5y ago
  > DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google. Bing - maybe. DDG - it used to be much more of an alternative, now a little less, with their decision to actively censor their content. Still, they - supposedly - don't collect and store information about you. That's the sense in which they're an alternative. And in Google, there is massive, manipulation of results with all sort of commercial biases. In DDG we don't know that that is the case. > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads are not an option. Hmm. I notice they didn't didn't say search results manipulation is not an option. > Why should everyone have the same search experience? As far as search results are concerned - so that you don't get to play games with what's more and less visible on the Internet? For the sake of fairness? > We all have our own preferences about how things should look and work. Oh, so you want to _flaunt_ how you'll manipulate people's search results to fit your interests? I'm sorry, I mean "the default preferences"?
• xmly 5y ago
  So kagi is still returning bunch of links, right?
• xmly 5y ago
  So Kaji is still returning a bunch of links, right?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• donnoit 5y ago
  Nitpicking here.. but the title and article are presumptuous are out-of-touch in 2022. Google is primarily an advertising company. Gmail, YouTube, Android, Mobile Apps, Google Home, Maps, devices, Search App all synergistically funnel users towards advertisers. G-Cloud and G-Pay may be among the few exceptions to that but also constitute Google. Point being: you cannot be the Next Google by building a better search engine, just like you can't be the Next Microsoft by building an email system better than Outlook or a desktop OS better than Windows.
• logicx18 5y ago
  I've been using you.com for a couple of months now and I think it has a lot of potential for one reason: choice. You can choose to be in private mode where they don't track you or you can choose to see some sites higher than others. Feels more customizable and the layout feels new
  • code2life 5y ago
    I love you.com mobile app, just saw that they made a layout update, really cool
• code2life 5y ago
  This article is great, but you.com is just much better for my work (software engineer), it's also free. I'd not pay for a search engine
• b8 5y ago
  Kagi requires for an account to be registered and will charge a monthly rate when it's out of beta, so I don't really think that it'll be a threat to Google.
  • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    > I don't really think that it'll be a threat to Google They don't want to. https://kagi.com/faq#Google-killer https://kagi.com/faq#Google-killer > We don't want to kill Google :) Google serves a purpose in the world and it did help enable the modern society to exist, with all its marvels and flaws. Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist! > > Think of Kagi as a small, premium brand, providing a very different, tailor-made, search experience.
• swethmandava 5y ago
  I might be biased but I see myself depending on trusted sources - no SEO links, no spam! I want yelp for restaurants, stackoverflow for coding questions, reddit for opinions or allrecipes for recipes. So I love you.com - it has an app for everything!
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• calbruin 5y ago
• calbruin 5y ago
• notadoc 5y ago
  None of these seem like the next Google. Too complicated. The earlier Google, when Google was at its best in both performance and results, was incredibly simple. It indexed the entire web. It returned keyword matched results based on relevancy. There was no customization required. No editorialized results. No Big Brothering the user against thoughtcrime or wrongthink. No promotion of The Current Thing. Just information, whether good or bad, true or false, as a search engine should be. Something that can replicate that will have a good chance of success, but I think the longstanding challenge to both Google and competitors is how to rank material in an increasingly siloed and ideological web filled with agendas, astroturfing, SEO optimization, and spam.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• kegi 5y ago
  I personally think this new search engine sucks. There's 1000 good reasons to create a new search engine to fight Google but they don't get it, they don't have vision and their features just sucks. "[...]We do not log or associate searches with an account.[...]" why would I trust that and why would a create an account in the first place ?
• wppick 5y ago
  If there is any next Google (or Google Search competitor) it would be, in my mind, something like Wolfram Alpha. I can search for things like today + 160 days and get much more rich results (as a simple example). Google does have some features like this already such as weather/climate, calculator, translate, etc. This area however is much weaker than I would like it to be. Wolfram can tell me how long it will take me to get a sunburn in my current location, and all kinds of stuff like that. Virtual assistants like Siri and "OK Google" might be heading in this direction, but why can't I ask "Ok Google, I will take a photo, then can you compress it and send it as an email attachment to Dave from work." Or something along those lines...
• bob1029 5y ago
  Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web crawler and building my own damn search engine from scratch. I can't ever come up with a hard reason it wouldnt work in 2022, other than the dynamic javascript blogspam that may be more challenging to trawl for meaningful content these days. Perhaps this is a win-win: The shit I can't crawl I wouldnt want to read anyways. Compete with google? Who gives a shit. I just want to be able to hit a full text index that points back to URLs. I don't need instant PhD-tier answers for life questions.
  • acatton 5y ago
    (Disclaimer: I work for a big company which makes a browser, an OS for smartphones and a search engine. This is my own opinion, and does not reflect my employer, and so on, and so on…) > Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web crawler and building my own damn search engine from scratch. A few things: * Storing the index. For example if I search for "Sushi", google says there is 1.3 Billion results. That's already 19.3 GiB just to store the relationship between "sushi" and its results. (If you use UUIDs) And you need to do that for most words in the english dictionnary. And I'm assuming you're not even storing what you crawl for debugging/re-indexing. * Website admins might throttle you. For example, discourse — a website which runs most discussion for Rust, Ocaml, and many other projects — blocked the bingbot at some point[1] due to its crawling aggressivity. Cloudflare, which is the front-facing caching service for almost half of the internet now, is notoriously anti-crawling. (It will quickly display captchas) * grep over the web will yield you bad results. (most of the time) You want a search engine which at least groups words semantically. If I search for horses, I'm usually also interested in mares and ponies. [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/bingbot-is-no-longer-default-throttled/84620 https://meta.discourse.org/t/bingbot-is-no-longer-default-th...
• yumraj 5y ago
  > The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. I have a fundamental disagreement with this. The best search engine is still an input box that spits out links based on what was typed. This allows the user to express what they're looking for, their query, in most natural terms. Everything else is secondary. At least for me..
• advael 5y ago
  You lost me at "Duckduckgo is a worse version of google" Privacy aside, I find the results much more helpful on average these days, and weeding past sponsored links is enough of a hassle within google search results to consider it a UX QOL downgrade
• deleted 5y ago
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• masswerk 5y ago
  I'd like my search engine to be not too intelligent. Sometimes, humans suppose to know what they are meaning. So - optional verbatim and prioritized terms (like Google once did it) - optional logical operators (and, or) - a separate input box for context (either, specific terms like "product", "shopping", "legal", or some assorted terms to indicate a field of meaning and/or associated concepts, time span, etc) It's the latter, where the search engine may shine and users may evoke its sophisticated intelligence, but, please, don't reinterpret the principal search terms to concepts that maybe just related. I do understand that this may not be for everyone, nor may it be the sole interface, but there should be a niche for this. Example, wanting to find something about the early press coverage of System/360: - Search term: (IBM || "big blue") && System/360 - Context: news 1965,1966 computer
  • agencies 5y ago
    Can you describe how context would work differently than additional search terms?
    • masswerk 5y ago
      I just think that a separation of intends may be suitable. One is the actual search term (optionally verbatim and using logical conjunctions), the other provides loose contextual information and/or categories specifying the source set. These are by no means the same. (Compare the example given above. I don’t think that you can do a search like this with Google today. This should also help with issues like newer content masking established, older one.) Edit: As it is, search engines return a quite diffuse field of information, which may not what you want, when you're looking for specific information. Some of this is related to the confusion of search terms and categorial and/or contextual information, while its also due to the eagerness to return any information at all (and as current as possible). Sometimes, this may be even worse than returning nothing. Also, this may lead to an eventual erosion of information in the long term. For centuries, human knowledge (at least, in Western cultures) has been organized in terms of content and categories. In a classic library, a research like the one mentioned above would have been easy. As it is, this kind of structured concept doesn't work with search engines anymore, or, at least, not too well.
• taosx 5y ago
  I too like many others feel that Google results have gone really bad in the last year which may be partially due to web pollution but the main issue is that I feel like google's search totally ignores my requests, a lot of times it even ignores exact matches using quotes. If only we could get some sql-like powers in that simple input box. Maybe I'm not their target audience...who knows.
• system2 5y ago
  Tell me this engine can serve millions of queries per second with all of these features. Will the search take 15 seconds or 1.5?
• MuffinFlavored 5y ago
  I don't think displaying data in different fashions is enough to come even remotely close to dethroning Google. It's their data, how much of it they have, and the algorithm that sits in between the search input box and the delivering you results that makes them the best.
• taxonomyman 5y ago
  Likely not the next Google but wanted to share: https://sanction.millionshort.com https://sanction.millionshort.com SANCTION is an experimental search engine powered by the popular experimental search engine Million Short – an experiment within an experiment. (This is alpha and buggy!) With SANCTION you can choose to remove results from any Country you wish, for whatever reason. Result removal is based on both the ccTLD and geographic location of where the page is hosted (a 1st degree connection). We have also provided the ability to remove results based on the ccTLD and location the scripts a particular page includes via script tags (a 2nd degree connection).
• garbagetime 5y ago
  I thought 21e8 was the next Google.
• microtherion 5y ago
  Buying the kagi.com domain for a search engine might be suboptimal SEO for people with some longer memories: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972
  • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    https://kagi.com/faq#kagi-old https://kagi.com/faq#kagi-old > That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Know how you’ll find the next Google? Same way those of us over 45 found this one. A respected friend or colleague will tell you that the next Google just works better. That’s what made Google search win: it just worked better. It’s now I found out about it and probably how you did if you’re pushing 50. We didn’t care about pagerank or know what it is. That came after we used it and wanted to know why it worked better - or we wanted to manipulate he results. We didn’t read a blog post telling us what’s good. We were using another search engine and Google arrived on the scene and it was just WAY better. I was using alltheweb. Friends were using other engines. In weeks, everyone smart and productive was using Google. Google/Alphabet may be a large company now, but never forget how they started. They were just so good we couldn’t ignore them. That’s how good the next Google will need to be.
  • elwell 5y ago
    I can still visualize a memory from my high school library, when my friend showed me Google search for the first time. I think I had been using Dogpile.
    • redisman 5y ago
      I was a Altavista die-hard. Google was a great improvement. Honestly I think this is just asking the wrong question. In the world of walled gardens and industrial SEO I just don’t think a search engine will be the “next Google”
      • mech422 5y ago
        I loved altavista query language.. For me, the draw in to Google was just the sheer size of the index.
    • bduerst 5y ago
      Same. No more paging through aggregate results from different search engines.
  • bduerst 5y ago
    That's going to be conversational/NLP search. Curious to see how Andi plays out. The simplest explanation is the scene from from Wall-E with the captain of the ship discussing with the A.I. It will be fluently integrated in our everyday lives.
• relaunched 5y ago
  nerds like nerd knobs... not sure customization has a mass market appeal. I also fundamentally disagree with the sentiment that the general public cares about privacy... though nerds do. Good luck!
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  A lot of the snooping does have an actual role with search - they need to guess the intended domain of the query [1] Welcome to my side project, a better organized directory of domain specific search engines, based on duckduckgo !bang operators https://github.com/MoserMichael/duckduckbang/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/MoserMichael/duckduckbang/blob/master/REA... The project also adds some explanation on the role of each search engine, also the page has been auto translated into several languages. Ideally this directory/thesaurus should help you with finding an appropriated domain specific search engine for a given task, without the need of snooping on the part of the search engine. [1] of course they also need the snooping for targeted advertising, but that's a different story!
• asciimov 5y ago
  The older I get the less I want to waste time on customizing things.
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  The fundamental problem with search engines is that 95% of the content on the web is utter garbage. Search engines used to seem better because they were filtering from a small pond of reasonably clear water, not an ocean of sewage.
• taurusnoises 5y ago
  I want to like this, but it also feels like another way we'll all be siloed in our echo chambers. I mean I guess this ship has already sailed with Google microtargeting it's search engine users through ever-increasing surveillance capitalism tavtics, but I was kind of hoping that some day search engines would be at least one way to establish commonality among us. Alas, I know this ain't happening. And, as I'm writing this, not even sure I want that.
• georgehill 5y ago
  Let's be honest here, If we remove ads, and blocked all SEO spam domains, Google results are good! I've never seen any new search engines including the new ones, even close to the quality of Google results. In fact, I am excited about their new feature multimodal search https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-mum/ https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-mum/
• wanda 5y ago
  Google had it search nailed for a long time. I don't expect Kagi to replace it if it's asking questions like "what killer feature do you want from a search engine" (paraphrased) I don't want any features. I want a search bar, a search button, and results that relate to my query based on more than simply matching a keyword to a query word, but based on less than whatever Google factors in these days and certainly not based on whether someone has paid to have their domain featured for a query. I have never clicked a paid promoted search link on Google, or any other service, and I never will. If you have to pay for your content to be displayed as matching a query, it probably shouldn't be. Content should speak for itself. The one thing I 100% never want to see is a selection of results that are at all influenced by what lots of other people have clicked on. I want to see results that pertain to my query, regardless of whether they have attracted the interest of others who have searched for something the same/similar. I also don't want to see results that are influenced by my previous searches, by my location, or by data gathered about my Google account unless I specifically want those to be factored into my search. Features like ways to refine search like inurl: or intitle:? Yes, cool, have them available. Also, I expect a search engine to load fast. I don't expect a ton of JavaScript to be required for an input box and a button, and I don't want doodles of the day and other junk. They're fun, sure, but at least let me turn that off because I'm a psychopath. I don't think we'll see a true Google competitor. Would I pay for a search engine that was just as good but kept it simple and returned better results than the trash Google can come up with? Yeah, probably, but I think all that will happen is that Google itself will come up with Google Premium Search, run it for two years and then shut it down. I don't think for one second think that search is easy, it most definitely isn't, and Google has a head start on its competitors -- but I do think that Google was more effective 10 years ago than it is now. I cannot however say whether that's down to Google overcomplicating their search algorithms or whether there's just x% more garbage out there, where x is some very large number.
• m_ke 5y ago
  I always thought Facebook getting into search could be big since they have really good engagement data based on what people post and like but I was just listening to TWIST (https://youtu.be/KfibbbLeT3c?t=4014 https://youtu.be/KfibbbLeT3c?t=4014) and they made a great point about the potential of Apple Spotlight Search being a way for Apple to expand into search and advertising. If Apple ends up turning spotlight into a proper search engine across web and apps it could really take a decent portion of the market from Google and FB, especially since all of the premium users are already in the Apple ecosystem. The dream search engine would always be a click/swipe away and have access to all of your personal data/documents and the web, if Apple wants it CMD+SPACE could really be that.
• tomatowurst 5y ago
  The perfect search engine would be powered by humans with a search engine. Google is fantastic but there is no human understanding of the needs and wants that can be conveyed through series of keywords. For example when I type "best humidifiers" I want a suggestion that is ideally based on accurate anecdotes of people who've experienced a brand in a variety of context and edge cases. What google gives me is a cnet article listing Top 10 in 20XX. This is why I add reddit to the end of the search query now.
  • bricemo 5y ago
    There was a startup called ChaCha that was a real live human answering every query in real time. They would chat with you and find you exactly what you were looking for. In the beginning it was amazing, but then they couldn’t figure out how to scale and quality went down. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)
    • Aachen 5y ago
      Aren't only something like 15% of queries unique? A cache ought to help scale. Don't see it mentioned on Wikipedia what the issues were unfortunately. Interesting though, thanks for sharing.
  • ricktdotorg 5y ago
    shout out to the travesty that was calacanis' mahalo.com[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
• alliao 5y ago
  slightly relevant is how to detect astroturfing.. probably applies more to this comment section too
• usr1106 5y ago
  Not an internationally good name. The io domain is ethicly questionable (although they are of course not alone using it). DKB is a German bank. Shouldn't be unknown in expat circles because it used to be close to the only one accepting customers living abroad and actively marketing towards them. Not sure whether they still do so, but at least they haven't made any attempts to get rid of me (knocking on wood). Offtopic background: International banking (for small customers) is a nightmare because of compliance issues even within the EU which is supposed to he a single market. Of course as soon as you have the US in the picture it gets completely hopeless (because of crazy rules for their own citizens and them acting world police, i.e. requesting others than their own citizens and businesses to comply).
• zw123456 5y ago
  I think the conundrum is people want a computer to read their minds to make things easier for them, but when it does, it creeps them out. The solution, IMHO, is less technical and more psychological. If I was trying to replace FAANG, that is the thing I would consider how to address.
• luis8 5y ago
  I wonder how feasible would it be to index everything locally? I mean how far are we from having the cpu and storage space to allow a search within our computers? Do we really need to store everything ? Maybe a local "ai magic" could select the specific information we regularly search for and sync from an open public index. In the case we need results it could sync and/or request those bits we are not indexing locally. Just thinking out loud
  • istjohn 5y ago
    What problem would that solve?
    • luis8 5y ago
      On top my head i can think of: Privacy no need to explain why this is important Resilience if google/any other search engine goes down it usually mean chaos You have total control of what is shown to you so no one can manipulate what is shown to you(at least not that easily) assuming it is open sourced of course I guess there are cons to this approach too but it looks/sounds really good :)
  • pmayrgundter 5y ago
    Good q. Totally feasible imho, and I used to help build the goog search engine! :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia 20GB, which is tiny these days. Fits on a $10 USB key. I think with some of that AI magic we'll soon be in a situation where most of the traditional (non-proprietary) human knowledge you ever need (text, images, 3d models of machines, anatomy, etc.) will be immediately accessible for free via an open-source knowledge engine. With a commodity network connection, that knowledge engine can keep itself apprised of the post-traditional/proprietary knowledge by doing all the drudgerous work of reading through the world of Ads to get to today's news, etc.. Mate that with more AI magic to make it easy to conversationally interact with the engine and you get an agent who can represent you online and provide a distilled interface of online for you. Your digital twin or avatar.
• Mondialisation 5y ago
  I love kagi, I use it myself, but this won't be ''the next google'' for the simple reason that kagi isn't a free service.
• beezle 5y ago
  Million short https://millionshort.com https://millionshort.com can come in handy I don't use it as my primary search engine as I often want images and news related to the search. But for any search that is going to get flooded with SEO type stuff it can get rid of a lot of the crud very easily.
• Vladimof 5y ago
  > The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. Google replaced other search engines that had just an input box...
• sebst 5y ago
  > You can change everything, from surface level appearances, to the final ranking of results. People don’t want this. My first boss told me he would bet on regular TV if only streaming was left. He didn’t account for recommendation algorithms, so it’s easy to prove him wrong. But the takeaway here is that people prefer things working for them out of the box. That’s the secret to Apple’s or Google’s success: It just works. Just works can mean that you’ll get “some” search results or a TV show that matches your preferences. Almost nobody would like to put effort into customizing their experience. Google provides “good” search results for a majority of users. From a business perspective it would be a wrong decision to enable customization for a neglectible fraction of users if the vast majority just want to “consume”.
  • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    > People don’t want this. Yeah, and that's why Kagi.com is bigger and bigger.
• SpaceManNabs 5y ago
  so difficult to find on that page if their search is powered by google or bing or wtv beneath. if your advertisement for your search engine is not easily searchable, then... I also don't want to customize anything anymore. I stopped playing RPGs, and I don't wanna RPG my engines too.
• henning 5y ago
  > We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before. No we don't. Google needs to go back to what made it successful: showing web pages that have the words you search for, untainted by SEO shit.
• upwardbound 5y ago
  One thing that sucks is that when I tried googling for NeevaScope, Google instead shows results for NervoScope, whatever the heck that is. I'm sure this was unintentional but it still feels anti-competitive. Anyways, here's NeevaScope: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neevascope https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neevascope
  • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    > but it still feels anti-competitive. Why? _NeevaScope_ seems like _NervoScope_. And _NervoScope_ is a lot better known term.
• magpi3 5y ago
  I look at statmuse.com and wikipedia: sites that provide DSS (domain specific search) for information as the anti-Googles. No one will replace Google, but a site that focuses on a narrow domain is extremely useful and is the one thing that pulls me away from Google.
• outloudvi 5y ago
  Have tried Kagi for a while as a beta user. It generally works fine, but I am just reminded every time when I try to do a search via Private Browsing - and Kagi, a subscription service, will apparently ask me to login - that each of my search history will be able to be linked to an individual. Then it's definitely not what I want.
  • radicality 5y ago
    Also a beta user. I wonder if the final version you’ll be able to stay pseudoanonymous - pay with crypto, no email, etc (kinda like Mullvad). Not defending them and also dislike this (but can’t think of a way involving payments which doesn’t do it). I do find their privacy policy quite clear and transparent - https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy And also let’s not kid ourselves - I would guess this is still likely more privacy-forward than a Private Session on Google. Would be surprised if Google isn’t using every potential signal to fingeprint you and link back that session back to some other login.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• farmin 5y ago
  If memory serves me correctly Google once had a desktop widget with search like neeva. I could search email, files, Web, all at once from task bar. Neat. Maybe I dreamt that.
  • darinf 5y ago
    Yes you are correct. Google Desktop Search. Connected Apps in Neeva is similar but better. It supports indexing more apps, like Figma and GitHub.
    • farmin 5y ago
      Cool. I will check it out. Edit: on the wait list
• htrp 5y ago
  At the rate we're going, google will eventually be forced to open its index to competitors just like how telecom companies were forced to allow competition.
• TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  wrong. unless these search engines have an ad play, they aren't the next google. More like the next internet explorer if anything.
• jedberg 5y ago
  > For this new generation, privacy is necessary, Why is this always a given? Yes, privacy is good, but honestly, I find what I'm looking for in the first few links about 99% of the time with Google, because of the lack of privacy. They have 20 years of search history on me, including maps searches. They know where I live and where I go and what I like and what I buy, and they can read all my email. And I get better search results because of it. If I search for [haircut], I get the cheap places near me, because Google knows I'm cheap when it comes to haircuts, because they've seen where I've gone before. To get that on an anonymous search engine, I'd have to search for [cheap haircut near $home_address], so now I've had to type extra words and I've given up my privacy anyway, just with extra effort. I'm not the biggest fan of Google knowing that much about me, but I also know it gets me great results, and that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make (and lots of other people are too).
• hbarka 5y ago
  What we really need is the next Twitter. It is time.
• sMarsIntruder 5y ago
  “DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google.” Ok, we can’t stop reading right there.
• dmitrykan 5y ago
  Thanks for the article, I've learnt new search engines despite spending a couple of years recently in web scale search. I think you may consider https://usearch.com/ https://usearch.com/ as another dimension in web scale search, where query log is learnt from the data, making it quite unique.
• bmitc 5y ago
  My primary want from a search engine is to not remove search terms I explicitly typed in and to point me to search results that don't have the end goal of wanting me to buy something, unless that's what searched for. It boggles my mind that search engines today assume I didn't actually mean the search terms I typed in.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  I have a solution for the google problem, but don't have time to pursue this myself. So anyone interested, steal my idea! (Or bash it in the replies, it's HN after all :D) Instead of pagerank we need peoplerank. Let's say we build a new elgooG search engine that you can customize by indicating which people you trust. For example I say to trust Paul Graham about the topics entrepreneur and startup. Then, authors like Paul can register a key on elgooG and sign their online articles with that key. When I search topics related to startups, elgooG knows I trust Paul and will try to find articles from him or anyone that he trusts, or even 3rd grade connections. It is very difficult to fool such a search engine with SEO optimization, since the user actually indicates which people to trust. I'm pretyy confident it would be a good solution, but I'm afraid it's very hard to start up. If you steal my idea, please consider giving me a 1% stake (or less) in your company ;D.
  • friendzis 5y ago
    This algorithm would have an extremely bad discoverability an would be extremely susceptible to platformization. How would you find Melcher writing about car engine maintenance on Bent Piston forum when you yourself rank KingsEgg on Vroom forums as the authority on engine maintenance? Which article do rank higher: one by Melcher that is highly ranked by large number of "random" individuals or the one recommended by KingsEgg?
    • bluebit 5y ago
      And boom, we're back to the original problem Google had - how to initially seed authority sites.
  • avnigo 5y ago
    I sort of like where the idea is going, but I don't like that it just depends on trust. People would become search engine "influencers" that you follow, and would get paid to bless certain articles, as along as they exude an air of trustworthiness. So in a sense, instead of Google being the ad server, the people you follow are. Maybe a combination of trust and reputation would work better, but you might still get groups of people vouching for each other's recommendations. I guess it's not an easy problem.
• inferense 5y ago
  I disagree. If google served me with what I search for within the top 5 results in every kind of context, I'd be willing to pay for it $30 / month, problem solved. No one needs filters, backround colors and all that useless fluff - that doesn't really hit the nail on the head. I just want to get a useful information quickly. Google is arguably unbeatable when it comes to dev related queries, but a complete trash with pretty much anything else. Now, the problem is with all of these appalling websites filled with ads, pop ups, hidden agendas of selling me something etc. That's on google because their business model depends on serving these results. A new kind of search engine does not run on ad revenue but on value add for the user in exchange for their subscription fee.
• urbandw311er 5y ago
  This just feels like yet another terrifying social bubble. Like walking down the high street with a retinal filter to blank out the homeless people.
• dusted 5y ago
  The search engine I want is the one that actually searches for the text I input into it, instead of "trying to find the most relevant" (aka "whatever is cached at the moment)
• Kiro 5y ago
  I feel like I'm the only one who is pretty happy with Google. Can someone tell me what they're searching for where Google is not satisfactory?
  • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    News or programming / development. On first pages, many clickbaits and generated spam sites.
    • Kiro 5y ago
      Do you have any example queries? The only spam I normally see are the sites scraping Stack Overflow but they are never above the actual Stack Overflow page.
• enoch2090 5y ago
  I’ve tried with Neeva, and to be honest, even put aside the potential privacy problems, it just doesn’t work. The quality of search results is notably poorer than Google. I used it for a dozen of PyTorch & Numpy related queries, and a dozen more on convex optimization maths. I often find that it can’t find the right answer for me. It’s really a pity because I quite like it’s feature to search information from connected accounts, in my case I gave it permission to my Notion page used as archive storage. That went pretty well tho.
  • codalan 5y ago
    It was pretty good a few months ago, but I've noticed more and more SEO spam in the results. They also started using dark patterns in the UI. For instance, some search results will bring up an obnoxious popup asking to enable location services. It blocks off a good chunk of the visible screen This is on a desktop machine without GPS. And it sometimes pops up for search terms that wouldn't have a location associated with it. And you can't disable it. I'll probably take a look at Kagi when I get an invite.
  • richardsocher 5y ago
    Would love your thoughts on some random queries based on what you said for you.com, eg. https://you.com/search?q=implement%20interior%20point%20method%20&fromSearchBar=true https://you.com/search?q=implement%20interior%20point%20meth... https://you.com/search?q=numpy+array+filter+elements+python https://you.com/search?q=numpy+array+filter+elements+python - results include AI writing code, StackOverflow, Arxiv papers etc.
• maxehmookau 5y ago
  I switched to Kagi a while ago and have been a user for a few months. I've not had to use Google search once. It just... works. I'll happily pay for it.
• hatmatrix 5y ago
  Seems a lot of focus on interfaces, but what about knowledge graphs and representation of the underlying data that is supposed to improve the search?
• grae_QED 5y ago
  -$5 or less a month -simple web interface -accurate results -privacy oriented -NO ADS That's all I want from a search engine. I don't care about shopping or maps or any of the other 'features' all of these alternative are trying to implement. I want a gnu style search engine. I want something that "does one thing, and does it well," and I want that one thing to be 'search.'
• mrkramer 5y ago
  Long story short of Google's rise and "fall" in quality: Altavista was dominant internet search engine in the 1990s but search quality was bad compared to what could've be done. Google figured out machine learning was the key to success e.g. PageRank. Google got incorporated in 1998. Good leadership(Larry, Sergey and Schmidt) and vivid vision propelled Google to 90% of market share in search. World Wide Web was drastically smaller two decades and one decade ago and Google was still able to "handle" it with already established machine learning algorithms. Fast forward to today World Wide Web is zettabytes big and not even Google can rank it "reasonably" and efficiently. Google doesn't care that much about search quality anymore because they have 90% market share in search, billions flowing in ad revenue plus 99 other projects they need to manage and develop.
• Sloppy 5y ago
  Neeva's similarity search is very useful. It takes a page and creates a query from it (oversimplified, actually a document based k-nearest-neighbors) then executes the query. This feature used to be in Google but they removed it, not used enough I guess. Neeva has very limited ways to use this. Here's wishing for this in all search!
• FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
  Ahh... this is about search. When I hear Google, I think "advertising".