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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 tha

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.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    TikTok's purpose and use-case is completely different from that of a search engine.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      Tech power users are still a niche in virtually every use case except maybe HN
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Tech power users (and power users in general I would say) might have more money to throw at the problem. "Nicheness" isn't necessarily a bad thing if your niche is profitable. I heard somewhere that power-grid-scale transformers are have insanely long lead times so the industry most be pretty niche (when's the last time you needed one of those?) and yet I think we can all agree that the equipment is valuable and I bet those manufacturers are making bank.
plutonorm 5y ago
I agree, none of these are the next google. Except perhaps YouWrite which taken to the limit is asking an AI for the answer rather than searching the internet.
mostlysimilar 5y ago
> a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want better than I do. Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google. I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  The death of the web is because most people don't want what you want. They don't mind walled gardens, so long as they are easy to use and have the content and connections that they want to see. The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market wants.
  - bradgessler 5y ago
    > Most people don’t want what you want This is absolutely true; however there are riches in niches. The % of internet users who want X probably is lower, but I’d gander the absolute number of people who would want something like this is much bigger than it was a decade ago. This community forgets that because we’re told by investors, the media we read, etc. to go after the biggest markets possible. “Hunt for elephants, not field mice,” they say. Don’t forget that a niche market on the web can still be massive and small fortunes can be made building products and services for them. You might not even need to have investors on your cap table to bring products to market to sell to those niches if you know what you’re doing, but shhhh… don’t tell them I told you that.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    People don't mind walled gardens because for a while they've been good enough if not better than the previous status-quo. However, those walled gardens are decaying such that there might actually be demand for something better if it existed.
dannywarner 5y ago
Google is anything but a simple box that gives you answers now. It hasn't been that for a very long time. I wish it was. It is a box that gives you a screenfull of ads, some spam copycat sites I wish I could remove, and a lot of clutter. As many people on here have said before, it only gets away with it because it owns the web browser through Chrome, Android and its Apple deal for Safari.
- hans1729 5y ago
  >it only gets away with it because it owns the web browser through Chrome, Android and its Apple deal for Safari. From someone who tried the switch to duckduckgo and uses ddg as the default engine: I can't remember the last query I typed without adding "!g". Google doesn't get my queries because the service is shoved down my throat, it gets them because the alternatives I tried are worse wrt the total scope of my queries.
  - richardsocher 5y ago
    Would love your feedback on https://you.com https://you.com - actually has most capabilities that G has and also has the same bangs as DDG.
    - TheLegace 5y ago
      Just tried to search "t-sne" was pleasantly surprised the first result [1] was what I found on DDG and a good result. Compared to Google which couldn't even find it on the first page. Most of Google's result are not exactly useful, and the only useful article is not my favorite in terms of quality. Order being. 1. Wiki article 2. Github repo 3. API documentation 4. Introduction with Python Code(Not my fav quality article) 5. Guide in R 6. Research article I can't quantify what is better. But Google didn't give me what I wanted but DDG and you.com did. So congrats. My only issue is seeing Medium articles above the web results. While Medium might have the answer in this scenario the top web result was correct but de-prioritized which was incorrect from my prespective. UI is nice and fast, different too. Not sure if I love yet, but will keep trying. Thanks for the link. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/t-sne-clearly-explained-d84c537f53a https://towardsdatascience.com/t-sne-clearly-explained-d84c5...
rdiddly 5y ago
All you have to do to improve on Google at this point is to do less, make it less bad, i.e. a process of removals, not additions. Just do the same thing, but without all the shitty extra stuff. But then what's the business model? (Since that is in fact most of the shitty stuff. Oh sure there's still the SEO spam, and you're in that arms-race, like it or not, even if you're not a successful search engine, so you do the best you can with that.) Speaking of doing less, I would love to see the web be more hierarchical or semantic (but not necessarily "the semantic web" as it's currently conceived). Google itself is what made the world reorganize itself. A world where that kind of search exists will reorganize itself around search, maybe not always for the better. Concrete example of going from a hierarchical/semantic world to a search-based one: Instead of finding your socks in the sock area, which is inside your clothes area, which is inside your "do private things" area, let's say now every sock has a trackable chip in it similar to an AirTag and you just say "Alexa where's the nearest pair of socks?" Pros: No effort spent on putting your socks in the sock place. Just throw them anywhere. Instant access to socks. Cons: Big Tech, with all its limitations and machinations, now mediates and controls the relationship between you and your socks. You succumbed to the temptation to slack off, and now there are socks everywhere. The Roomba doesn't even work right.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  100% agree. Want a search engine that is better in every way than Google? Give me Google from 2010 or so: 1. Much clearer delineations between ads and organic search results. 2. For anything remotely commercial it wasn't the case that literally the first 4 or 5 results were ads, pushing organic results below the fold. 3. No AMP carousel 4. There wasn't a vomitous amount of those "tidbit" sections - there were only a couple and they were usually helpful.
  - planb 5y ago
    Those 4 points can be solved by ad blockers or other browser extensions. The real problem is that the results below the ads are also ads, seo spam and clickbaity stuff.
- distrill 5y ago
simion314 5y ago
>I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster or better people want the customization. At my job we have paying users that requests features that indeed are work related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded people will disagree and they prefer to bend their work to fit a guru-s vision., Now my turn to ask, why do people like you think there is a generic and basic solution that works at the same time for the casual user and for the user that has a lot of tasks to accomplish? Is there some theorem that shows this, like "The GNOME theoreme of product design, keep removing features until the shit convergence to the local minimum where you find the minimum product and the minimum set of users possible.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  Because most users would rather not have to customize anything. It's funny that your example is gnome, as most users are not tinkerers and would never use Linux on the desktop unless it were made so simple that (again) they would not have to customize anything. Obviously there are exceptions, and some tools are so advanced that it's necessary to be able to customize them. No argument from me there. But for most tools, and most users, there's just no hunger for customization. Almost nobody wants to have to manage an array of options to do a web search.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    Being forced to manage an array of options is very different from being able to if the need arises.
  - simion314 5y ago
    I agree, there are users that don't use customization for X but they use it for Y, so you get the idiotic philosophy that removes customization from X and Y. So you get GNOME fanboys that love that 10 features they personally don't use are removed but when the ones they use is removed their brain finally realize that not all people use the exact same options, the exact same workflows etc. What is even more shitty is when soem feature is removed like the System Tray and first they pretend they do not understand what you mean when you say this feature is very important, then after someone wastes his time to explain a n=th time again how working people use the System Tray features at work or at home the GNOME dude finally admits the issue and offers some workarounds that are not equivalent but are "possible to do but with lot more work". On short, some people do work on the computer, some people use search engines for work to find relevant stuff, this people do not ask features like "please use the exact same padding everywhere because I am OCD" or "please make those buttons/corners or edges smoother so I don't cut my tongue when I lick my screen", this people want the customization to do a task. I am not sure why simple people have a SEGFAULT if they randomly end up in the Advanced section of a settings section, what do they expect when they open Advanced? Google main page has a small link for Advanced search see https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 how many GNOME users got hurt by this link existing?
ravenstine 5y ago
Where did this idea come from that all viable products have to appeal to the widest possible audience?
abhinavsharma 5y ago
While generally true, this isn't necessarily true if the customization is well-layered and the user is at a dead end in their search journey. Too many products equate frictionless == featureless these days and there should be more power when the user needs it. That's why we built a search extension that improves upon Google specifically in ways that it's weak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives
notatoad 5y ago
There's a certain type of person who loves buttons and knobs. They're also the same sort of person who might decide to make a new search engine. But yeah, more knobs is definitely not something the market is asking for.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  I remember when the same thing was said about Apple's reductionist philosophy: "The market doesn't demand stuff you can't configure to your needs". Turns out the market doesn't know what it wants until market participants see what is being offered.
drozycki 5y ago
Most people don't want to tinker if they can avoid it, but many will come to appreciate the power of the advanced tab if and when they need it. These startups should take the "people are lazy" line of thinking to heart and make customization profiles easy to share, whether by direct link posted to Slack or a public customization "store" a la Chrome Web Store.
bko 5y ago
I agree with this, however it could be used as a platform for others to provide their own config and you can piggyback off the work of others. It's kind of like ad-blockers where you don't have to maintain a list of domains to block. Others do that for you. And then people could create hosted version of their simple box with all the infra taken care of.
guelo 5y ago
It's a dead end if you are an ads business obsessed with reaching billions of eyeballs that don't want to spend any of their attention. It is not a dead end if you're building a tool.
nicce 5y ago
> That's why TikTok is so successful. More likely, it exploits human's cognitive weaknesses successfully with a simple way. It learns how how people get their dopamine dose. And there is no going back. You need more and more, more extreme content. More polarization. All you need to do is to open app and get that dose. Is it the same for search engine? And people make more crazy stuff to get views. How this ends? Not well, probably.
- Budged 5y ago
  I don’t think it is fair when we frame products as being objectively and consciously nefarious in this way. Conjuring images of executives rubbing their hands together, giddy with enjoyment that the war is leading to more exciting content. These are firms that are meeting a legitimate need- and that’s the need to feel connected. Tik-tok provides that, and very effectively. Plenty of people get genuine enjoyment out of their product, and meaningful connections do happen thanks to Tik-tok
  - nicce 5y ago
    Maybe it is not fair, but that is what happens and eventually it is acknowledged by executives, which leads for new design decisions based on that on TikTok and other platforms to get more money and users. I don't think they fulfill some gap of the need of feeling of connected in a real way. More like a bandage. We have seen the development of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram. Their audience is fading on countries who have used them longer time, what went wrong? How is TikTok so good that they try to adapt it on their platforms as well? No way to connect? Short video clips which might or might not lead for a real conversation. They might offer escape from reality in your lunch break at work. I understand the perspective of "feeling connected". It brings people together with similar mindsets on entertaining way. Or at least people who seems to enjoy similar things. On the contrary, is it different than some oldschool cults or religions? Cults which are using psychology writings as base for feeling mutual understanding of themselves. Or religions which share same ideologies and use it as a solution for their problems? Technology is advancing, is TikTok a modern solution for finding your role and place in the world when it does not make sense and you feel you are alone with your thoughts? Maybe it is, maybe it then fills some gap. I agree that TikTok is providing entertainment (well, that is what dopamine usually is). It is easier to hook people on short videos which are done by global audience versus Netflix where there is a limited amount of material and they cost a lot to make, when audience on TikTok is mostly making them free and you just pick suitable ones with your algorithms for showing the other audience. However, there are many problems in this. How it can be abused and how it creates people living on their own bubble, like people on some extreme Facebook groups. When a narrative includes only content that boosts your own thoughts, a reality can be lost. We need some research on this matter, but for some reason social media companies are doing their best to prevent that. Someone people also really get addicted on the entertainment and cannot stop using it. Well, same thing can apply also for alcohol, but is addiction risk closer to opiates for example? I don't really believe that executives are thinking for the best of the people, so optimizing platforms to hook users is a quite dangerous play.
mullr 5y ago
For Kagi, at least, there's a very well integrated search customization method that they didn't bother to show here. For any search result, you can add a ranking adjustment for the site it came from. This is directly in the results, so it's very accessible, and quite easy. One of the choices is 'pin', which is fantastic for technical work: 'sqlite.org' is now boosted over everything else, for me, and it's exactly what I want. I could just as easily take it out, if it becomes a problem.
Animats 5y ago
I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I tend to agree. It's an attempt to deal with bad design by putting in switches, options, and knobs to tweak. That's because 1) it's easier than focus groups, A/B testing, and taking video of users using the thing, 2) design takes some artistic talent, and 3) it lets the programmer blame the users for the problem. This is a vice of open source people. It's why Linux on the desktop has never taken off. "Just edit /etc/conf/foo/bar/prefs.txt" is not a design. Nor is "On the visual side, you can modify everything about the way things look, even being able to write your own custom CSS." I'm critical of Google's search, but this is not the way to fix it. Consider just few more search options, alongside "News", such as "Scholar" and "Noncommercial", for when you're overwhelmed by crap. And "Popular", for when you want the crap. Don't add another interacting dimension of tweaking.
richardsocher 5y ago
At https://you.com https://you.com we believe in choice but not force it. It will just work out of the box, but as folks shop or get really into something like coding - we have heard from many users that they like or dislike certain sources or apps. Like w3school - it's in every search engine but some folks hate it so they can downvote it. I personally benefitted a lot from the ability to like the reddit app once and then see more real reddit results?
nate 5y ago
There's a book I love to send people: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001REFRZG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001REFRZG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect (old school. no kindle. just hardcover. :) ) "Something Really New" How innovation works. First question in the book is: you need to come up with a new idea for a faucet company. Customer research says: Users want lots of variety in their faucets. Everyone then immediately comes up with the same exact ideas: faucets that are easily customizable. Faucets that have skins. Etc. When really innovative stuff is just about removing steps. If a process has 10 steps, remove as many as you can, and now you have something truly innovative on your hands. I feel like Google did exactly that. Pre Google steps: search for XYZ, wait, check first link, second link, spam, spam, check next page. Post Google: search for XYZ, get XYZ.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  eh... except google is now basically just the pre-google product: Search for XYZ, wait, skip promoted link, skip second promoted link, third promoted link is actually the direct competitor to what I fucking searched, click result that was on top ten years ago, but is now almost below the fold. Or worse - Search for exact term: get a page full of "Missing X - must include X" links hidden in tiny text below a result, click "Must include X" get the SAME FUCKING RESULTS again, click tools, click the dropdown, select verbatim, finally see decent results
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  Of course blog and SEO spam is such a problem on Google now that it looks more similar to your Pre Google steps. I don't know how to easily fix that though. Simply "crawling the entire internet" is still not a simple problem, let alone doing something more useful with the result than google can. Ahrefs is an interesting business but not what people mean when they say the next google. "Machine learning" but I think google is all over this already (and has been for years). Google does a bad job at getting user feedback about results while reddit does better so people search reddit, maybe a hybrid is an opportunity.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Possibly, but being able to add in your email and private services is interesting. Crazy from a privacy perspective, but potentially very seductive in terms of convenience.
Nition 5y ago
I've been using Kagi for a little while. The customisation isn't really necessary - the defaults work fine - but it's quite nice to have when you want it. I've banned Pinterest from the search results.
theiz 5y ago
Google has these options, but these are solved by AI. So with that you come in a catch22: people want personalised content, but rather not have their data given away. If you open YouTube without login, you get all kind of rubbish so you want to login. Probably this is by design: you want what google wants: results based on your data. Both happy. Now if there was a privacy friendly way of doing this, I am all for using that. I just don’t see how, and I don’t see who wants not to gain a profit if you would have that data. So the next google probably is another google.
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  If Google has these options, why can't I search for any image and have it not return any Pinterest results? If I search with -site:pinterest.com, I get Pinterest's million alternate tlds, if I just search for -pinterest, Google decides, in their infinite wisdom, that I didn't actually mean that and ignores it.
  - theiz 5y ago
    Probably because the AI thinks it is better to ignore your input because it can be profitable to give you the Pinterest results.
Sebb767 5y ago
> 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. And that's great if it works! The problem is that once it fails (and, at least in my use-case, it does so quite often), working with it becomes an absolute pain. I, too, would prefer an omniscient box perfectly answering my questions. But it clearly doesn't exist. And a box with screws to adjust so that I can eventually find what I'm looking for is the second best thing.
celdon25 5y ago
It never fails to amaze me how many people, apparently triggered by these omens, come out and say this as if there was never such a thing as a default configuration. "But you MUST configure!" Um, no. Google has preferences also.
notreallyserio 5y ago
What counts as customization? I might agree that most people don't care to change font sizes or colors or even themes but they might want to be able to tell Google to never return results from a particular site. Is hiding results from a site customization? Is it the sort of customization that would overwhelm a user if they saw it as an option?
bsder 5y ago
> I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. It doesn't need much--a single button with "Remove this site from future results". That would solve 99% of the problem because it would destroy SEO optimization since whole swathes of people would have different criteria due to the blocked websites. It would also tell Google which websites suck if they didn't already know. Alas, it would also destroy their ad revenue because once a site got overly scummy people would start delisting it.
lhorie 5y ago
I would go one step further and question the premises that a) the next google must necessarily be dominant/monopolistic and b) that said dominance must necessarily ride on top of free user economics. What TikTok shows to me is that users want specific things when they go to a site: for TikTok, they want fresh entertainment, plain and simple. I go to HN when I want tech discussion. I go to reddit when I want aggregation of niche topics. I go to costco.com when I'm looking to shop. Google is frankly a horrible experience for ecommerce, it simply cannot compete w/ the likes of Amazon or any retail store website, really. Being a search portal, it's fundamentally incompatible with the concept of evolving through permanence of a hivemind; every new search is like reseting a would-be community to zero all over again, so you cannot gradually build up a collective commons on Google like you can on HN. Youtube has recently gotten pretty bad with cycling fresh content on the front page. For stack overflow sort of stuff, any other search engine does more or less the same. For trivia, Siri/Alexa are fine substitutes. The Google search properties have become mediocre on average; they're not particularly great at any particular thing. Are many of these domains walled gardens? Yes, think of things like Doordash/Uber Eats grocery catalogs, a ton of brick and mortar shops are choosing to integrate with these delivery apps, and these catalogs are completely invisible to Google. News SERPs on Google are often garbage since they just link to paywalled content half the time, might as well just get a subscription from the actual news outlets. Etc. IMHO, the next Google is already here, and it's everybody else wisening up to the simple business fact that they need to own the top of their funnels.
pedalpete 5y ago
Spot on. Back in the days of web portals, millions was spent on making them customizable. I can't find a link, but I believe back in the early 2000s reading that less than 5% of people actually customized their portal.
Vixel 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. For the average person outside of our bubble, google "just works". They don't give a fuck about customization or the occasional ads. There are still plenty of people who click on the sponsored links without even knowing, or caring, that they are ads.
pizza 5y ago
There should be a "make me lucky" button - to tell you what you ought to be searching for, since it's got enough data to know you better than you know yourself :)
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
I agree; choices and tinkering add complexity to a search engine, and search engines need to be simple. That aside, a search engine needs to be really focused on privacy. Customising it implies that the user needs to log in and remain logged in. I'd much rather no do that with a search engine, and I don't want its behaviour to react to my identity either.
matwood 5y ago
> I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. It's often said that people don't want more choices, they want to be confident in the choices they make. It's the strength in simple product lineups like good, better, best. Googles lone search box is good example. Apple's product line also tends to be a good example at times.
iab 5y ago
Fantastic perspective. The next google won't be a search engine at all, IMO.
asddubs 5y ago
i think more customization can help you get power users to spread the word, as long as it doesn't get in the way of someone who just wants to do/read/understand as little as possible to get results
AussieWog93 5y ago
>I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. I think it really depends on the product. If it's something like Photoshop or Vim which are used by professionals for multiple hours a day and productivity is to be maximised, customisation is not just a nice-to-have but a necessity. Power users appreciate it too. You're absolutely right in 90% of the cases, though I'm not sure which box web search would fall into.
xhrpost 5y ago
I still love one of the design stories of Steve Jobs in Isaacson's biography. I don't remember the exact phrasing, but essentially someone at Apple was showing Jobs the new DVD burner software the company wanted to distribute. It likely had a ton of options to it (like other dvd writer software of the time). Jobs' response was roughly "Hmm, ok. Here's what we're going to do. There's going to be a box, and you drag the files you want on the dvd into the box. Then we're going to have a button that says "Burn DVD" and when you press it, it burns the DVD"
powerapple 5y ago
I haven't used Google's search for a long time. The sticky ones for me now are gmail and YouTube. gmail because it is a lock-in, once you have the email address, I don't think you can ever change. Since I am a Chinese now I have to think about if Google stops serving me in the future, but I am deeply invested in my gmail account :( The other one is YouTube, where it can work without login. Google's simple box is not attractive when others can provide the same quality in search results.
kirso 5y ago
Well, today I literally use google to search opinions. However these opinions are usually fake or are serving affiliate links to the searches are: site:reddit.com {search_query} site:twitter.com {search_query} I hope to have this as default at some point because some of the indexed results by default are just terrible. You are so on point with being opinionated though...
Gareth321 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. I agree, BUT I would like to share my experience moving from Google to Kagi. Google serves me primarily ads, whether it labels them ads or pretends the results aren't ads, they're mostly ads. I see the same horrible domains pop up frequently, and there's nothing I can do about it. Kagi gives me the ability to remove these domains from my search, and it is INCREDIBLE. How many times has Pinterest barged into your search results? Now, one could argue that these are domains which no one wants in their search feed. So perhaps this could be solved by being less beholden to shareholders and an advertising model. However, what about domains which most people want, but I don't? For example, I was finding increasingly polarising political content coming from MSNBC. I didn't like their "human" angle on news, and I didn't appreciate their extremely polarising commentary. So I want to remove all MSNBC results from my search feed. I understand I am probably in the minority. Perhaps my political views don't align with the typical customer. Could a well designed search provider anticipate this need of mine without giving me some kind of method to tell the provider that I don't want to see MSNBC? I'm not convinced so. So I think the answer here is both. Design a search engine well, and give users the ability to customise it.
can16358p 5y ago
This! This is why I love Apple products too. It abstracts away many of the things that 99% of the people (general public, not HN community) don't need or use. It's better to focus on the core basics and perfecting it than to add many features and try to support and maintain them especially if they are features that only 1% of the users use.
sAbakumoff 5y ago
Right. Their premise is “There’s no average human”. IMHO, it is ridiculous. The majority of people are just average every day normal ones, and they don't give a flying fuck about customizations.
mbeex 5y ago
This is not a binary "the people who don't want" / "the people who do". The old Google was able to do an exact search using Boolean expressions. Man, I miss that all the time.... It's not rocket science to provide a user interface for this. A combination of GUI configuration, keywords, and specific URLs for these cases would go a long way here without bothering the regular user in the slightest. Yes, it's probably slower than in earlier times, pure search volumina and its handling by AI weighting etc. considered. But there is also a "don't want" on the part of Google and the other players.
randomblast 5y ago
Exactly this. Scrolling through the customisation feature list, I just see "more work", "more work", "more work" - and it's not super clear how doing all this extra work is going to help me. And I'm in the target audience for a "technical" search engine; this is a total non-starter for the 99.999% of the world we call "normal people". The useful ideas in here is the "just my data" search, linking into external providers across siloes. Of course, Microsoft, Google & Apple already have this as long as all of your data is held in their ecosystem.

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.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  TikTok's purpose and use-case is completely different from that of a search engine.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    Tech power users are still a niche in virtually every use case except maybe HN
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Tech power users (and power users in general I would say) might have more money to throw at the problem. "Nicheness" isn't necessarily a bad thing if your niche is profitable. I heard somewhere that power-grid-scale transformers are have insanely long lead times so the industry most be pretty niche (when's the last time you needed one of those?) and yet I think we can all agree that the equipment is valuable and I bet those manufacturers are making bank.

plutonorm 5y ago

I agree, none of these are the next google. Except perhaps YouWrite which taken to the limit is asking an AI for the answer rather than searching the internet.

mostlysimilar 5y ago

> a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want better than I do. Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google. I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.

idiotsecant 5y ago
The death of the web is because most people don't want what you want. They don't mind walled gardens, so long as they are easy to use and have the content and connections that they want to see. The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market wants.
- bradgessler 5y ago
  > Most people don’t want what you want This is absolutely true; however there are riches in niches. The % of internet users who want X probably is lower, but I’d gander the absolute number of people who would want something like this is much bigger than it was a decade ago. This community forgets that because we’re told by investors, the media we read, etc. to go after the biggest markets possible. “Hunt for elephants, not field mice,” they say. Don’t forget that a niche market on the web can still be massive and small fortunes can be made building products and services for them. You might not even need to have investors on your cap table to bring products to market to sell to those niches if you know what you’re doing, but shhhh… don’t tell them I told you that.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  People don't mind walled gardens because for a while they've been good enough if not better than the previous status-quo. However, those walled gardens are decaying such that there might actually be demand for something better if it existed.

dannywarner 5y ago

Google is anything but a simple box that gives you answers now. It hasn't been that for a very long time. I wish it was. It is a box that gives you a screenfull of ads, some spam copycat sites I wish I could remove, and a lot of clutter. As many people on here have said before, it only gets away with it because it owns the web browser through Chrome, Android and its Apple deal for Safari.

hans1729 5y ago
>it only gets away with it because it owns the web browser through Chrome, Android and its Apple deal for Safari. From someone who tried the switch to duckduckgo and uses ddg as the default engine: I can't remember the last query I typed without adding "!g". Google doesn't get my queries because the service is shoved down my throat, it gets them because the alternatives I tried are worse wrt the total scope of my queries.
- richardsocher 5y ago
  Would love your feedback on https://you.com https://you.com - actually has most capabilities that G has and also has the same bangs as DDG.
  - TheLegace 5y ago
    Just tried to search "t-sne" was pleasantly surprised the first result [1] was what I found on DDG and a good result. Compared to Google which couldn't even find it on the first page. Most of Google's result are not exactly useful, and the only useful article is not my favorite in terms of quality. Order being. 1. Wiki article 2. Github repo 3. API documentation 4. Introduction with Python Code(Not my fav quality article) 5. Guide in R 6. Research article I can't quantify what is better. But Google didn't give me what I wanted but DDG and you.com did. So congrats. My only issue is seeing Medium articles above the web results. While Medium might have the answer in this scenario the top web result was correct but de-prioritized which was incorrect from my prespective. UI is nice and fast, different too. Not sure if I love yet, but will keep trying. Thanks for the link. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/t-sne-clearly-explained-d84c537f53a https://towardsdatascience.com/t-sne-clearly-explained-d84c5...

rdiddly 5y ago

All you have to do to improve on Google at this point is to do less, make it less bad, i.e. a process of removals, not additions. Just do the same thing, but without all the shitty extra stuff. But then what's the business model? (Since that is in fact most of the shitty stuff. Oh sure there's still the SEO spam, and you're in that arms-race, like it or not, even if you're not a successful search engine, so you do the best you can with that.) Speaking of doing less, I would love to see the web be more hierarchical or semantic (but not necessarily "the semantic web" as it's currently conceived). Google itself is what made the world reorganize itself. A world where that kind of search exists will reorganize itself around search, maybe not always for the better. Concrete example of going from a hierarchical/semantic world to a search-based one: Instead of finding your socks in the sock area, which is inside your clothes area, which is inside your "do private things" area, let's say now every sock has a trackable chip in it similar to an AirTag and you just say "Alexa where's the nearest pair of socks?" Pros: No effort spent on putting your socks in the sock place. Just throw them anywhere. Instant access to socks. Cons: Big Tech, with all its limitations and machinations, now mediates and controls the relationship between you and your socks. You succumbed to the temptation to slack off, and now there are socks everywhere. The Roomba doesn't even work right.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
100% agree. Want a search engine that is better in every way than Google? Give me Google from 2010 or so: 1. Much clearer delineations between ads and organic search results. 2. For anything remotely commercial it wasn't the case that literally the first 4 or 5 results were ads, pushing organic results below the fold. 3. No AMP carousel 4. There wasn't a vomitous amount of those "tidbit" sections - there were only a couple and they were usually helpful.
- planb 5y ago
  Those 4 points can be solved by ad blockers or other browser extensions. The real problem is that the results below the ads are also ads, seo spam and clickbaity stuff.
distrill 5y ago

simion314 5y ago

>I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster or better people want the customization. At my job we have paying users that requests features that indeed are work related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded people will disagree and they prefer to bend their work to fit a guru-s vision., Now my turn to ask, why do people like you think there is a generic and basic solution that works at the same time for the casual user and for the user that has a lot of tasks to accomplish? Is there some theorem that shows this, like "The GNOME theoreme of product design, keep removing features until the shit convergence to the local minimum where you find the minimum product and the minimum set of users possible.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
Because most users would rather not have to customize anything. It's funny that your example is gnome, as most users are not tinkerers and would never use Linux on the desktop unless it were made so simple that (again) they would not have to customize anything. Obviously there are exceptions, and some tools are so advanced that it's necessary to be able to customize them. No argument from me there. But for most tools, and most users, there's just no hunger for customization. Almost nobody wants to have to manage an array of options to do a web search.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  Being forced to manage an array of options is very different from being able to if the need arises.
- simion314 5y ago
  I agree, there are users that don't use customization for X but they use it for Y, so you get the idiotic philosophy that removes customization from X and Y. So you get GNOME fanboys that love that 10 features they personally don't use are removed but when the ones they use is removed their brain finally realize that not all people use the exact same options, the exact same workflows etc. What is even more shitty is when soem feature is removed like the System Tray and first they pretend they do not understand what you mean when you say this feature is very important, then after someone wastes his time to explain a n=th time again how working people use the System Tray features at work or at home the GNOME dude finally admits the issue and offers some workarounds that are not equivalent but are "possible to do but with lot more work". On short, some people do work on the computer, some people use search engines for work to find relevant stuff, this people do not ask features like "please use the exact same padding everywhere because I am OCD" or "please make those buttons/corners or edges smoother so I don't cut my tongue when I lick my screen", this people want the customization to do a task. I am not sure why simple people have a SEGFAULT if they randomly end up in the Advanced section of a settings section, what do they expect when they open Advanced? Google main page has a small link for Advanced search see https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 how many GNOME users got hurt by this link existing?

ravenstine 5y ago

Where did this idea come from that all viable products have to appeal to the widest possible audience?

abhinavsharma 5y ago

While generally true, this isn't necessarily true if the customization is well-layered and the user is at a dead end in their search journey. Too many products equate frictionless == featureless these days and there should be more power when the user needs it. That's why we built a search extension that improves upon Google specifically in ways that it's weak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives

notatoad 5y ago

There's a certain type of person who loves buttons and knobs. They're also the same sort of person who might decide to make a new search engine. But yeah, more knobs is definitely not something the market is asking for.

DocTomoe 5y ago
I remember when the same thing was said about Apple's reductionist philosophy: "The market doesn't demand stuff you can't configure to your needs". Turns out the market doesn't know what it wants until market participants see what is being offered.

drozycki 5y ago

Most people don't want to tinker if they can avoid it, but many will come to appreciate the power of the advanced tab if and when they need it. These startups should take the "people are lazy" line of thinking to heart and make customization profiles easy to share, whether by direct link posted to Slack or a public customization "store" a la Chrome Web Store.

bko 5y ago

I agree with this, however it could be used as a platform for others to provide their own config and you can piggyback off the work of others. It's kind of like ad-blockers where you don't have to maintain a list of domains to block. Others do that for you. And then people could create hosted version of their simple box with all the infra taken care of.

guelo 5y ago

It's a dead end if you are an ads business obsessed with reaching billions of eyeballs that don't want to spend any of their attention. It is not a dead end if you're building a tool.

nicce 5y ago

> That's why TikTok is so successful. More likely, it exploits human's cognitive weaknesses successfully with a simple way. It learns how how people get their dopamine dose. And there is no going back. You need more and more, more extreme content. More polarization. All you need to do is to open app and get that dose. Is it the same for search engine? And people make more crazy stuff to get views. How this ends? Not well, probably.

Budged 5y ago
I don’t think it is fair when we frame products as being objectively and consciously nefarious in this way. Conjuring images of executives rubbing their hands together, giddy with enjoyment that the war is leading to more exciting content. These are firms that are meeting a legitimate need- and that’s the need to feel connected. Tik-tok provides that, and very effectively. Plenty of people get genuine enjoyment out of their product, and meaningful connections do happen thanks to Tik-tok
- nicce 5y ago
  Maybe it is not fair, but that is what happens and eventually it is acknowledged by executives, which leads for new design decisions based on that on TikTok and other platforms to get more money and users. I don't think they fulfill some gap of the need of feeling of connected in a real way. More like a bandage. We have seen the development of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram. Their audience is fading on countries who have used them longer time, what went wrong? How is TikTok so good that they try to adapt it on their platforms as well? No way to connect? Short video clips which might or might not lead for a real conversation. They might offer escape from reality in your lunch break at work. I understand the perspective of "feeling connected". It brings people together with similar mindsets on entertaining way. Or at least people who seems to enjoy similar things. On the contrary, is it different than some oldschool cults or religions? Cults which are using psychology writings as base for feeling mutual understanding of themselves. Or religions which share same ideologies and use it as a solution for their problems? Technology is advancing, is TikTok a modern solution for finding your role and place in the world when it does not make sense and you feel you are alone with your thoughts? Maybe it is, maybe it then fills some gap. I agree that TikTok is providing entertainment (well, that is what dopamine usually is). It is easier to hook people on short videos which are done by global audience versus Netflix where there is a limited amount of material and they cost a lot to make, when audience on TikTok is mostly making them free and you just pick suitable ones with your algorithms for showing the other audience. However, there are many problems in this. How it can be abused and how it creates people living on their own bubble, like people on some extreme Facebook groups. When a narrative includes only content that boosts your own thoughts, a reality can be lost. We need some research on this matter, but for some reason social media companies are doing their best to prevent that. Someone people also really get addicted on the entertainment and cannot stop using it. Well, same thing can apply also for alcohol, but is addiction risk closer to opiates for example? I don't really believe that executives are thinking for the best of the people, so optimizing platforms to hook users is a quite dangerous play.

mullr 5y ago

For Kagi, at least, there's a very well integrated search customization method that they didn't bother to show here. For any search result, you can add a ranking adjustment for the site it came from. This is directly in the results, so it's very accessible, and quite easy. One of the choices is 'pin', which is fantastic for technical work: 'sqlite.org' is now boosted over everything else, for me, and it's exactly what I want. I could just as easily take it out, if it becomes a problem.

Animats 5y ago

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I tend to agree. It's an attempt to deal with bad design by putting in switches, options, and knobs to tweak. That's because 1) it's easier than focus groups, A/B testing, and taking video of users using the thing, 2) design takes some artistic talent, and 3) it lets the programmer blame the users for the problem. This is a vice of open source people. It's why Linux on the desktop has never taken off. "Just edit /etc/conf/foo/bar/prefs.txt" is not a design. Nor is "On the visual side, you can modify everything about the way things look, even being able to write your own custom CSS." I'm critical of Google's search, but this is not the way to fix it. Consider just few more search options, alongside "News", such as "Scholar" and "Noncommercial", for when you're overwhelmed by crap. And "Popular", for when you want the crap. Don't add another interacting dimension of tweaking.

richardsocher 5y ago

At https://you.com https://you.com we believe in choice but not force it. It will just work out of the box, but as folks shop or get really into something like coding - we have heard from many users that they like or dislike certain sources or apps. Like w3school - it's in every search engine but some folks hate it so they can downvote it. I personally benefitted a lot from the ability to like the reddit app once and then see more real reddit results?

nate 5y ago

There's a book I love to send people: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001REFRZG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001REFRZG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect (old school. no kindle. just hardcover. :) ) "Something Really New" How innovation works. First question in the book is: you need to come up with a new idea for a faucet company. Customer research says: Users want lots of variety in their faucets. Everyone then immediately comes up with the same exact ideas: faucets that are easily customizable. Faucets that have skins. Etc. When really innovative stuff is just about removing steps. If a process has 10 steps, remove as many as you can, and now you have something truly innovative on your hands. I feel like Google did exactly that. Pre Google steps: search for XYZ, wait, check first link, second link, spam, spam, check next page. Post Google: search for XYZ, get XYZ.

horsawlarway 5y ago
eh... except google is now basically just the pre-google product: Search for XYZ, wait, skip promoted link, skip second promoted link, third promoted link is actually the direct competitor to what I fucking searched, click result that was on top ten years ago, but is now almost below the fold. Or worse - Search for exact term: get a page full of "Missing X - must include X" links hidden in tiny text below a result, click "Must include X" get the SAME FUCKING RESULTS again, click tools, click the dropdown, select verbatim, finally see decent results
dave_sullivan 5y ago
Of course blog and SEO spam is such a problem on Google now that it looks more similar to your Pre Google steps. I don't know how to easily fix that though. Simply "crawling the entire internet" is still not a simple problem, let alone doing something more useful with the result than google can. Ahrefs is an interesting business but not what people mean when they say the next google. "Machine learning" but I think google is all over this already (and has been for years). Google does a bad job at getting user feedback about results while reddit does better so people search reddit, maybe a hybrid is an opportunity.

robertlagrant 5y ago

Possibly, but being able to add in your email and private services is interesting. Crazy from a privacy perspective, but potentially very seductive in terms of convenience.

Nition 5y ago

I've been using Kagi for a little while. The customisation isn't really necessary - the defaults work fine - but it's quite nice to have when you want it. I've banned Pinterest from the search results.

theiz 5y ago

Google has these options, but these are solved by AI. So with that you come in a catch22: people want personalised content, but rather not have their data given away. If you open YouTube without login, you get all kind of rubbish so you want to login. Probably this is by design: you want what google wants: results based on your data. Both happy. Now if there was a privacy friendly way of doing this, I am all for using that. I just don’t see how, and I don’t see who wants not to gain a profit if you would have that data. So the next google probably is another google.

thesuitonym 5y ago
If Google has these options, why can't I search for any image and have it not return any Pinterest results? If I search with -site:pinterest.com, I get Pinterest's million alternate tlds, if I just search for -pinterest, Google decides, in their infinite wisdom, that I didn't actually mean that and ignores it.
- theiz 5y ago
  Probably because the AI thinks it is better to ignore your input because it can be profitable to give you the Pinterest results.

Sebb767 5y ago

> 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. And that's great if it works! The problem is that once it fails (and, at least in my use-case, it does so quite often), working with it becomes an absolute pain. I, too, would prefer an omniscient box perfectly answering my questions. But it clearly doesn't exist. And a box with screws to adjust so that I can eventually find what I'm looking for is the second best thing.

celdon25 5y ago

It never fails to amaze me how many people, apparently triggered by these omens, come out and say this as if there was never such a thing as a default configuration. "But you MUST configure!" Um, no. Google has preferences also.

notreallyserio 5y ago

What counts as customization? I might agree that most people don't care to change font sizes or colors or even themes but they might want to be able to tell Google to never return results from a particular site. Is hiding results from a site customization? Is it the sort of customization that would overwhelm a user if they saw it as an option?

bsder 5y ago

> I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. It doesn't need much--a single button with "Remove this site from future results". That would solve 99% of the problem because it would destroy SEO optimization since whole swathes of people would have different criteria due to the blocked websites. It would also tell Google which websites suck if they didn't already know. Alas, it would also destroy their ad revenue because once a site got overly scummy people would start delisting it.

lhorie 5y ago

I would go one step further and question the premises that a) the next google must necessarily be dominant/monopolistic and b) that said dominance must necessarily ride on top of free user economics. What TikTok shows to me is that users want specific things when they go to a site: for TikTok, they want fresh entertainment, plain and simple. I go to HN when I want tech discussion. I go to reddit when I want aggregation of niche topics. I go to costco.com when I'm looking to shop. Google is frankly a horrible experience for ecommerce, it simply cannot compete w/ the likes of Amazon or any retail store website, really. Being a search portal, it's fundamentally incompatible with the concept of evolving through permanence of a hivemind; every new search is like reseting a would-be community to zero all over again, so you cannot gradually build up a collective commons on Google like you can on HN. Youtube has recently gotten pretty bad with cycling fresh content on the front page. For stack overflow sort of stuff, any other search engine does more or less the same. For trivia, Siri/Alexa are fine substitutes. The Google search properties have become mediocre on average; they're not particularly great at any particular thing. Are many of these domains walled gardens? Yes, think of things like Doordash/Uber Eats grocery catalogs, a ton of brick and mortar shops are choosing to integrate with these delivery apps, and these catalogs are completely invisible to Google. News SERPs on Google are often garbage since they just link to paywalled content half the time, might as well just get a subscription from the actual news outlets. Etc. IMHO, the next Google is already here, and it's everybody else wisening up to the simple business fact that they need to own the top of their funnels.

pedalpete 5y ago

Spot on. Back in the days of web portals, millions was spent on making them customizable. I can't find a link, but I believe back in the early 2000s reading that less than 5% of people actually customized their portal.

Vixel 5y ago

Couldn't agree more. For the average person outside of our bubble, google "just works". They don't give a fuck about customization or the occasional ads. There are still plenty of people who click on the sponsored links without even knowing, or caring, that they are ads.

pizza 5y ago

There should be a "make me lucky" button - to tell you what you ought to be searching for, since it's got enough data to know you better than you know yourself :)

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

I agree; choices and tinkering add complexity to a search engine, and search engines need to be simple. That aside, a search engine needs to be really focused on privacy. Customising it implies that the user needs to log in and remain logged in. I'd much rather no do that with a search engine, and I don't want its behaviour to react to my identity either.

matwood 5y ago

> I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. It's often said that people don't want more choices, they want to be confident in the choices they make. It's the strength in simple product lineups like good, better, best. Googles lone search box is good example. Apple's product line also tends to be a good example at times.

iab 5y ago

Fantastic perspective. The next google won't be a search engine at all, IMO.

asddubs 5y ago

i think more customization can help you get power users to spread the word, as long as it doesn't get in the way of someone who just wants to do/read/understand as little as possible to get results

AussieWog93 5y ago

>I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. I think it really depends on the product. If it's something like Photoshop or Vim which are used by professionals for multiple hours a day and productivity is to be maximised, customisation is not just a nice-to-have but a necessity. Power users appreciate it too. You're absolutely right in 90% of the cases, though I'm not sure which box web search would fall into.

xhrpost 5y ago

I still love one of the design stories of Steve Jobs in Isaacson's biography. I don't remember the exact phrasing, but essentially someone at Apple was showing Jobs the new DVD burner software the company wanted to distribute. It likely had a ton of options to it (like other dvd writer software of the time). Jobs' response was roughly "Hmm, ok. Here's what we're going to do. There's going to be a box, and you drag the files you want on the dvd into the box. Then we're going to have a button that says "Burn DVD" and when you press it, it burns the DVD"

powerapple 5y ago

I haven't used Google's search for a long time. The sticky ones for me now are gmail and YouTube. gmail because it is a lock-in, once you have the email address, I don't think you can ever change. Since I am a Chinese now I have to think about if Google stops serving me in the future, but I am deeply invested in my gmail account :( The other one is YouTube, where it can work without login. Google's simple box is not attractive when others can provide the same quality in search results.

kirso 5y ago

Well, today I literally use google to search opinions. However these opinions are usually fake or are serving affiliate links to the searches are: site:reddit.com {search_query} site:twitter.com {search_query} I hope to have this as default at some point because some of the indexed results by default are just terrible. You are so on point with being opinionated though...

Gareth321 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. I agree, BUT I would like to share my experience moving from Google to Kagi. Google serves me primarily ads, whether it labels them ads or pretends the results aren't ads, they're mostly ads. I see the same horrible domains pop up frequently, and there's nothing I can do about it. Kagi gives me the ability to remove these domains from my search, and it is INCREDIBLE. How many times has Pinterest barged into your search results? Now, one could argue that these are domains which no one wants in their search feed. So perhaps this could be solved by being less beholden to shareholders and an advertising model. However, what about domains which most people want, but I don't? For example, I was finding increasingly polarising political content coming from MSNBC. I didn't like their "human" angle on news, and I didn't appreciate their extremely polarising commentary. So I want to remove all MSNBC results from my search feed. I understand I am probably in the minority. Perhaps my political views don't align with the typical customer. Could a well designed search provider anticipate this need of mine without giving me some kind of method to tell the provider that I don't want to see MSNBC? I'm not convinced so. So I think the answer here is both. Design a search engine well, and give users the ability to customise it.

can16358p 5y ago

This! This is why I love Apple products too. It abstracts away many of the things that 99% of the people (general public, not HN community) don't need or use. It's better to focus on the core basics and perfecting it than to add many features and try to support and maintain them especially if they are features that only 1% of the users use.

sAbakumoff 5y ago

Right. Their premise is “There’s no average human”. IMHO, it is ridiculous. The majority of people are just average every day normal ones, and they don't give a flying fuck about customizations.

mbeex 5y ago

This is not a binary "the people who don't want" / "the people who do". The old Google was able to do an exact search using Boolean expressions. Man, I miss that all the time.... It's not rocket science to provide a user interface for this. A combination of GUI configuration, keywords, and specific URLs for these cases would go a long way here without bothering the regular user in the slightest. Yes, it's probably slower than in earlier times, pure search volumina and its handling by AI weighting etc. considered. But there is also a "don't want" on the part of Google and the other players.

randomblast 5y ago

Exactly this. Scrolling through the customisation feature list, I just see "more work", "more work", "more work" - and it's not super clear how doing all this extra work is going to help me. And I'm in the target audience for a "technical" search engine; this is a total non-starter for the 99.999% of the world we call "normal people". The useful ideas in here is the "just my data" search, linking into external providers across siloes. Of course, Microsoft, Google & Apple already have this as long as all of your data is held in their ecosystem.