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> 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".

> 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.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    Or there just may be demand for walled gardens that are better kept
  - TheDong 5y ago
    > However, those walled gardens are decaying such that there might actually be demand for something better if it existed. Some walled gardens, like facebook, are decaying. Others, like tiktok, are vibrant, still fresh and new. Walled gardens are a natural result of the pursuit of capital. If you burn VC money, but create no moat (it turns out the walls of a walled garden are also a moat, weird huh), then as soon as you introduce a clever algorithm that introduces 50% more ads to extract profit, your users will all leave. As such, a business is incentivized to build these walls and moats. How do we avoid this? Well, we do have examples. Mastodon and other open source projects eschew walled gardens in favor of free software ideals. Web3 embraces a certain "decentralized" vibe which lends itself in this direction. Universities, and other public-ish institutes like DARPA, created the original internet and many of its technologies. Unfortunately, open source projects will struggle to advertise or find users. They do not have the initial capital to get as much momentum as the VC-funded alternatives. Web3 seems surely doomed to end up also building walled gardens for the crypto-anarcho-vibe is only skin-deep, and many a regular business is now highly involved. This leaves government entities. The government is the one group that is both well funded enough, and has motive to create protocols which prioritize the user's freedom over profit (after all, the users will pay taxes regardless of how high the walls are). It seems to be out of fashion these days for the government to actually do anything though, so perhaps there is no more chance of that than of a free software project managing the same.
- ouid 5y ago
  What the market has produced is not ipso facto what the people want. The market is simultaneously optimizing many things. Walled gardens are much better explained by companies benefitting from not having to allow their competitors access to their customers than by "being what the people want".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The market can trivially get stuck in a local maximum.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- baxtr 5y ago
  This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about. That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.
  - simulate-me 5y ago
    Desiring choice isn’t elitist. Early web adopters were passionate and willing to put in more work. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with liking simple default settings either.
    - mattcwilson 5y ago
      Wondering if, by “elitist”, GP meant more like “out of reach to many laypeople because of learning curve.” Is there a good single word for that? “Difficult” and “complex” aren’t quite right. Anyway - you’re right, nothing at all wrong with wanting choice. I think the point being made here though is that “layperson gravity” / mass market appeals / lowest common denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search will be a niche product, forever. Even if we’d both like that niche.
      - tobyjsullivan 5y ago
        "High barrier to entry" ie, only accessible to an elite class (1337, if you will) "Elitist" feels pejorative. Also a not-inaccurate way to describe a system which presents high barriers to entry.
        gorjusborg 5y ago
        Yes. The early internet wasn't elitist but a higher percentage were elite than today.
        nmstoker 5y ago
        What were these high barriers to entry? Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines. Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field. Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyone had found out about it? That's not really a barrier in terms of difficulty - as soon as people got into the "in crowd" they could use it just like the rest of them.
- rapind 5y ago
  I think you’re conflating “tinkering” with simply desiring a different feature set. In my case I actually want “less” from Google in terms of number of features. I don’t want to tinker either, but we naturally reach for toggles as a way to tell the system we want different (not necessarily more) features. Most of my search results at this point look like a spam ridden inbox from the mid-2000s.
- redmen 5y ago
  You mean people don't want to spend any energy and want to be fed sugar and fat without (ideally) even having to open their mouths? Google is a drug dealer selling to the digitally crack addicted. The death of cocaine was meth, and the death of the web was google.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  I think you’ve touched on an interesting point here with respect to connection. Content naturally lives inside a walled garden and is often created there whether by users or professional studios. Users expect and dont care about this. However _connection_ is naturally between things and is a source of user friction when things dont connect well together.
- chefandy 5y ago
  Yep. Imagining nontechnical users would endure paths of greater resistance to avoid shady privacy and openness practices is magical thinking. Privacy and openness are important, but having tools designed to maximally reduce the overhead of solving your problems is more important. I know I get on people's nerves on HN by harping on user needs and FOSS usability and interface design and such, but I think we as a group need to start taking user needs much more seriously. Open-source alternatives will always be alternatives until without taking usability and the overall experience seriously. Many, if not most FOSS software developers choose some commercial tools— count how many MacOS and Windows laptops you see at OSCON or FOSDEM. Consider how different the cost/benefit analysis would be for people without the most basic requisite knowledge to reason about software problems, let alone troubleshoot, or throw in a PR to address them directly. Commercial companies don't get these seamless experiences by magic— it involves research, design, development and testing to deliberately remove friction and stumbling blocks rather than assuming your use case is universal, or that docs are a suitable replacement for fixing usability problems. There's nothing stopping any open source project from doing any of it. Volunteering isn't unique to coding— people volunteer to cook and build houses and clean up trash, too. But developers run FOSS and developers need to deliberately incorporate those other perspectives into their projects to get the benefit.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Imagine a commenter in a walled garden complaining about the walled garden's audience. "Facebook's audience is extremely skewed toward..., but that's not what...." How long before some Facebook reader asks, "Then why are you using it?" If one dislikes systems that allow tinkering then why read and comment on HN. I do not understand.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    I'm not sure who said they dislike systems that allow tinkering.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      Apparently "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering. Presumably "the market" refers to some people who said they dislike systems that allow tinkering. Either that or the commenter is inferring "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering even though no person has actually made a statement to that effect. Maybe HN is not the ideal forum for discussions of "the market" (due to lack of interest and/or understanding), but maybe HN is a decent forum for discussing systems that allow tinkering.
chewz 5y ago
> Give me links to websites. There are no more websites worth linking to anymore... If you filter out all SEO spam there is barely few webpages left... Google is desperately trying to hide that fact. Most of the web 1.0 can nowadays fit into small town telephone directory... You do not need mulitibilion dolar business to run web directory...
- politician 5y ago
  I think this is exactly correct.
- eitland 5y ago
  Try search.marginalia.nu (especially https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random but try some searches for git commands or history too, just remember it is a search engine, not a conversation partner so only include words that should be in the article you search for) and come back to me afterwards. I thought like you that if even Google couldn't find anything it was not there, but after discovering marginalia I now know it is just Google that has become unusably bad. For day to day searching I now use Kagi and for me it is easily worth 10 or maybe 20 dollars a month since it "just works" unlike Google and has a larger index than Marginalia. For now though Marginalia gets the money since Kagi is still in beta.
  - emsixteen 5y ago
    > search.marginalia.nu This is just retrieving articles when I search, not actual websites. Interesting if you're looking for article related to search keywords I guess, but genuinely unusable for actually finding something specific.
    - nuancebydefault 5y ago
      Gave it another try with "ssh scp". Google's first result explains me how to use scp (ssh provides a hint about the context), which was what i would be looking for. Marganilla... not so much it seems
jader201 5y ago
> but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google" You’re in the small minority. You’re a power user that thinks like a software engineer, and likes to deal with data in lists. Most users are completely happy that Google tries to answer their questions and (usually) provides the right answer front and center.
- pwython 5y ago
  The best example of this is having a Google Home device and just being like, "Hey Google, how many ounces are in a cup?" as you're standing in the kitchen with your hands covered in flour.
Melatonic 5y ago
Google still searches forums pretty decently - I think what you are describing are two separate phenomena 1. Yes Google search has gone to shit - even putting stuff in quotes now does not do an exact search (there is another checkbox you ALSO need to use for that). It tries to be too smart even when no user is logged in. 2. Giant mega forums like Reddit have really taken over. Instead of a dedicated forum people just go to subreddits. Personally I think it is good and bad and I still try to actively participate in both.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  I'd spend more time in reddit if they had better search.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    Using site:reddit.com in google usually gives pretty decent results
jfoster 5y ago
Google used to be this. It was great back then. The "we answer your question" thing could be useful, but: 1. It should be in addition to (not instead of) the web search results. 2. The answers can't be wrong. Google often gives such a low quality answer that I no longer want to use it for this, besides asking about the weather and sunset/sunrise.
xnx 5y ago
> 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. I think you have the cause and effect reversed. (Though I disagree with the meme that Google's results have gotten worse. For me, it's more useful than it's ever been. I often find the information I need without even needing to click on a result.)
jupp0r 5y ago
A lot of search results pointing to independent forums are about people asking the same question I have only to be told to use Google to find the answer.
ehnto 5y ago
"Word for a bad scientist" gives me results as if I had searched for "Mad scientists fun stories", and it wasn't even offered as a correction. Google can't even accept that I'm typing the word I want anymore, I must surely want something else.
usrbinbash 5y ago
> this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". You don't want that, I don't want that, and I am sure many people here on HN and similar gathering places for powerusers agree with us. But "the next google" doesn't have to replace google for us, it would have to replace google for the average consumer (AC). And the AC likes the "simple box". The AC doesn't want to fiddle with customization options. The AC is used to walled gardens, advertising, "Apps" that are just wrappers around webpages. So any "next google" will have to compete exactly at the "simple box" game to get the attention of the masses.
imtemplain 5y ago
dusted 5y ago
Indeed, google has become extremely good at answering simple questions, and extremely poor at finding textual information on the world wide web.
theaeolist 5y ago
Maybe Google should start a new thing, a "search engine", which actually searches (rather then guess, anticipate, and interpret).
mrkramer 5y ago
>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. You are wrong; Open Web died or almost died because of walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Billions of people who hang out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter would hang out instead on Open Web e.g. websites, blogs, forums etc. if walled gardens didn't exist.
- codalan 5y ago
  Reddit, too. I kind of miss forums being the place where most discussion took place.

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.
- airstrike 5y ago
  Or there just may be demand for walled gardens that are better kept
- TheDong 5y ago
  > However, those walled gardens are decaying such that there might actually be demand for something better if it existed. Some walled gardens, like facebook, are decaying. Others, like tiktok, are vibrant, still fresh and new. Walled gardens are a natural result of the pursuit of capital. If you burn VC money, but create no moat (it turns out the walls of a walled garden are also a moat, weird huh), then as soon as you introduce a clever algorithm that introduces 50% more ads to extract profit, your users will all leave. As such, a business is incentivized to build these walls and moats. How do we avoid this? Well, we do have examples. Mastodon and other open source projects eschew walled gardens in favor of free software ideals. Web3 embraces a certain "decentralized" vibe which lends itself in this direction. Universities, and other public-ish institutes like DARPA, created the original internet and many of its technologies. Unfortunately, open source projects will struggle to advertise or find users. They do not have the initial capital to get as much momentum as the VC-funded alternatives. Web3 seems surely doomed to end up also building walled gardens for the crypto-anarcho-vibe is only skin-deep, and many a regular business is now highly involved. This leaves government entities. The government is the one group that is both well funded enough, and has motive to create protocols which prioritize the user's freedom over profit (after all, the users will pay taxes regardless of how high the walls are). It seems to be out of fashion these days for the government to actually do anything though, so perhaps there is no more chance of that than of a free software project managing the same.
ouid 5y ago
What the market has produced is not ipso facto what the people want. The market is simultaneously optimizing many things. Walled gardens are much better explained by companies benefitting from not having to allow their competitors access to their customers than by "being what the people want".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The market can trivially get stuck in a local maximum.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
baxtr 5y ago
This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about. That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.
- simulate-me 5y ago
  Desiring choice isn’t elitist. Early web adopters were passionate and willing to put in more work. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with liking simple default settings either.
  - mattcwilson 5y ago
    Wondering if, by “elitist”, GP meant more like “out of reach to many laypeople because of learning curve.” Is there a good single word for that? “Difficult” and “complex” aren’t quite right. Anyway - you’re right, nothing at all wrong with wanting choice. I think the point being made here though is that “layperson gravity” / mass market appeals / lowest common denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search will be a niche product, forever. Even if we’d both like that niche.
    - tobyjsullivan 5y ago
      "High barrier to entry" ie, only accessible to an elite class (1337, if you will) "Elitist" feels pejorative. Also a not-inaccurate way to describe a system which presents high barriers to entry.
      - gorjusborg 5y ago
        Yes. The early internet wasn't elitist but a higher percentage were elite than today.
      - nmstoker 5y ago
        What were these high barriers to entry? Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines. Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field. Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyone had found out about it? That's not really a barrier in terms of difficulty - as soon as people got into the "in crowd" they could use it just like the rest of them.
rapind 5y ago
I think you’re conflating “tinkering” with simply desiring a different feature set. In my case I actually want “less” from Google in terms of number of features. I don’t want to tinker either, but we naturally reach for toggles as a way to tell the system we want different (not necessarily more) features. Most of my search results at this point look like a spam ridden inbox from the mid-2000s.
redmen 5y ago
You mean people don't want to spend any energy and want to be fed sugar and fat without (ideally) even having to open their mouths? Google is a drug dealer selling to the digitally crack addicted. The death of cocaine was meth, and the death of the web was google.
enos_feedler 5y ago
I think you’ve touched on an interesting point here with respect to connection. Content naturally lives inside a walled garden and is often created there whether by users or professional studios. Users expect and dont care about this. However _connection_ is naturally between things and is a source of user friction when things dont connect well together.
chefandy 5y ago
Yep. Imagining nontechnical users would endure paths of greater resistance to avoid shady privacy and openness practices is magical thinking. Privacy and openness are important, but having tools designed to maximally reduce the overhead of solving your problems is more important. I know I get on people's nerves on HN by harping on user needs and FOSS usability and interface design and such, but I think we as a group need to start taking user needs much more seriously. Open-source alternatives will always be alternatives until without taking usability and the overall experience seriously. Many, if not most FOSS software developers choose some commercial tools— count how many MacOS and Windows laptops you see at OSCON or FOSDEM. Consider how different the cost/benefit analysis would be for people without the most basic requisite knowledge to reason about software problems, let alone troubleshoot, or throw in a PR to address them directly. Commercial companies don't get these seamless experiences by magic— it involves research, design, development and testing to deliberately remove friction and stumbling blocks rather than assuming your use case is universal, or that docs are a suitable replacement for fixing usability problems. There's nothing stopping any open source project from doing any of it. Volunteering isn't unique to coding— people volunteer to cook and build houses and clean up trash, too. But developers run FOSS and developers need to deliberately incorporate those other perspectives into their projects to get the benefit.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Imagine a commenter in a walled garden complaining about the walled garden's audience. "Facebook's audience is extremely skewed toward..., but that's not what...." How long before some Facebook reader asks, "Then why are you using it?" If one dislikes systems that allow tinkering then why read and comment on HN. I do not understand.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  I'm not sure who said they dislike systems that allow tinkering.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    Apparently "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering. Presumably "the market" refers to some people who said they dislike systems that allow tinkering. Either that or the commenter is inferring "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering even though no person has actually made a statement to that effect. Maybe HN is not the ideal forum for discussions of "the market" (due to lack of interest and/or understanding), but maybe HN is a decent forum for discussing systems that allow tinkering.

chewz 5y ago

> Give me links to websites. There are no more websites worth linking to anymore... If you filter out all SEO spam there is barely few webpages left... Google is desperately trying to hide that fact. Most of the web 1.0 can nowadays fit into small town telephone directory... You do not need mulitibilion dolar business to run web directory...

politician 5y ago
I think this is exactly correct.
eitland 5y ago
Try search.marginalia.nu (especially https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random but try some searches for git commands or history too, just remember it is a search engine, not a conversation partner so only include words that should be in the article you search for) and come back to me afterwards. I thought like you that if even Google couldn't find anything it was not there, but after discovering marginalia I now know it is just Google that has become unusably bad. For day to day searching I now use Kagi and for me it is easily worth 10 or maybe 20 dollars a month since it "just works" unlike Google and has a larger index than Marginalia. For now though Marginalia gets the money since Kagi is still in beta.
- emsixteen 5y ago
  > search.marginalia.nu This is just retrieving articles when I search, not actual websites. Interesting if you're looking for article related to search keywords I guess, but genuinely unusable for actually finding something specific.
  - nuancebydefault 5y ago
    Gave it another try with "ssh scp". Google's first result explains me how to use scp (ssh provides a hint about the context), which was what i would be looking for. Marganilla... not so much it seems

jader201 5y ago

> but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google" You’re in the small minority. You’re a power user that thinks like a software engineer, and likes to deal with data in lists. Most users are completely happy that Google tries to answer their questions and (usually) provides the right answer front and center.

pwython 5y ago
The best example of this is having a Google Home device and just being like, "Hey Google, how many ounces are in a cup?" as you're standing in the kitchen with your hands covered in flour.

Melatonic 5y ago

Google still searches forums pretty decently - I think what you are describing are two separate phenomena 1. Yes Google search has gone to shit - even putting stuff in quotes now does not do an exact search (there is another checkbox you ALSO need to use for that). It tries to be too smart even when no user is logged in. 2. Giant mega forums like Reddit have really taken over. Instead of a dedicated forum people just go to subreddits. Personally I think it is good and bad and I still try to actively participate in both.

mgkimsal 5y ago
I'd spend more time in reddit if they had better search.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  Using site:reddit.com in google usually gives pretty decent results

jfoster 5y ago

Google used to be this. It was great back then. The "we answer your question" thing could be useful, but: 1. It should be in addition to (not instead of) the web search results. 2. The answers can't be wrong. Google often gives such a low quality answer that I no longer want to use it for this, besides asking about the weather and sunset/sunrise.

xnx 5y ago

> 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. I think you have the cause and effect reversed. (Though I disagree with the meme that Google's results have gotten worse. For me, it's more useful than it's ever been. I often find the information I need without even needing to click on a result.)

jupp0r 5y ago

A lot of search results pointing to independent forums are about people asking the same question I have only to be told to use Google to find the answer.

ehnto 5y ago

"Word for a bad scientist" gives me results as if I had searched for "Mad scientists fun stories", and it wasn't even offered as a correction. Google can't even accept that I'm typing the word I want anymore, I must surely want something else.

usrbinbash 5y ago

> this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". You don't want that, I don't want that, and I am sure many people here on HN and similar gathering places for powerusers agree with us. But "the next google" doesn't have to replace google for us, it would have to replace google for the average consumer (AC). And the AC likes the "simple box". The AC doesn't want to fiddle with customization options. The AC is used to walled gardens, advertising, "Apps" that are just wrappers around webpages. So any "next google" will have to compete exactly at the "simple box" game to get the attention of the masses.

imtemplain 5y ago

dusted 5y ago

Indeed, google has become extremely good at answering simple questions, and extremely poor at finding textual information on the world wide web.

theaeolist 5y ago

Maybe Google should start a new thing, a "search engine", which actually searches (rather then guess, anticipate, and interpret).

mrkramer 5y ago

>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. You are wrong; Open Web died or almost died because of walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Billions of people who hang out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter would hang out instead on Open Web e.g. websites, blogs, forums etc. if walled gardens didn't exist.

codalan 5y ago
Reddit, too. I kind of miss forums being the place where most discussion took place.