It's interesting that most of the responses here so far are criticizing the article and positing that Google is, more or less, the best we can expect. Yet numer

It's interesting that most of the responses here so far are criticizing the article and positing that Google is, more or less, the best we can expect. Yet numerous other front page posts on HN have been very unanimously critical of Google, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 My own anecdata is that non-tech people are beginning to really dislike Google's results. Take a very normal-person kind of search: looking for almost any mainstream recipe. The vast majority of results ramble on for pages about the author's childhood experience and Italian grandmother and how the dog liked the recipe so much, painstakingly repeating the SEO phrases in the currently-most-effective combination. Most people despise this stuff. I think we all know why that is; SEO is unavoidable, gaming the system is unavoidable. But the important question would seem to be: is Google actually doing a bad job, such that someone could disrupt their model? I can't see that the answer is anything but "yes". Google is deeply addicted to search ad revenue. That ad revenue comes from the exact same people gaming SEO and producing reams of poor quality content. Google is dependent on its abusers; they are more valuable than its users. How can that end in anything other than a general degradation in quality? And as a public company, Google can't exactly back off from its ad revenue focus for a while and fix its business. At the same time, nothing I've seen yet could disrupt Google. DuckDuckGo et al are largely just copies, and their differences are too minor to get users to switch. But it's very odd to say that because disruption hasn't happened, it cannot or will not. That seems like a failure of imagination.