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> We’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better ch
by judge2020 3y ago
> We’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice.
Bold to take the stance of "woe to the users of an inferior product that just don't know they could be using us". If your search engine is that much better, you have to tell people about it, explain why it's better, and if you succeed users will indeed take the time to change their browser's search engine setting.
I imagine it would've been nice to get a bunch of users who go "hmm I guess i'll use this random search engine called Neeva" if all OSes/browsers had a list of search engines that the user had to select from upon setup, but the product failed more because you failed to either make a better product, or inform to the users of the benefits of switching. Lowering the barrier to switching makes it easier for people to switch to another engine just for the sake of it instead of switching to improve their own UX.
And the barrier of having to pay for a search engine is infinitely larger than the friction of going into your browser settings to change the default engine.
- eftychis 3y agoI think past hackernews comments and posts have proven that this is at least partially wrong. The drag is real. How many posts are there about duckduckgo -- in its golden days; that it was better and should be the default. How much people preaching time and marketing has been spend on that? And yet the average user, even technical users does not care. It has to be a vastly different experience, e.g. ChatGPT enabled search -- like Bing now say -- and even then, the monopoly moats placed by Google and the decades of inaction by DoJ have created what we have now. Chrome should have never been allowed to be under Google or Alphabet. Paying to set a search engine to this scale should not have been allowed as a practice. [Edit:] P.S. And to answer all the thousands of comments by users here of why Google has gotten worse: because it can; it can get worse while maximizing its ad profit; DoJ allowed it.
- judge2020 3y ago> And yet the average user, even technical users does not care. If users do not care, they do not think the UX improvement is worth switching. So what is the goal here? Antitrust isn't happening here because the harm is only to competitors, with the UX being harmed if Safari, Chrome et al had to implement a popup like "duckduckgo.com would like to become your default search engine. switch? y/n".