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There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be direct
by asdfman123 3y ago
There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site.
It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.
- bdw5204 3y agoI think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank by reducing outbound links.
- asdfman123 3y agoThat kind of web directory would work if it were just used by a small group of adherents. But it would encounter the same problems typical to big tech once any "real" money started flowing in.
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoThe only way to make a better replacement is to make a 100 competing replacements each with substantial market share. They don't even have to be better implemented than Google, getting rid of market dominance alone would improve results because SEO assholes wouldn't have time to optimize for all 100.