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What is preventing Bing or Google to copy the techniques marginalia or kagi uses
Both google and bing seems to be having a hard time to serve good results especially bing so what are they doing ?
- dotcoma 3y agoThey are interested in serving ads, not good search results. Sometimes things are really simple.
- arromatic 3y agoIsn't there news about google struggling from ai generated content causing them to make a 60 million dollar deal with reddit. Reddit results won't help them with ad revenue because reddit has it's own ad platform.
- dotcoma 3y agoits, not it’s, in any case.
- arromatic 3y agoThanks . Will be careful next time.
- dotcoma 3y agoAnyway, I don’t see how this deal, of which I know nothing, contradicts the fact that they are more interested in the ads they serve than in the search results they serve.
- arromatic 3y agoThey will lose users to other search engines better search results assuming there will be a new generation of search engine startups powered by ai and by ai i don't mean just a ai summarizer that every search engine is adding.
- dotcoma 3y agoIn theory they will lose users to other search engines. This has not really happened during the last decade of enshittification of Google, but who knows, maybe it will happen in the future.
- arromatic 3y agoSpeaking of enshittification of google there seems to be to be two opinion one blames google and other blames users : 1. Google intentionally enshittified it self . 2. There are too many seo spam or ai content and google is helpless .
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TylerE 3y agoNo. Just a normal licensing deal to get direct access to the API firehose and permission to consume it and use it.
- arromatic 3y agoMy mistake and bad writing but my point still stands https://searchengineland.com/reddit-dominates-google-search-discussions-forums-437501 https://searchengineland.com/reddit-dominates-google-search-...
- rightbyte 3y agoNever attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by short term profits.
- globular-toast 3y agoThese are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But in reality they kept their useds using techniques like marketing, vendor lock in and monopolistic practices. They aren't competing based on quality of search results.
- ysofunny 3y ago> They aren't competing based on quality of search results. not anymore, but when they first started out they certainly were much better than everything else available at the time
- sitkack 3y agoSpam never impacted me on Alta Vista because I used the advanced query operators almost exclusively, Google was my alt when I wasn't finding what I needed. Had AV addressed spam sooner, Google would not have grown as fast. And we wouldn't see them as the single dominant pretend-benevolent player they are today. There is no competition in search from multiple reasons, many of them from Google anticompetitively paying to be the default.
- hiddencost 3y agoOrganizational bloat. The larger an organization gets, the harder delivering becomes.
- arromatic 3y ago1. Search is googles sole purpose . How can they mess up their main product even being a large org ? 2. Also another question , how can large org deliver effectively among bloat ?
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoWhat? Advertising is Google’s sole purpose. And if you think that some random HN user has the answer to “how do you get a large org to continue innovating”, and is going to share it instead of make literal trillions of dollars with it, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
- arromatic 3y agolol .You made me chuckle .
- smokel 3y agoIt is probably not that Kagi or Marginalia have more advanced technology. The problem is that SEO scum is only targeting the relevant players.
- kristofferR 3y agoNot really. Kagi has tech that groups "listicles", for example, something Google could easily do to improve the results: https://imgur.com/a/18ZYjUa https://imgur.com/a/18ZYjUa
- lozenge 3y agoYes really. Those listicles exist because Google became stricter about a different type of content- product reviews. https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ The business model of the listicles is: clicks from Google + commission from Amazon/similar = revenue for the website "In 2022, e-commerce accounted for nearly 19 percent of retail sales worldwide." So imagine if 19% of all retail decided they needed to rank highly on Kagi to get a slice of that huge revenue. Kagi's team wouldn't stand a chance against what they thought up.
- dazc 3y ago'Best [insert random product]' will often be the most popular key phrase, Google users get what they want. Could those lists be better, no because they have reached their optimum balance of effort/reward. Nobody is going to go out and buy 100 bikes just so they can tell you which 10 were best.
- jorams 3y agoThere is no technical reason, it's all about incentives. What Kagi and Marginalia do is fundamentally incompatible with Google's business model. The reason Google shows you search results is to serve you ads, but the presence and volume of ads is an inherently negative quality of those search results. So Google is incentivized to show you lower quality search results, as long as those results don't become so bad that you stop using the service. Endless terribly formatted clones of Stack Overflow or GitHub issues don't provide any value to the world, but they do show Google's ads, so they weren't banned from all results after the first person at Google noticed them. Empty results pages don't lead you to ads, but ad spam that doesn't answer your query does, so over the years the "no results" page has more and more been replaced with useless results. Some of us spend some mental energy looking at the SRP to determine they're useless, many more probably click the first result and are served ads. Google's founders knew this, wrote it into their paper, then ignored it and made it their business model anyway.
- is_true 3y agoIs it possible google added "revenue earned" as a ranking factor? I guess so. If market share starts to decrease we should see an improvement in results, the problem is that's gonna be too late.
- avidiax 3y agoThere could be a technical reason. At this point, Google's search ranking algorithm is probably a pile of interrelated heuristics designed to maximize revenue without sacrificing quality too much. It would not be simple to integrate another algorithm in a revenue neutral way. The signals may be missing, and the new algorithm may overlap or interfere with several other rules, either negating or over promoting their effects.
- acdha 3y agoThere’s some truth to this but Google has highly-ranked sites which stay above the sources they’re scraping for years. It’s hard to believe that the experience wouldn’t be better at almost no cost if they were quicker to ban those spam domains or let users do so.
- vbezhenar 3y agoDo you have any statistics to claim that Google does not serve good results? That’s not my experience.
- is_true 3y agoI do. I regularly find myself visiting page two or adding more search terms to improve results.
- lozenge 3y agoIt depends massively what you're searching for. If there's a whiff of money attached then the results are crap. However if you want to know why the sky is blue then Google delivers.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoHere's a test. Google something like 'flat tow jeep'. Now read the first 10 'articles' which are all articles written solely for SEO purposes to sell you a service. You need to read through a lot of useless text before you find a line that says 'check your manual for how to enable flat towing in your transfer case and transmission'. So it's like a long tease and at the end you're still not getting a satisfactory answer. And overall the more your search terms are related something the average American searches for, the more junk there is.
- vbezhenar 3y agoHere's my first Google result: https://www.quadratec.com/c/reference/flat-towing-jeep-wrangler https://www.quadratec.com/c/reference/flat-towing-jeep-wrang... Seems good enough? Short instruction and some helpful comments.
- ThePhysicist 3y agoThey optimize for overall revenue and do not cater to (revenue-wise) largely irrelevant niche audiences like HN users or tech-savvy and privacy-obsessed hackers. Perceived quality is an aspect of user retention but I'd wager that 99 % of their users don't think that Google or Bing results are getting worse for them. Google is on track to make $1BN in revenue per day, Kagi and Marginalia are literally at one millionth of that, so while Google might have them on their radar I have a hard time believing they actually care about what they do. If any incumbent manages to capture more than 1 % of the search market they might start to adapt their strategy. Kagi and Marginalia are growing within their respective niches so they can care about these "weird" users as they are at a scale where it makes a difference for them. At some point they would need to start catering to mainstream users as well though in order to keep growing.
- ergonaught 3y agoBing's results are so awful I assumed it was intentional, ie: Google funding it for the purpose of avoiding monopoly-related penalties/etc, but MS mostly seems to be suffering from the same thing as Apple (no Steve or Bill forcing alignment). Quality tanking because people who don't care or understand are making the decisions.
- arromatic 3y agoquestion :1. How did they hit 3 trillion with incorrect people making decisions ? 2. and is satya worse than steve or bill ? there seems to be a lot of praise about how satya saved microsoft.
- imperialdrive 3y agoI'm very curious about number one as someone that grew up using Microsoft solutions and made a nice career from it as well. Their products have gotten so bad though that I am close to living in denial for continuing to recommend their offerings to clients. Win11 and Edge and Teams are the most terrible trio. Their 365 ecosystem has almost become a joke of a mess too. I not familiar with better complete alternative just yet, so it may simply be a poor time for the industry and I have to deal with it for now.
- cainxinth 3y agoThey didn’t hit $3b because of their search products. It’s because of their entrenched base of enterprise customers.
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- ipaddr 3y agoKagi limits the results to sites without ads or affiliate links. Copying that would work against their core values. Most people don't want a more limited set of results. Most google users want more results not less.
- dazc 3y ago'Most google users want more results not less.' Most google users are looking for the results that are often complained about, cheap holiday deals, voucher codes, ten best of, etc. Google are doing their job.
- arromatic 3y agoI am pretty sure when i search "lord of the rings review" or "the hobbit" there are least a 500 different blog post reviewing and i would like to have option to choose to read as many review as i want and not be limited to to 10 or 50 search results.
- onionisafruit 3y ago> Kagi limits the results to sites without ads or affiliate links I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been using kagi for a few months now, and I get plenty of results with ads and affiliate links. I’m not complaining about that because sometimes those are the best results for my query.
- SushiHippie 3y agoThey don't "limit"/filter the results but downrank them.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoAsk HN:
- altairprime 3y agoEmail the mods and they’ll fix it.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoGoogle has only made 2 successful products. Search and gmail. Having worked intimately with a bunch of people from Google, there are brilliant engineers but nobody knows how to design or build products. And now the search index is so big that they don't know how to fix that either. All in all it's basically Google's end days. Like any company. Nothing to feel sad about. Companies like Nintendo are very rare which can last over centuries.
- arromatic 3y agoI don't understand how can you be a being brilliant engineer but not know how to design/build product especially at google which attracts best talents ? If engineers can't then who is supposed to build/design product ?
- yuhong 3y ago[dead]