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Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google
- spamdotlol 2y agoGoogle isn't even a competitor in the search space anymore. They've been completely unusable for a decade.
- wslh 2y agoIt remains a competitor as long as it continues to capture attention (eye-balls), even if its usability has diminished.
- iamacyborg 2y agoA cursory glance at their market share in the search space clearly says that’s not true. For a big site I help run, we’re getting about 8.2x the impressions on Google compared to Bing.
- eitland 2y agoTo interpret GP charitably I think they mean that Google is there not because they are a good search engine these days but because of inertia. For you as a site owner, Google is the best: it delivers the impressions. For a user who wants to search, Google has gone downhill since around 2009 and the only thing that confuse me is why DDG - who initially felt better - chose to run after Google down the path of insisting to give me results for things I didn't ask for. (The usual answer is: "It is so much harder than in 2009 and SEO is so crazy these days, that nobody can do it, not even Google", to which I have to point out that even marginalia - run by one Swede - manages to do it in the niches it prioritizes.)
- rurp 2y ago> the only thing that confuse me is why DDG - who initially felt better - chose to run after Google down the path of insisting to give me results for things I didn't ask for. I have the same frustration. The killer feature that got me to switch from Google to DDG was that DDG would reliably return results for the search query I entered, long after Google had stopped doing so. Now that they've taken the same path the benefit is much less. Although I suspect this is more due to a change on the part of Bing than a conscious decision from DDG.
- arnaudsm 2y agoEvery new search engine I've seen was a Bing wrapper with sometimes light reranking. I understand that competing with Google was borderline impossible a decade ago. But in 2024, we have cheap compute, great OSS distributed DBs, powerful new vector search tech. Amateur search engines like Marginalia even run on consumer hardware. CommonCrawl text-only is ~100TB, and can fit on my home server. Why is no company building their own search engine from scratch?
- stephantul 2y agoBecause it is super expensive and difficult to keep an index up to date. People expect to be able to get current events, and expect search results to be updated in minutes/seconds.
- arnaudsm 2y agoSome sources update faster than others, you could index news sources hourly and low velocity sites weekly. Google does that. CommonCrawl gets 7TB/month, indexing and vectorizing that is quite manageable.
- stephantul 2y agoI think it is more complex than that. Common crawl does not index the whole web every month. So even if you use common crawl and just index it every month, which you could do pretty cheaply admittedly, I don't think that would lead to a good search index. Running an index is an extremely profitable business, from multiple points of view (you can literally earn money, but also run ads, you get information you can sell, you can buy mindshare). Everybody is looking for indexes beyond Google and Bing, but there are none. If it really is as easy as indexing common crawl, then I think we'd have more indexes.
- notyourwork 2y agoThis reads like the “I could build Dropbox in a weekend”.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- readingnews 2y agoHow things change... I recall having a subscription (had one of those friends who always seemed to know what was coming out right before it came out) right when they started publishing, what was that, 1994? It was so cool. I just viewed the front page, looks like the definition of "internet chum". But seriously, to upend Google, you are going to need to be the default on what people use, which I think for now is phones. Another barrier, maybe they need to get away from this: "will require succeeding at home and growing revenue, which largely comes from running ads." So what do you do when everyone runs some ublock-origin thing? We need to figure out a search monetization beyond "feed me weird things I do not want" on the sidebar. Should websites pay? No, wait, then only those with real money are on the web. Should we pay? Now, wait, we have had it for "free" for too long (could be wrong, I might at this stage in the game pay to have an actual search engine, like say google circa-internet 2004, of course the net was a different place, but still).
- FredPret 2y agoThis is somehow not about Perplexity. Like many, I tried many other search engines, starting with DuckDuckGo way back when. I always ended up Googling (or !g… -ing). Perplexity is the first one that consistently works for both code questions (what’s this error message) and local questions (where’s my nearest store X and when do they close). Now they just need to speed it up a bit - Google queries are effectively instant.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoI would strongly prefer a search engine that searches and doesn't attempt to proactively answer questions.
- FredPret 2y agoI like that too but the benefit of the answer model is near-zero spam. Perplexity gives an answer with references, effectively combining search with the answer.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoI've recently started using Perplexity and find that I've started using it for finding answers to specific questions, where I'll still use traditional search to find "a few sites on which I may be able to cobble together a useful set of information about <topic>". So, for me, "search" has fragmented into two separate use cases, one of which is served by the new not-really-a-search-engine.
- ryukoposting 2y agoThis is one of the few comments advocating for LLM search use that actually lines up with my experience trying to use it. It's pretty good for a narrow subset of my search queries, but it's totally useless for everything else. I gave up on it because "two search tools instead of one" is just a really hard sell for me. When I go to search something, the keystrokes/hand motions are totally intuitive. Having two different patterns was annoying. StartPage works great for me. I have no reason to replace it, much less half-replace it with something that has only proven to be incrementally better at a few tasks. That's a matter of personal preference, though.
- elashri 2y agohttp://archive.today/qEyTJ http://archive.today/qEyTJ
- starlite-5008 2y ago[flagged]
- telgareith 2y ago[flagged]
- bilekas 2y agoIt shouldn't be too hard to achieve what Google were good at before. Their recent search results for me (last 6-12 months) have been so far removed from what I'm searching it felt like a meme. Even after rephrasing things, more details, special quotations etc that everyone knows as the 'search tricks' the results are terrible.
- bayindirh 2y agoI'm using Kagi for quite some time. It's invisible to me. I search, get 30ish high quality results per search, and I'm a happy camper. No ads, no seo grafting, nothing. Moreover, I can block sites and customize my own search results. This feels good. When I first started using Kagi, it felt like leaving a closed building and stepping out to open air.
- eitland 2y agoAlmost same here: One of the few software tools I care to pay for except Jetbrains. Only in practice I almost never use filter or block features, because Kagi does out-of-the-box what we always wanted to do our selves in Google: block spam sites. The ranking also seems to be better for some reason somehow. The funny thing is it doesn't feel like a step forward, but rather like a step back to Google ca 2009 - 2012 somewhere.
- bilekas 2y agoI’ve heard good things about it actually I must go check it out now. Thanks for reminding me. I don’t mind paying for things that save me time.
- beAbU 2y agoI moved to DDG a couple of years ago, and initially, I found myself often using the `!g` switch, but I honestly can't recall the last time I needed to do that. Only when I'm shopping do I find the goog to be a slightly better tool for finding products sold by niche suppliers. I honestly think google's monopoly on search at this time is 100% powered by momentum, there is almost no other reason to use it over something like DDG or hell, even Bing!
- miyuru 2y agoevery new search engine i have tried so far, failed to do regional searches properly. for some queries i need regional index without adding my country to the query.
- ricardo81 2y agoBing and Google do have the benefit of websites defining their market via their webmaster tools sections. And a critical mass of click through metrics, etc.
- keyboardJones 2y agoI found this article much more informative: https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/11/ecosia-and-qwant-two-european-search-engines-join-forces-on-building-an-index-to-shrink-reliance-on-big-tech https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/11/ecosia-and-qwant-two-europ...
- ohstopitu 2y ago> Ask the search engine Ecosia about “Paris to Prague” and flight booking websites dominate the results. Ecosia’s CEO Christian Kroll would prefer to present more train options, which he considers better for the environment. But because its results are licensed from Google and Microsoft’s Bing, Ecosia has little control over what’s shown. Kroll is ready for that to change. While I think Google sucks right now and we need something new, this specific reason is so dumb. Unless I add the word "train" or "air" etc. I would much rather be shown either all options or the one that I care about most (if it's flying, then so be it - the search engine can't and shouldn't try to filter out options FOR me without my consent)
- crestfallen 2y agoRespectfully, the search engine is "allowed" to do what it wants to for its business purpose. In Ecosia's case, that is to prefer environmentally sound modes of travel, sites, or businesses. And that's fine! What it means is that it might not be the search engine for you or for me. And that's fine too!
- cphoover 2y agoWhy isn’t there a distributed, decentralized or open index that all of these startups can utilize? I understand that these startups are all are focusing in on different problem areas, but doesn’t it make sense to have something like open street maps so that all of these companies can share their compute resources in order to maintain something competitive with the big guys? Or even if it’s not fully decentralized these startups teaming up to build a bigger index for themselves makes a lot of sense to me. I have no knowledge of this field but something like that would seem seem to make sense.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y agoYacy is still around. While I wouldn't want to disrupt it's decentralized/p2p nature, I think there's a case to be made for a community-managed central aggregation server to help seed the index at various snapshots. I might even be interested in helping run such a thing.
- knadh 2y agoPretty much exactly what I have been thinking lately. Write about it recently here: https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/ https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/
- ricardo81 2y agoA shared index would surely be nice (Common crawl is perhaps an example of one that could be used) but say you had 10 search engines running from it. One decides a page is very important and updates constantly, so should be fetched every 30 minutes. Another search engine decides a page is spam and doesn't need to be recrawled. There's backend choices that affect the shape and crawl directions of the index. Then things like whether the crawler should render the page (Using the end DOM content rather than the original source), does it do any tokenisation of the content, store other metrics etc, or does that need to be done by the end search engines. Also there's issues with crawling Reddit, sites behind Cloudflare etc that others have went into more detail on this comment page.
- lexlambda 2y ago> “We could de-rank results from unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” Kroll says of the eco-minded Ecosia. Understandable knowing Ecosias goals, but I find it rather concerning their vision of a better search involves deciding what is good and bad. Ranking by quality (against spam & SEO sites) is fine, but it should be applied equally to all Websites, and not target specific companies.
- iterance 2y agoThe measure of success of a search engine is how quickly I leave it with the info I want in hand. I too find this a bit strange. Downranking results that would otherwise be naturally highly ranked seems only to inhibit the operation of the search engine.
- bananapub 2y ago> I find it rather concerning their vision of a better search involves deciding what is good and bad the entire purpose of a search engine is to do this, you've been grossly confused about the entire space if you think this isn't exactly what everyone is trying to do.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Nasrudith 2y agoYes, but it usually isn't "good or bad" in the moral judgement sense. Not to mention the many logical flaws involved with trying to make such prioritization. If I'm searching for say desert eagles refusing to return any gun related content and only giving me birds isn't helping anything or anyone. Although come to think of it I'm surprised that I haven't heard of any attempts of fundamentalists to make "moral" search engines that do things like exclude evolution.
- TreetopPlace 2y agoYes, people aren't going to use a search engine that politically skews the results. It will end up as a tiny website for a very narrow niche of person, similar to eg Mastodon.
- daft_pink 2y agoUntil they actually produce results, does any one actually believe them. I tried a lot of search engines to replace google until finally settling on Kagi.
- pixxel 2y ago>“We could de-rank results from unethical or unsustainable companies and rank good companies higher,” Kroll says of the eco-minded Ecosia. Censorship…for reasons. How’s this any better.
- ricardo81 2y agoShoutout for Mojeek. Highlights: - Has its own index - Had a pro-privacy privacy policy well before DDG existed - No conflated marketing (DDG wrt it passing on 3 octets of an IP to Bing for local searches, Ecosia for not including Bing's carbon footprint as a meta search engine) - Has an API It's a smaller index and has more limited resources, but pretty much the best genuine alternative, and great for finding older resources that have long since been buried by G/B.
- whiplash451 2y agoGreat. Now go monetize it.
- ricardo81 2y agoI'm an API customer.
- mxuribe 2y agoThis is quite welcomed! I like seeing more competition in such spaces. What would be really interesting is if DDG got involved...and those 3 entities (DDG, Ecosia, and Qwant) worked together. I know DDG is simply a wrapper around Bing...but i think one of these others has a similar Bing back-end...so if someoine who has the mindshare of DDG got into that, i think woul;d make it even more interesting. I know Google is quite the behemoth, but still, would be great to see some shake-ups (assuming of course that the results are good and provide value, etc.).
- bionsystem 2y agoqwant had bing as a backend a few years back iirc.
- _1tem 2y agoIs it just me or does it feel like a lot of Big Tech empires are immovable? There are no winner takes all markets now. Massive incumbents are not replaced by another even more massive startup that gobbles up the market, but rather a collection of specialized alternatives. So Google is not being replaced, but is slowly losing bits and pieces to ChatGPT, Kagi, Perplexity, and others. Facebook/X lose a little to BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads and Telegram. Netflix by a dozen streamers. Etc. The age of massive upheavals is over? I can’t remember a single Big Tech company that went under completely in the last decade, just slowly became “not the only one”.
- Nasrudith 2y agoIt went on for far longer than the last decade. The thing is that it takes a long time for a very big company of any sort to die, so it can zombie along for years. Even when private equity notorious is pretty much trying to kill the company.
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoI really hope they can make it work. We all hate how shitty the big sites have gotten in the name of maximizing profit, but I think it's more insidious than that. It would be one thing if running (say) a news site with decency and integrity was merely less profitable; there would still be people doing it. But I fear that it's actually become impossible to sustain a business like that. The ones that try either die or sell out to survive. (Or are so limited in scope that one person's unpaid part-time labor can sustain them.)
- ThinkBeat 2y agoFor me, it seems the direction for search is going towards AI sites. (Gemini, ChatGPT) Trying to reinvent Google/ Search in 2024 seems a bit like jumping the shark
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoThe thing is, often I want articles, opinion pieces, and interesting reading. Sure, sometimes I'm searching for facts or answers to programming questions, but most of the time LLMs are not going to give me what I'm looking for.
- hengheng 2y agoQuite the opposite. The part of the crowd that has site:old.reddit.com in their muscle memory has to be the premium end of the search market. Sure, garbage tier searches will be done LLM style. But few smart people might be bored with that, and pay for something better.
- hackernewds 2y agoThe audacity of power users assuming they're the majority
- Liquix 2y agoParent comment makes no assumption that they are the majority. But a minority of users (probably hacker types) who search with boolean operators and keywords instead of typing full sentences do indeed represent a portion of the market willing to pay $$$. These users crave a search engine which returns what they searched for, not what the provider's black box algorithm comes up with. GNU/Linux as a desktop OS is an example of this market. 95%+ of people will work with Windows or MacOS their whole career which fits their use case perfectly. But the 5% of powerusers who choose Linux gain so much productivity and professional value that it's a thriving ecosystem with plenty of lucrative businesses built around it.
- jay_kyburz 2y agoI want to remake Yahoo! I want to browse a catalog of interesting web content. Like walking down the isle of an old fashioned newsagent, flicking through the magazines that stand out.
- alabhyajindal 2y agoI was hoping this will be about Kagi. A lot of companies that make bold promises of taking on Google end up in the drain 2 years later.
- disqard 2y agoI'm a paying customer of Kagi. Kagi itself runs on top of Google. It's certainly worth paying for (IMO), but let's not kid ourselves -- it is *not* a competitor (as in, can replace Google). Without Google, there is no Kagi.
- ezekiel68 2y agoRight. But the higher signal-to-noise ration is so worth it. That's why I pay for Kagi as well.
- SushiHippie 2y ago> Without Google, there is no Kagi. Google isn't the only search engine they use (they have a small selfmade index, Brave, Marginalia, and others which they don't disclose, and "vertical information" like Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, etc..), but probably most of the results are from Google. Without Google there would still be Kagi, but maybe not as good as today.
- alabhyajindal 2y agoI used Kagi for half a year - I loved it! I was hoping Kagi got some media coverage and this was an article covering how it's so much better than Google. My problem is with companies who start by declaring they are going to take on Google. These kind of companies are nowhere to be found a few years later.
- onetokeoverthe 2y agoyandex!!!
- netcan 2y agoIf Google search ad business dwindled, the remaining ad-supported tech will all be targeting based. The adtech parts of ai are going to be weird.
- madrox 2y agoMy hot take on this new era of search engines is that "search is a bug" and even trying to be a search engine is a fool's errand. Search solved a problem of the legacy internet where you wanted information and that information would be on one of a million websites. If someone is going to disrupt Google, it's because they've cut out the middleman that is search results and simply give you what you're asking for. ChatGPT and Perplexity are doing the best here so far afaik
- nickpsecurity 2y agoSearch is still better for getting to specific, existing documents you need. Even the RAG people have been finding that out with hybrid models becoming more popular over time. I also think you can update search indexes more cheaply than further pretraining LLM’s.
- heraclius1729 2y agoNot to mention that the cost per search in terms of compute and energy is so much smaller for web search than for running an LLM. I forget the exact numbers now, but it was orders of magnitude as I recall. Search engines are just cheaper to run. I don't know that there's a good, long term model for a free LLM-based search replacement because of how much higher the operating costs are, ad supported or not.
- nickpsecurity 2y agoOn top of that, search usually uses CPU instead of GPU. A large infrastructure with CPU’s is easier to reuse for jobs other than search.
- madrox 2y agoThese are great reasons why this business will be hard, but given how ChatGPT and Perplexity are making inroads into search traffic, you can't deny it's an experience consumers prefer.
- khana 2y ago[dead]
- greatgib 2y agoDon't believe a single second the marketing speech about these 2 engines, they are both total crap trying to gain users with whatever hype subject is around. Qwant used to pretend being a champion of privacy, a "french made" tech, but with a search engine mostly based on Bing, lobbying with Microsoft against our interests, and with a boss sucking as much public funding as possible to finance luxury HQ locations and lavish cars... Qwant collapsed and was sold, but now it is just a mediocre ghost product trying to capitalize on a stained branding and on being a French/european alternative.
- hartator 2y agoQwant is just burning French tax payer money in an effort to "compete".
- jansan 2y agoIs it somehow related to the Quaero search engine project that burnt 400 million € of taxpayer money in the early 2000s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://www.heise.de/news/400-Millionen-Euro-fuer-europaeische-Suchmaschine-Quaero-159381.html https://www.heise.de/news/400-Millionen-Euro-fuer-europaeisc...
- greatgib 2y agoIt is not directly related except by the fact that the dynamic is the same and that it is a repeat of the previous attempt. There are 2 clear things that is so common in Europe: Politics injecting a shit load of public money thinking that if you give the money you will be able to reproduce American company success and co. In the end, the money is wasted for their own interest by big groups, intermediaries, and opportunists. When the thing fails, it is the fault of no one, it was just "too hard" and "maybe the money budget was not enough for such a subject" This is totally different to what leads innovation like Google, where you have doers that create something first and when they are able to show or convince that they have breakthrough, money will flow in by itself. And at the beginning cash is used for brain and development instead of giving big salaries to top management and political friends. The second thing that is usual is the pattern with this kind of projects: - corporate sucks all the money - responsibility is shared between multiple actors to spread the blame in case of problem. - project fail and corporate give up. "Not their fault" - one year later the initial hype subject is back on the table (European search engine sovereignty for ex) and politics announce that they will spend that much more money to resolve it - same corporate vampires starts again from zero... - and it fails the same in a loop
- 6510 2y agohttps://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com https://www.ecosia.org https://www.ecosia.org
- guywithahat 2y agoI would love to see Yandex take English search more seriously. They're great for some things, but their spam filters are way too harsh, my email has been marked as spam since the day I made it and I can't respond to support since the email account is flagged. I have frequent issues with their search as well, I constantly have to fill out their captcha's which never let me through anyways
- renewiltord 2y agoDo you guys remember Cuil? Man that was a whacky ass engine. Just gave you all sorts of comical results.
- fred_is_fred 2y agoFor anyone not around the hype around that thing was so over the top. It was a for-sure google killer. The first few days it barely loaded due to the load and when it did, yeah, not great results!
- ElijahLynn 2y agoI've been using the chatGPT browser extension for a week now. It replaces Google search for me in Brave. It was a little odd at first but now I find I won't go back. I love I can ask follow up questions, and it shows the listing results on the right just like a search engine. But it also gives my a such summary on the left, again, with the ability to ask follow up questions. Anyone trying to build a search engine to provide a Google-like experience is going to fail, in my opinion. chatGPT search is a game changer. I'll pay $20 month for this forever.
- rajup 2y agoIt was the exact opposite for me interestingly. I couldn’t stand chatGPT search beyond a few days, I guess because my search patterns don’t need a bunch of useless words thrown in (locations, very specific keywords that lead to websites etc). The speed is also a big factor. Google search feels almost instantaneous and watching ChatGPT search emit a bunch of tokens before getting to what I need drove me to frustration.
- nektro 2y agoMarginalia and Kagi are the only alternatives worth considering
- usemycomputer 2y agoSince I don't want to pay for searching, I think that an alternative is to allow search engines to use my computer (one per cent of computer power). The problem is how can I be sure that the use of my computer is not reading my private information? Another idea is to provide rating for some local products in exchange for searching.
- ezekiel68 2y agoSince I can never know that, I pay for search (just offering the alternate practical view. I know many will not wish to do so)
- aniviacat 2y agoI'd love to pay for search, but don't want my searches to be tied to an account. I'm still wishing that one day we might get real microtransactions.
- ezekiel68 2y agoDid you ever hear the one about how two competing armies in China cooperated to resist the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II?
- grizzles 2y agoThey need to make a browser with new features. That is the route to getting new search users.
- aurareturn 2y agoThis is why we shouldn’t over regulate tech. Market forces are strong in search.
- latexr 2y agoIt says right on the subtitle (emphasis mine): > Generative AI and new rules targeting tech giants are giving Ecosia and Qwant fuel to challenge Google and Microsoft and develop a web index for Europe. “New rules” means regulation. “Market forces” kept the incumbents at the top, it is regulation that is giving others a chance.
- aurareturn 2y agoWhat are the rules?
- latexr 2y agoYou can literally do a web search for “new rules for big tech”.
- aurareturn 2y agoOk, but which rule specifically allows these two search companies to compete?
- latexr 2y agoIt’s in the article: > But Kroll believes tech advances have made affordable indexing more possible, and new EU regulations limiting the power of gatekeepers such as Google are making it a worthwhile pursuit. Which links to another Wired story: https://www.wired.com/story/europe-dma-breaking-open-big-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/europe-dma-breaking-open-big-tec... They’re talking about the Digital Markets Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act Which is also what you’d get inundated by when doing the search I mentioned above. None of this is hard to find. If you want to discuss the article, it’s expected you make a minimum of effort to check what it says.
- llm_nerd 2y agoSince ChatGPT added web search augmentation my usage of Google has dropped probably 90%. There are still those times where I hit Google -- usually involving "real world" things like finding a restaurant website and similar type things -- but for a shocking number of my normal run-to-google moments now I use ChatGPT. NFL scores (live!) and random stats like point differentials or F1 driver / event queries. Of course the dozens of coding questions a day in this era where we all jump languages so frequently we have to keep looking up how to do basic stuff. Cooking instructions, and things like "can I substitute butter for lard". Product documentation stuff like "how can I assign a wheel on my Alesis QX61 to the pan in Logic Pro, and record it live to a track" or "how can I disable a malfunctioning pitch wheel on that controller". Historical and science queries. Language queries. It has completely changed my usage, very much for the better. Web search provided RAG has been a game changer. And while Google is outrageously fast, getting results on the screen quickly isn't the end. Then I'm digging through shitty bloated webpages or looking through a hundred Reddit comments filled with misinformation.
- ryukoposting 2y agoI'm beginning to suspect LLMs' viability for search purposes is dependent on your existing search habits. 40% of my search queries are just copy-pasted error messages. Another 10% are business names, for the sole purpose of finding their hours or phone number. Less than 10% are complete clauses or sentences. I just don't see how an LLM fits my search habits. I tried using ChatGPT for search purposes, and it was dreadful. Incorrect hours for businesses, gibberish results for the copy-pasted error messages, it was an all-around failure. Have you people been typing complete sentences into Google all these years? Is that where this whole "LLMs will replace search" thing is coming from?
- carlosjobim 2y agoYou should use the right tool for the right purpose. If you're searching for a physical place and want opening hours, reviews and photos, it's Google Maps. If you're looking for updates and photos for a physical place, it's Instagram. If it's detailed articles it's Wikipedia. If it's to define or translate a word, right click and "Look up". Or if it's general search, you have Kagi.
- ryukoposting 2y agoMy purpose is Search, and I want one right tool for it. I have had one right tool for my entire life - first Google, and then StartPage since ~2017. I considered Kagi. I like the concept, and I'm willing to pay for search, but Kagi costs more than I'm willing to pay.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoWithout some innovation in business model, who cares? They could be a hundred times as good as Google at its peak, but as long as they remain advertising firms (or become them, as they soon would), what would be the point?
- karaterobot 2y agoI suspect that Two Upstart Search Engines Are Teaming Up To Hopefully Get Bought by Google would be a more accurate headline.
- rustcleaner 2y agoThe best way to stop SEO is to build a bot which detects commercial activity on the page (and/or availability of cart/payment controls), and commercial language in the text of the page (does the content look like an ad or product/sales page). Also combine with number of hops to a commercial page (with cart, prices, advertising material, etc), and create a distance metric. Offer the user a commercial activity slider. Sliding to zero commercial activity should result in zero product pages or SEO spam. Also important are user provided blacklists and whitelists of domains. Experts-Exchange was a site that called for this on search engines like Google, as Experts-Exchange was universally a cash sticky-trap waiting for searchers in pain to pony up. No, and constantly pasting -site:xyz each time is unacceptable. ADDENDUM COPY&PASTE: One blind spot I missed: advertising and telemetry activity are to count strongly in the commercial score. When I slide the Commercial slider to zero, only web pages which there are no obvious detectable ways for the host or author to make money from showing me the page should be returned. Bad behavior stems from the drive to make money. Make a search where it is impossible to make money by being a result in the search (especially if a Commercial slider is slid to low or zero).
- pembrook 2y agoThe presence of affiliate links should be the biggest indicator that the information provided is going to be heavily financially incentivized (ie. bad). Would be much simpler to calculate and detect. I would be super surprised if Google's algorithm doesn't already know how to detect affiliate links.
- rustcleaner 2y agoI argue ANY money making mechanisms or language need to be detected and contribute to the commercial score. When I am looking up baking recipes or paleontology text on T-Rex, that should not be a commercial[izable] activity. Full stop! Commercial activity is like sexual activity in this specific regard: it's unwanted! 98% of my searches are for information that autists would pour their hearts into for free out of love, and that commercial interests will only detract from (such as pirated content and software cracks... lol wut did u xpect hm?). If I could pass a law which bled webmasters and search engines dry in fines until something like this is set up... I would! (Elect me BDFL of the world.)
- HlessClaudesman 2y agoAnyone else recently tried to search for a location, even using keyword map, and still not be shown a Google Maps link? I would much rather be shown a map, than whatever BS AI generated dogwater summary they are dishing out instead. If Google mangement can't see the user value of putting their own useful products in search, what hope is there for the rest of the world's useful information?
- lazyeye 2y agoFingers crossed they are able to do some damage to Google. A terrible company filled with awful people.
- gitprolinux 2y ago[dead]