3 ms·
> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me
by Cushman 14y ago
> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.
It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly.
Fifteen seconds isn't a lot, but multiplied by every search you do in your life it starts to add up. Multiplied across the Internet, you start talking about whole lifetimes being wasted-- and multiplying miniscule efficiencies into lifetimes is Google's bread and butter.
> It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine.
I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.
- nilkn 14y ago> It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly. That's a fair point, but truth be told I rarely find myself completely satisfied with Google's extracted results anyway. When I look up movies, I almost always end up going to another page in the end anyway for more information. For instance, if I google "movies near me," it only gives me a list of movies with their running times. It actually doesn't give me any showtimes at all. So I definitely cannot make any decisions based on that list alone. > I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else. I do ultimately agree with you; my main point, though, was that the guy I replied to said DuckDuckGo gave nothing useful, which really doesn't seem to be true at all as far as I can tell. That said, I just found this: http://duckduckhack.com http://duckduckhack.com It looks like they're trying to let developers add in their own plugins to the search engine for instant answers, which is a pretty sweet idea IMHO.
- Cushman 14y agoI agree with all of that :) I actually think DDG's open approach will win out in the end over Google's monolithic big-data strategy, but they certainly have a good head start.