5 ms·
Search is really really hard to do, isn't it? I mean there aren't that many search engines, and even more prominent "alternative" engines (like DuckDuckGo) are
by sirkneeland 13y ago
Search is really really hard to do, isn't it? I mean there aren't that many search engines, and even more prominent "alternative" engines (like DuckDuckGo) are often pulling results from Google and/or Bing...both of which have made fairly gargantuan investments in the technology and infrastructure behind their search engines.
Could there be some other technical genius way of doing it? Well...I'm sure there is, but would Yahoo really have the in-house talent to discover it before Google or Bing (or another wealthy potential Search entrant like Apple or Facebook)?
Sure, Marissa has been buying up talent, but that has primarily been mobile devs...
- mmastrac 13y agoYahoo used to have a stellar research group with tons of expertise in search, but alas, no more. There might be a few stragglers left, however.
- themodelplumber 13y agoWhat about purchasing DDG? Is that off the table? I don't know much about how that might work.
- RexRollman 13y agoWhat I am sad about is there are no search engines that can return pure search results. The results you get are now tainted by DCMA takedown notices, censorship, and other various legal mechanisms.
- AJ007 13y agoPresumably there are specific domain names which do not respond to DMCA requests, while the search engines do. The others would respond to DMCA requests and thus results for them would be useless/dead. A project could aim to index these DMCA proof domains specifically? I don't have a problem with the DMCA but I believe using it to censor a list of links is abuse and breaks the US's first amendment.
- nashequilibrium 13y agoIf you click on the notice, the links are right there. This is what I do when I see it in the google search results.
- rogerbinns 13y agoYou are assuming their search has to be very good. Would it make a difference if the search was merely good enough. Search engines will generally get the most popular stuff well enough (eg "Justin Bieber") and it is the longer tail where they distinguish themselves. But does Yahoo need to distinguish themselves there?
- aswanson 13y agoYes, they surely do. Bill Gates pursued a "good enough" search strategy 10 years ago that cost msft the business.
- gerbal 13y agoGoogle became popular because of their excellent performance on the long tail. Yes ~30% of all queries are for the same 50 search terms, but 50% are unique or nearly unique queries.
- AznHisoka 13y agoI'm developing buzzsumo.com, which focuses on searching for fresh content on a topic. So when you search for "startups", you don't get official sites about startups, but rather the most popular stories about startups that's being shared the most.