4 ms·

I suspect there are less incremental ways to beat Google. In this field, as in many, the big advances will come from redefining the problem: from saying not "w

by pg 17y ago

I suspect there are less incremental ways to beat Google. In this field, as in many, the big advances will come from redefining the problem: from saying not "we could make search better if we did x" but "if we did x, people wouldn't need to do search." Directed Edge is already looking at the world that way. I'm not claiming they're the startup that will make Google irrelevant. Historical precedents suggest it's still early for that. But it seems extremely unlikely that nothing ever will.

shorbaji 17y ago
Well said. Microsoft dethroned IBM with "if we did PCs, [most] people wouldn't need to do mainframes". Ditto Google to Microsoft with "if we did search & cloud, [most] people wouldn't need to do OS". For someone to "beat" Google the the search bar needs to become irrelevant.
bsd_junkie 17y ago
Actually, any service out there that tries to do away with the requirement that people actively perform some effort would fit the bill for a potential Google killer in a particular vertical. In other words, any recommendation service that preferably can "learn" the habits of its users and then simply recommend new content. DirectedEdge is just the latest player in this game. I personally track the news recommendation niche. There used to be a service called Findory that in my opinion came very close to being "optimal". But they went under for some reason. The closest to Findory (and with some very cool features such as computational lie detector for news) is http://www.euraeka.com http://www.euraeka.com They have all three basic features - search (aka Google-style), discovery (aka crowd-wisdom style) and recommendation engine.
- amichail 17y ago
  Recommendation engines tend to fail, with StumbleUpon being the exception.
  - wheels 17y ago
    I'm not sure that's a meaningful statement in the startup world, since I think it can be reduced to, "Startups tend to fail, except for the ones that don't." If the incidence of such is higher within the recommendations space, it's by less than a standard deviation.
anamax 17y ago
Recommendation engines aren't the only way to change search. Most people spend a large fraction of their online day in a couple of applications. Those applications could easily auto-generate useful search links - this kills the search box. It also solves some very hard search problems. ("dolphin" is ambiguous in a search box but it's unambiguous in most documents.) The next step is to make the search results page more useful. In the context of a document, this "more useful results page" is likely to not have ads. Instead, the results will go into the document in a useful form. FWIW, Microsoft does a better job monetizing the best candidates for this kind of search integration.
eserorg 17y ago
Starting a search experience by asking the user what they are looking for misses a lot of important use cases. For instance, checkout some of the demos of Marti Hearst's research into faceted search at Berkeley: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html

by pg 17y ago

shorbaji 17y ago

Well said. Microsoft dethroned IBM with "if we did PCs, [most] people wouldn't need to do mainframes". Ditto Google to Microsoft with "if we did search & cloud, [most] people wouldn't need to do OS". For someone to "beat" Google the the search bar needs to become irrelevant.

bsd_junkie 17y ago

Actually, any service out there that tries to do away with the requirement that people actively perform some effort would fit the bill for a potential Google killer in a particular vertical. In other words, any recommendation service that preferably can "learn" the habits of its users and then simply recommend new content. DirectedEdge is just the latest player in this game. I personally track the news recommendation niche. There used to be a service called Findory that in my opinion came very close to being "optimal". But they went under for some reason. The closest to Findory (and with some very cool features such as computational lie detector for news) is http://www.euraeka.com http://www.euraeka.com They have all three basic features - search (aka Google-style), discovery (aka crowd-wisdom style) and recommendation engine.

amichail 17y ago
Recommendation engines tend to fail, with StumbleUpon being the exception.
- wheels 17y ago
  I'm not sure that's a meaningful statement in the startup world, since I think it can be reduced to, "Startups tend to fail, except for the ones that don't." If the incidence of such is higher within the recommendations space, it's by less than a standard deviation.

anamax 17y ago

Recommendation engines aren't the only way to change search. Most people spend a large fraction of their online day in a couple of applications. Those applications could easily auto-generate useful search links - this kills the search box. It also solves some very hard search problems. ("dolphin" is ambiguous in a search box but it's unambiguous in most documents.) The next step is to make the search results page more useful. In the context of a document, this "more useful results page" is likely to not have ads. Instead, the results will go into the document in a useful form. FWIW, Microsoft does a better job monetizing the best candidates for this kind of search integration.

eserorg 17y ago

Starting a search experience by asking the user what they are looking for misses a lot of important use cases. For instance, checkout some of the demos of Marti Hearst's research into faceted search at Berkeley: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html