I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user chosen social graph, everything's abstracted away.
And that's by the way why Google is still successful as well. Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers without needing to do anything else. The only way to beat that is to make it even better while not making it more complicated which is very hard to do.
I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple advice. I did a bunch of online research before I booked things, but man was it painful. There are so many copy-cat blogs who just throw together a bunch of basic information with no real research done in order to get those clicks/adwords.
For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple enough. Circus Circus actually has a waterslide, but if you dive deeper (read a hundred reviews manually) you find out parts are often shut down, and the hotel itself is quite trashy and smells bad and has bad service (explains the really cheap room rate). But do you find that information on blogs? No way, they just include all the hotels with pools and copy in the verbiage directly from the hotel websites or other blogs.
There's probably an actual traveler blog out there that tells you all this and has great information, but it's hidden by all the SEO optimized trash blogs.
And this example can be applied to so many things we do all the time. Try to find a product you want on Amazon without spending half a day sorting through reviews and trash blogs.
So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service. I'd pay a few bucks to call up a service to answer these questions definitively for me.
I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great actionable recommendations within an hour or two for:
- good coffeeshops
- tacos
- Korean grocery stores
- places that have traditional style al pastor tacos
- finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store
- finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe)
- hot chicken
- canolis
and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you posted to the /r/vegas subreddit asking about the coolest hotel pool in vegas, you'd get a bunch of up to date info.
When I visited my mom in Romania, I was amazed that hair dressers filled *exactly this purpose*. It almost felt like you were "Googling" for 30 minutes and getting a haircut as a side-effect.
Customer: How is the newly opened Spa?
Hair dresser: Other customers said the water was cold.
How is finding the best X at something from I assume hundreds if not thousands of choices, a simple question ? In particular, would asking any human give you the actual answer ?
At best we’d be in the same situation as looking at guide books or Michelin guide kind of rankings, created with human oversight but static in nature. More probably we’d get the most reputable hotel with no actual evaluation if it is effectively better than the myriads of others.
And that’s without digging into what you value in pool experiences vs what any evaluation system took as criteria to rank them.
I think this is an example of how we are trying very hard to simplify problems that are inherently complex. And sometimes it kinda seem to work, so people start forgetting it still is complex and rebuilding it from scratch means reapplying magic on it again.
How could it possibly be only a few bucks to answer questions like this though? A human would have to be doing the research and writing for you. If that human is trying to answer a query a minute to earn a reasonable wage then your results are going to be rushed and poor. If the human takes enough time to find a good answer then the search will need to cost enough to make it worth the time of a skilled researcher.
I could see a "virtual assistant" version of this where you pay fifty dollars and send a request like "Reservations in Vegas for these dates at a hotel with good pool."
The future is trust networks. Where you trust a number of friends, who trust other people, etc. and you can use a matrix of trust to retrieve review scores, etc.
Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the reviews from other HN users ...
I agree with everything you said about the spam blog problem.
And yet Travelocity (and others) would have told you how terrible Circus Circus is in five minutes or less.
22,000 reviews, 3.2 stars out of 5, among the worst in Vegas (among major hotels) with a gigantic number of reviews. Its room rate alone helps you to begin immediately forming a good conclusion about its quality. This isn't a subtle thing.
Oh, but that's not realiable, one might say. Yes it is. It does a great job of approximating the quality of the hotel in question, and it's an exceptionally easy and fast means to narrow with. It isn't a perfect approach (is it really a 3.1 or 3.3 star quality?!?) and doesn't need to be, it just needs to let you know that Circus Circus is garbage, and it does exactly that.
You can also get some decent mileage out of Booking.com and checking reviews for keywords. That won't help you quickly find the best hotel pool, but it will help you find out what people think of a specific hotel's pool (e.g., Circus Circus).
I can empathize exactly. Trying to do a bit of research on an upcoming trip seems like something that should be fun or at least not feel like an overly burdensome exercise. But as you point out it's a giant time drain filled with frustration. Everything from the booking sites that create a high pressure experience("3 people are looking at this room right now!") to the influencer chum pages that seem to be more about marketing their brand than providing practical information. You can lose two hours trying to research a trip and still not got anywhere. A service where you could talk to local people would be great. That's a service would be worth paying for, like a travel advisor.
I can imagine the first two steps of their process working for a human-assisted search machine. Specifically, the "finding sources of information" and "filtering information" steps. But, I'd imagine the human workers would still need more complex / configurable search tools than Google (which is probably what the workers in the study used to find their sources).
If you don't mind staying on Fremont Street (I prefer it to the Strip), the Golden Nugget has a pretty nice pool setup (complete with waterslide) and is a "nice" place to stay.
Amex has a really good concierge that handles this. And it's free with most cards. Absolutely underrated, especially when you're traveling internationally
Exact same experience except with Iceland. Google "top attractions in Iceland" and you get a bunch of garbage posts telling you about the Blue Lagoon. I ended up reading an entire book on iceland tourism and perusing many blogs and reaching out to many friends, and the Blue Lagoon is definitely not one of the top spots.
Feels like you asked the wrong question. You asked about the best pool, not the best hotel with a good pool. But even do, I've read many sites that tell a little bit the hotel when I search for the best pool. Not one of them listed circus circus
Also important for anyone actually thinking of taking Google on, very few of the features listed are things Google can't easily do, too. Attacking their strengths is crazy. You better have something both crazy good and hard to replicate by someone with more money than god.
Whatever replaces Google will be doing something that Google can't without causing them other problems. The first thing that comes to mind is make them choose traffic vs. advertisers (I don't know, if I had an idea of how to, I would not be writing this), but they're big enough that other wedges could start chipping away at their margins.
> - who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available)
- how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades)
The solution for o both of these might actually be a paid service. If you have a paid service, there is a possibility of it being profitable with much fewer users. As an example, let’s say you have 1,000,000 users at $10/month, that is a $10,000,000/month which might be enough to run the service and provide a comfortable profit.
With regards to the spam issue, the fact that you have a small user base would be to your advantage. Because there are so many Google users, it is in websites’ economic interests to spend money to try to game the algorithms. With much fewer users, your paid search users may not be worth it for the sites to spend money trying to game your algorithms.
Adding on to this, customization is nice but customization is not why DuckDuckGo isn't as good as Google. The reason nothing is as good as Google is because Google indexes way more content than every other service that I'm aware of
Average users may not pay, but specialized users may pay and pay more than enough to subsidize some sort of free tier.
Not to mention, if free search engines keep devolving into an endless sea of spam, people may have no choice but to start paying. There's plenty of things out there people pay for not necessarily by choice but because there's nothing else out there that would accomplish the task at hand.
Know how you’ll find the next Google? Same way those of us over 45 found this one.
A respected friend or colleague will tell you that the next Google just works better. That’s what made Google search win: it just worked better. It’s now I found out about it and probably how you did if you’re pushing 50.
We didn’t care about pagerank or know what it is. That came after we used it and wanted to know why it worked better - or we wanted to manipulate he results.
We didn’t read a blog post telling us what’s good.
We were using another search engine and Google arrived on the scene and it was just WAY better. I was using alltheweb. Friends were using other engines. In weeks, everyone smart and productive was using Google.
Google/Alphabet may be a large company now, but never forget how they started. They were just so good we couldn’t ignore them.
Any Google killer needs to have search indexing technology and infrastructure as a core competency to be truly successful. Kagi has done a great job of solving some of the UX and privacy problems endemic in online search these days, but at the end of the day they could be snuffed out at the whim of the big search providers (Google, Bing) if they decide to kick them off until they can get their own indexing solution off the ground. If an alternative search engine reached Bing's level of popularity, this would undoubtedly happen.
The same goes for DuckDuckGo and others. All of the above use the Bing search API for the majority of their web results which for most use cases is not economically sustainable.
I do think there is a large swath of users who will pay a subscription for a truly great search engine offering, but indexing has to be at the core of this offering, at least for me. If users realized this is just Bing results with a few enhancements and additional result sources mixed in, they might not be as willing to pay for what they could technically get for free elsewhere, albeit with significantly less privacy.
That said I wish Kagi all the luck in the world. As the original dev who planned out and built the initial backend implementation in Crystal and put together their early engineering team, I can at least say they are building on rock-solid, very fast and privacy-oriented foundations, and this is a truly web-scale product in terms of the infrastructure design.
My problem with google is that it often tries to figure out my search intent and then return results accordingly. the attempt might be commendable but for many types of searches they fail miserably. when they misread my search intent, the results are completely awful.
and to make matters worse, 95% or more of the web isn't even being shown to users and so I keep getting the same stupid search results: which is fine for many cases but not all cases. sometimes I need more than just another post by NBC.
I will say, google search is very good at technical searches, that's for sure. But, for example, they totally suck if you're looking information or doing research on financial matters or economics.
I have a solution for the google problem, but don't have time to pursue this myself. So anyone interested, steal my idea! (Or bash it in the replies, it's HN after all :D)
Instead of pagerank we need peoplerank. Let's say we build a new elgooG search engine that you can customize by indicating which people you trust. For example I say to trust Paul Graham about the topics entrepreneur and startup. Then, authors like Paul can register a key on elgooG and sign their online articles with that key.
When I search topics related to startups, elgooG knows I trust Paul and will try to find articles from him or anyone that he trusts, or even 3rd grade connections.
It is very difficult to fool such a search engine with SEO optimization, since the user actually indicates which people to trust.
I'm pretyy confident it would be a good solution, but I'm afraid it's very hard to start up.
If you steal my idea, please consider giving me a 1% stake (or less) in your company ;D.
I sort of like where the idea is going, but I don't like that it just depends on trust. People would become search engine "influencers" that you follow, and would get paid to bless certain articles, as along as they exude an air of trustworthiness. So in a sense, instead of Google being the ad server, the people you follow are.
Maybe a combination of trust and reputation would work better, but you might still get groups of people vouching for each other's recommendations. I guess it's not an easy problem.
This algorithm would have an extremely bad discoverability an would be extremely susceptible to platformization. How would you find Melcher writing about car engine maintenance on Bent Piston forum when you yourself rank KingsEgg on Vroom forums as the authority on engine maintenance?
Which article do rank higher: one by Melcher that is highly ranked by large number of "random" individuals or the one recommended by KingsEgg?
Google can be the next Google if they just stopped being evil for a second:
1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome extension.
2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with what it thinks I want.
3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search results. Where I can narrow down the search results using additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to weed out spam and narrow my search accurately.
I always thought Facebook getting into search could be big since they have really good engagement data based on what people post and like but I was just listening to TWIST (https://youtu.be/KfibbbLeT3c?t=4014) and they made a great point about the potential of Apple Spotlight Search being a way for Apple to expand into search and advertising. If Apple ends up turning spotlight into a proper search engine across web and apps it could really take a decent portion of the market from Google and FB, especially since all of the premium users are already in the Apple ecosystem.
The dream search engine would always be a click/swipe away and have access to all of your personal data/documents and the web, if Apple wants it CMD+SPACE could really be that.
The perfect search engine would be powered by humans with a search engine. Google is fantastic but there is no human understanding of the needs and wants that can be conveyed through series of keywords.
For example when I type "best humidifiers" I want a suggestion that is ideally based on accurate anecdotes of people who've experienced a brand in a variety of context and edge cases.
What google gives me is a cnet article listing Top 10 in 20XX. This is why I add reddit to the end of the search query now.
> For this new generation, privacy is necessary, and invasive ads are not an option.
This is a red flag to me. I would like if this were true for a next gen anything, but in my experience truly next gen experiences - the kind that spread like wildfire and displace incumbents - have no reason to make promises about privacy or ads. Why would they, if they have a product that consumers want to use?
Search is the wrong way to look at it. It needs to answer questions, like an oracle.
Anyway, Google is getting less relevant because the technology is getting better than "good enough", and any additional tech that Google adds is not really all that useful. It's like PCs. You don't need a faster one because your old one can do word processing just fine.
Nitpicking here.. but the title and article are presumptuous are out-of-touch in 2022. Google is primarily an advertising company. Gmail, YouTube, Android, Mobile Apps, Google Home, Maps, devices, Search App all synergistically funnel users towards advertisers. G-Cloud and G-Pay may be among the few exceptions to that but also constitute Google. Point being: you cannot be the Next Google by building a better search engine, just like you can't be the Next Microsoft by building an email system better than Outlook or a desktop OS better than Windows.
Some days I wonder what would stop me writing my own web crawler and building my own damn search engine from scratch. I can't ever come up with a hard reason it wouldnt work in 2022, other than the dynamic javascript blogspam that may be more challenging to trawl for meaningful content these days. Perhaps this is a win-win: The shit I can't crawl I wouldnt want to read anyways.
Compete with google? Who gives a shit. I just want to be able to hit a full text index that points back to URLs. I don't need instant PhD-tier answers for life questions.
Let's be honest here, If we remove ads, and blocked all SEO spam domains, Google results are good! I've never seen any new search engines including the new ones, even close to the quality of Google results.
In my view Google could possibly be the next Google. They're leading in AI right now and if they can get the magic we've seen in some of their papers into products like Search or Google Assistant it would be major moment.
Why is this always a given? Yes, privacy is good, but honestly, I find what I'm looking for in the first few links about 99% of the time with Google, because of the lack of privacy. They have 20 years of search history on me, including maps searches. They know where I live and where I go and what I like and what I buy, and they can read all my email.
And I get better search results because of it.
If I search for [haircut], I get the cheap places near me, because Google knows I'm cheap when it comes to haircuts, because they've seen where I've gone before. To get that on an anonymous search engine, I'd have to search for [cheap haircut near $home_address], so now I've had to type extra words and I've given up my privacy anyway, just with extra effort.
I'm not the biggest fan of Google knowing that much about me, but I also know it gets me great results, and that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make (and lots of other people are too).
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
And that's by the way why Google is still successful as well. Because it literally still is a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers without needing to do anything else. The only way to beat that is to make it even better while not making it more complicated which is very hard to do.
[+] [-] legohead|3 years ago|reply
For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple enough. Circus Circus actually has a waterslide, but if you dive deeper (read a hundred reviews manually) you find out parts are often shut down, and the hotel itself is quite trashy and smells bad and has bad service (explains the really cheap room rate). But do you find that information on blogs? No way, they just include all the hotels with pools and copy in the verbiage directly from the hotel websites or other blogs.
There's probably an actual traveler blog out there that tells you all this and has great information, but it's hidden by all the SEO optimized trash blogs.
And this example can be applied to so many things we do all the time. Try to find a product you want on Amazon without spending half a day sorting through reviews and trash blogs.
So, personally, I think the future will be actual human service. I'd pay a few bucks to call up a service to answer these questions definitively for me.
[+] [-] chrisshroba|3 years ago|reply
- good coffeeshops
- tacos
- Korean grocery stores
- places that have traditional style al pastor tacos
- finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store
- finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe)
- hot chicken
- canolis
and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you posted to the /r/vegas subreddit asking about the coolest hotel pool in vegas, you'd get a bunch of up to date info.
[+] [-] anticristi|3 years ago|reply
Customer: How is the newly opened Spa?
Hair dresser: Other customers said the water was cold.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
> best hotel pool in vegas.
How is finding the best X at something from I assume hundreds if not thousands of choices, a simple question ? In particular, would asking any human give you the actual answer ?
At best we’d be in the same situation as looking at guide books or Michelin guide kind of rankings, created with human oversight but static in nature. More probably we’d get the most reputable hotel with no actual evaluation if it is effectively better than the myriads of others.
And that’s without digging into what you value in pool experiences vs what any evaluation system took as criteria to rank them.
I think this is an example of how we are trying very hard to simplify problems that are inherently complex. And sometimes it kinda seem to work, so people start forgetting it still is complex and rebuilding it from scratch means reapplying magic on it again.
[+] [-] ALittleLight|3 years ago|reply
I could see a "virtual assistant" version of this where you pay fifty dollars and send a request like "Reservations in Vegas for these dates at a hotel with good pool."
[+] [-] trh0awayman|3 years ago|reply
It was called ChaCha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the reviews from other HN users ...
[+] [-] adventured|3 years ago|reply
And yet Travelocity (and others) would have told you how terrible Circus Circus is in five minutes or less.
22,000 reviews, 3.2 stars out of 5, among the worst in Vegas (among major hotels) with a gigantic number of reviews. Its room rate alone helps you to begin immediately forming a good conclusion about its quality. This isn't a subtle thing.
Oh, but that's not realiable, one might say. Yes it is. It does a great job of approximating the quality of the hotel in question, and it's an exceptionally easy and fast means to narrow with. It isn't a perfect approach (is it really a 3.1 or 3.3 star quality?!?) and doesn't need to be, it just needs to let you know that Circus Circus is garbage, and it does exactly that.
[+] [-] prawn|3 years ago|reply
https://www.oyster.com/las-vegas/hotels/
You can also get some decent mileage out of Booking.com and checking reviews for keywords. That won't help you quickly find the best hotel pool, but it will help you find out what people think of a specific hotel's pool (e.g., Circus Circus).
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|3 years ago|reply
I love the idea. However…
You have invented an influencer hellscape. Not to mention the complete subjectiveness of so many things.
[+] [-] bogomipz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] telchior|3 years ago|reply
I can imagine the first two steps of their process working for a human-assisted search machine. Specifically, the "finding sources of information" and "filtering information" steps. But, I'd imagine the human workers would still need more complex / configurable search tools than Google (which is probably what the workers in the study used to find their sources).
[+] [-] rubyist5eva|3 years ago|reply
So...a travel agent? Nothing beats talking to a person one on one who is actually trained to do this stuff and personalize it to their client.
We've come full circle.
[+] [-] jthrowsitaway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackernewds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SahAssar|3 years ago|reply
I get what you're saying but, does anyone really need the "best" here? why not "good" or "great"?
[+] [-] ip26|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KerryJones|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismcb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tmpod|3 years ago|reply
See [1] for Vegas, for example.
[1]: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Las_Vegas
[+] [-] sydthrowaway|3 years ago|reply
Duh.
[+] [-] boomer918|3 years ago|reply
- who pays for the service (ads? users pay? Average user will never use a paid service if a free one is available)
- how to resist attacks against the algorithm (Google has been fighting spam for decades)
- how to personalize without invading privacy, e.g. Google had an option to search through your email in Google search...it's gone now, I wonder why?
[+] [-] sanxiyn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _jal|3 years ago|reply
Whatever replaces Google will be doing something that Google can't without causing them other problems. The first thing that comes to mind is make them choose traffic vs. advertisers (I don't know, if I had an idea of how to, I would not be writing this), but they're big enough that other wedges could start chipping away at their margins.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago|reply
The solution for o both of these might actually be a paid service. If you have a paid service, there is a possibility of it being profitable with much fewer users. As an example, let’s say you have 1,000,000 users at $10/month, that is a $10,000,000/month which might be enough to run the service and provide a comfortable profit.
With regards to the spam issue, the fact that you have a small user base would be to your advantage. Because there are so many Google users, it is in websites’ economic interests to spend money to try to game the algorithms. With much fewer users, your paid search users may not be worth it for the sites to spend money trying to game your algorithms.
[+] [-] chaostheory|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
Overall it seems very rare anyone ever considers this an engineering problem. Really, what's stopping you from running a search engine?
[+] [-] aaomidi|3 years ago|reply
From what I'm seeing, if you could create a bot free eco system, people will pay for it.
The question is "can you make it bot free". This is gonna be the next trillion dollar company.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|3 years ago|reply
Not to mention, if free search engines keep devolving into an endless sea of spam, people may have no choice but to start paying. There's plenty of things out there people pay for not necessarily by choice but because there's nothing else out there that would accomplish the task at hand.
[+] [-] mmaunder|3 years ago|reply
A respected friend or colleague will tell you that the next Google just works better. That’s what made Google search win: it just worked better. It’s now I found out about it and probably how you did if you’re pushing 50.
We didn’t care about pagerank or know what it is. That came after we used it and wanted to know why it worked better - or we wanted to manipulate he results.
We didn’t read a blog post telling us what’s good.
We were using another search engine and Google arrived on the scene and it was just WAY better. I was using alltheweb. Friends were using other engines. In weeks, everyone smart and productive was using Google.
Google/Alphabet may be a large company now, but never forget how they started. They were just so good we couldn’t ignore them.
That’s how good the next Google will need to be.
[+] [-] davidkunz|3 years ago|reply
An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.
[+] [-] sam0x17|3 years ago|reply
The same goes for DuckDuckGo and others. All of the above use the Bing search API for the majority of their web results which for most use cases is not economically sustainable.
I do think there is a large swath of users who will pay a subscription for a truly great search engine offering, but indexing has to be at the core of this offering, at least for me. If users realized this is just Bing results with a few enhancements and additional result sources mixed in, they might not be as willing to pay for what they could technically get for free elsewhere, albeit with significantly less privacy.
That said I wish Kagi all the luck in the world. As the original dev who planned out and built the initial backend implementation in Crystal and put together their early engineering team, I can at least say they are building on rock-solid, very fast and privacy-oriented foundations, and this is a truly web-scale product in terms of the infrastructure design.
[+] [-] throw8383833jj|3 years ago|reply
and to make matters worse, 95% or more of the web isn't even being shown to users and so I keep getting the same stupid search results: which is fine for many cases but not all cases. sometimes I need more than just another post by NBC.
I will say, google search is very good at technical searches, that's for sure. But, for example, they totally suck if you're looking information or doing research on financial matters or economics.
[+] [-] koonsolo|3 years ago|reply
Instead of pagerank we need peoplerank. Let's say we build a new elgooG search engine that you can customize by indicating which people you trust. For example I say to trust Paul Graham about the topics entrepreneur and startup. Then, authors like Paul can register a key on elgooG and sign their online articles with that key.
When I search topics related to startups, elgooG knows I trust Paul and will try to find articles from him or anyone that he trusts, or even 3rd grade connections.
It is very difficult to fool such a search engine with SEO optimization, since the user actually indicates which people to trust.
I'm pretyy confident it would be a good solution, but I'm afraid it's very hard to start up.
If you steal my idea, please consider giving me a 1% stake (or less) in your company ;D.
[+] [-] avnigo|3 years ago|reply
Maybe a combination of trust and reputation would work better, but you might still get groups of people vouching for each other's recommendations. I guess it's not an easy problem.
[+] [-] friendzis|3 years ago|reply
Which article do rank higher: one by Melcher that is highly ranked by large number of "random" individuals or the one recommended by KingsEgg?
[+] [-] focom|3 years ago|reply
Glad to disagree, DuckDuckGo is good enough if not great.
[+] [-] superasn|3 years ago|reply
1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome extension.
2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with what it thinks I want.
3. A new feature where I can search inside the top 100 search results. Where I can narrow down the search results using additional filters like I do on amazon searching for products. So i can say "5000mah -clickbank" in the top-100 search results to weed out spam and narrow my search accurately.
[+] [-] m_ke|3 years ago|reply
The dream search engine would always be a click/swipe away and have access to all of your personal data/documents and the web, if Apple wants it CMD+SPACE could really be that.
[+] [-] tomatowurst|3 years ago|reply
For example when I type "best humidifiers" I want a suggestion that is ideally based on accurate anecdotes of people who've experienced a brand in a variety of context and edge cases.
What google gives me is a cnet article listing Top 10 in 20XX. This is why I add reddit to the end of the search query now.
[+] [-] codemk8|3 years ago|reply
https://images.app.goo.gl/G1K7J8gZ135x98mz7
[+] [-] helen___keller|3 years ago|reply
This is a red flag to me. I would like if this were true for a next gen anything, but in my experience truly next gen experiences - the kind that spread like wildfire and displace incumbents - have no reason to make promises about privacy or ads. Why would they, if they have a product that consumers want to use?
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
Anyway, Google is getting less relevant because the technology is getting better than "good enough", and any additional tech that Google adds is not really all that useful. It's like PCs. You don't need a faster one because your old one can do word processing just fine.
[+] [-] donnoit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob1029|3 years ago|reply
Compete with google? Who gives a shit. I just want to be able to hit a full text index that points back to URLs. I don't need instant PhD-tier answers for life questions.
[+] [-] georgehill|3 years ago|reply
In fact, I am excited about their new feature multimodal search https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-mum/
[+] [-] alphabetting|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|3 years ago|reply
Why is this always a given? Yes, privacy is good, but honestly, I find what I'm looking for in the first few links about 99% of the time with Google, because of the lack of privacy. They have 20 years of search history on me, including maps searches. They know where I live and where I go and what I like and what I buy, and they can read all my email.
And I get better search results because of it.
If I search for [haircut], I get the cheap places near me, because Google knows I'm cheap when it comes to haircuts, because they've seen where I've gone before. To get that on an anonymous search engine, I'd have to search for [cheap haircut near $home_address], so now I've had to type extra words and I've given up my privacy anyway, just with extra effort.
I'm not the biggest fan of Google knowing that much about me, but I also know it gets me great results, and that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make (and lots of other people are too).