Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore

I work on Google Search. Having one search engine per country doesn't seem like the correct approach to the problem.

> Every country has a mammoth collection of valid results for your query.

Having seen the corpus of content available from each language, this is categorically false. Consider Wikipedia, which is a fairly ubiquitous information source on the web that provides answers to tons of searches. English documents: 5.4M, Romanian documents: 376k.

Perhaps the solution to the OP's woes is more tools for filtering. This post conflates the ideas between language and country. Search typically returns to you results and search features that are in the query language. Today's solution where filtering is done through query refinement and query operators seems to cover a lot of use cases already.

Further, by having an integrated product, ML models can learn behaviors specific to certain locales where those behaviors differ from region to region, and balance with more universal behaviors that apply to more than one region.

Here's what I get for "iPhone price": http://i.imgur.com/VOE0Q1q.png which shows the actual prices.

The thesis of the post seems to be that it's a bad idea to have one search engine because people will reverse engineer it. That's true, but the billions of dollars flowing into Google means they throw the smartest people at staying ahead of SEO. It seems pretty effective.

> Sooner or later the internet will have to be decentralized.

It sounds like a pipe dream. Centralisation exists for a reason: it's far easier to coordinate complex efforts within a single organisation, rather than a host of unreliable entities. Supposedly, we develop a protocol where we share the responsibility of crawling, indexing, and searching the whole web. Isn't is unrealistic to expect that millions of computers (an optimistic estimate considering number of Google servers dedicated to Search) would voluntarily want to participate in the effort? Who ensures redundancy, speed, and abuse handling?

If a single company commanding the whole power is untrustworthy, a million entities having no stake in the game is multifold more.

I couldn't agree more - one search engine is a terrible thing. But for other reasons. It's amazing to see how in other areas people complain about monopolies but when it comes to our window to the digital world, most of us seem to be fine with it. One US monopoly that dictates what should be important for us, filters what we see based on secret algorithms, forces us to "optimize" our websites in this and that way along their "standards". Google has good technology but we should wake up and see they are not the altruists they like to tell everyone.

The author says a lot of correct things. When information belongs to one organization, then there is no future. Do you really think that we will receive information only from 1 organization? Monopoly on information, like any other monopoly will not be eternal.

Today the information growing rapidly and they try to place everything on first page - it is impossible to display all the relevant information on 1 page, it is very restrictive.

And I'm not talking about the fact that on this first page there are a lot of advertising links and artificially advanced sites.

Model Yahoo has a future. And we are developing it: we are developing the Bubblehunt project, where each user can create his own search engine. This is decentralization, where each user can act as an independent information provider, like miniGoogle.

A bit of advertising, sorry: https://bubblehunt.com - tell me, what do we need to improve?

We strive to enable each user to influence the quality of Internet search and make it more social, transparent and dynamic.

People are increasingly talking about the need to change something in search.

Google is an excellent search engine, but it hides from us a huge amount of information. Every day born a lot of interesting resources and we get information only from sites that are on the 1 page of search. They become only more popular. And you need to pay money so people see your website!

Is this correct in your opinion? In my opinion, Google will make a huge profit here and this is not very correct. People just do not have alternatives.

One search engine per country seems like the wrong way to slice the problem up to me.

Locality is missing from many queries because the data is generally not relevant or is relevant but not available.

I would propose that instead of breaking it per country, breaking the search based on what sort of content you are looking for.

Programming data or food recipes have nothing to do with locality but finding the nearest place to get chocolate covered coffee beans is.

I know this is going to seem like total self-promotion but this article caught my eye and thought that it would be valid to say I have been thinking about this problem a while, which is why I built https://www.closient.com/ - mind you I am still building it but it does work.

Maybe I am not seeing the same problem as the author is but I do see locality as being a critical part of merging the logical/virtual world with the physical.

The internet is quite independent of countries and regions. Sure, sites are localised and internationalised but the idea of an "[insert country here] internet" is meaningless. One of the major reasons that the internet is successful is that it is effectively borderless.

Personally, when I know that a certain topic is of high value to advertisers, I don't even bother googling anymore, and try to find someone qualified instead. For example, I recently was trying to look up theory behind working out, how differenr muscles work, how nutrition works and all that - but there're so many people who're trying to sell their courses, apps, books and stuff, that I have no idea how to go around looking for unbiased and at least semi-scientific source of information.

Edit: I would be thankful for pointers as to why this comment was downvoted, so I can increase quality of my content in the future.

Of course Google has its short comings. But I don't see "a search engine per country" is going to change anything. First of all, why limit the boundary to countries? There could be vastly different areas in the same country or two countries with similar culture and languages. Second not every country can afford / has enough resource for setting up their own Google. Search engine requires expertise that builds up through many years of experience. Instead of reinventing the wheel for every country, why not work on better localisation of existing search engines?

Google works surprisingly well with languages other than English. I've been looking for Russian-language originals of some of Chekhov's short stories and plays, and pasting, e.g., "Чехов чайка"into the search bar finds the full text of The Seagull (on a .ru site) with no problem. I'm not sure how having a Russian-only search engine helps here.

Google is not the only search engine available. Bing has still a big market share in the US, Yandex in Russia, and Seznam in the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, the dominance of Google often means that SEO follows their ideas but often we see SEO masters adjusting to these search engines too because they want to reach also their users.