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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

The 'frightening ambition' on display here seems to be to beat out incumbents.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and PG is right to point out that the rewards for doing so are huge (this reads a lot like Zero to One).

But in terms of social impact I look at these ideas, with the possible exception of Moore's Law (albeit they are from five years ago) and think, meh?

How much does an incrementally better Google, a slightly faster GMail (exists, if you're willing to give up spam filtering), a replacement to Oxford/Harvard, a slightly better Netflix really get us? Certainly it doesn't seem to solve any of the major challenges that we face today.

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To replace something you have to offer something better, and often, there's a ton of value there:

- Google: Actually there's a lot to improve on Google, and a ton of value there. Just think that instead of what Google gives on medical info, you'll be refereed to an AI that will ask you questions, and give you top quality information like a medical expert would(or better - more time, better quality content, etc...). Or the million ways better search could help engineers/scientists/lawyers/etc...

Actually i would like to see something like a subscription marketplace for quality search engines(where your query is refered to the most suitable search engine and profits are shared fairly). Would be interesting.

- Replace universities: Just solve the affordability problem. That would be huge enough.

- Ongoing diagnosis - If it works well, and affordable enough, could create plenty of value. But that's a big if.

But the rest, sure they seem mostly about money.

Google already aims to provide better medical results. They recently hired former FDA head Rob Califf to help lead that effort.

I'm also fairly convinced big tech companies will eat up any emerging market that's within it's competency unless there's some core violation of principles. Take Duck Duck Go, for example. They've definitely managed to steal market share away from Google because they clash with Google's lack of concern for pure privacy. Snapchat managed to do the same to Facebook because of their disappearing images, but now that Facebook has incorporated those features into Instagram, that point of difference is dead.

For as long as big tech maintains the startup mindset, challengers will invevitably be swallowed either through competition or acquisition. In my opinion, the most ambitious startups are those pursuing underserved markets encumbered by bureaucratic or corporate incompetency.

The issue with giving advise on medical information is there is no one "right" way. It is the same with a lot of domains like education or finance. In a way it is better for a search engine to put out information in a more meaningfully related way for a user to easily find stuff and be able to get a broader / deeper view of a subject by himself / herself.

If the "Google for Healthcare" can't verify your medication regime, perform a physical evaluation, and order labs and imaging to accompany your medical inquiry, it will never be more than a toy for the masses to scare (or pacify) themselves with.

I think PG phrased the university point poorly. He says he wants to get rid of universities? Really what he wants to get rid of is the undergraduate education system. Universities are primarily places where cutting edge research is done, with students being a secondary concern (they just bring in the money).

There are some decent counter-arguments:

The draw of universities, certainly top ones, is that you physically bring together hundreds, thousands, of people who are eager to learn. This is something you will never get with a MOOC in the same way. You might have a community ten times larger doing 6.00x online, but you don't have that mingling of smart people in different fields. Good ideas (rarely) come out of lectures, they come out of meeting friends for beer or coffee.

That's a very rose tinted view of reality, but some universities like Oxbridge, MIT, Stanford, etc really excel at putting great people in the same room as each other.

Aside from education, universities are by far (in my experience) the best places to meet like-minded people who are a similar age to you. We had societies for everything under the sun. Many people go to university/college solely for the social aspect.

A better search engine is a project that is near and dear to my heart. PG describes the problems with google as trying too hard to give you information you'll like (as opposed to information that is correct) and a loss of focus on the results.

I think a better search engine at least does the following:

1. Focuses on access to technical information. It doesn't need to have up-to-the-minute indexes of reddit, or hollywood whatever magazine. As an example, lets suppose I want to know how to design an HVAC system for a house. If I google "home HVAC design" I get a page full of HGTV installation videos and HVAC company brochures. One result had a single math equation, and a different result had a data table. If I "Better Search" for home HVAC design, I should get almost exclusively technical information, such as equipment lists, equations, and data tables.

2. Allow personalized scraping. If I want to extract math equations and data tables from all websites related to "home HVAC design" this should only take a few clicks. Give the user tools to OCR images from results, extract data from graphs, and import code snippets into their IDE.

3. Call out StackOverflow. Lots of times the answers to technical questions use information that is out of date, or cite solutions/workarounds from webpages that cease to exist. A better search engine would identify situations (not just on StackOverflow) where this happens and put warnings next to any results that make heavy use of dead websites or old information. A better search engine might automatically suggest cached versions of the now-broken links, or suggest that you resubmit the question to whatever community and ask for more up-to-date information.

What does all this do? Hopefully it dramatically changes the productivity of technically-minded people by making research easier.

I actually wish you all the best if you plan to build one. Having said that, you are identifying a niche product which can only survive by charging people money for searching, which more or less caps how ambitious such an idea could be.

I've always suspected it should be possible to charge people in non-monetary ways. That is to say: charge them by having them give you computer resources.

You've still got to monitize those resources though. I think an enterprise subscription model could work well. It could increase productivity.

you seem to be selectively glossing over one: "replace universities", the social impact of which would be unfathomable, but otherwise you're absolutely right.

"Ambition" is the wrong word here.

I think they are actually all paradigm shifts. Medical diagnosis, defeating email, etc. there are incumbents there but the path to beating them is not incremental advantage, it's radical change that gives you an advantage incumbents can't easily replicate.

Edit: really cool that And it looks like it these are being attempted! There are companies doing the diagnosis in the early stage, there is slack, there is duck duck go, etc. Dont see the second Jobsian hardware anywhere though, and don't expect to.

Same here. The examples given are surely ambitious, but the intro had me thinking at the scale of "make accessible the sum total of human knowledge" (Wikipedia) or "create the everything store" (Amazon). Intro and conclusion though were great.

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