Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

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If you think about it Google is used in a weird way these days, that's completely different from its early years, so it does make me wonder why "replace Google" wouldn't be reasonable.

I rarely visit sites out of a band of 15 or so, and I only use Google to find pages within those sites (which itself follows a normal distribution). I.e. I know I want a page from stackoverflow, or Wikipedia, or arxiv, or Reddit, or Yelp but rather than navigating to those sites I just cmd+T in Chrome, type keywords, and scroll to the site's link on the result page which is almost always at the top anyways.

I'm sure others use Google like this too (varying on your culture's go-to sites), so does it even need to exist as it does right now? I could imagine a new app that indexes just within this band of sites. And Google or some other app is relegated to "the rest" for rare occasions.

This is what DuckDuckGo's "bang" searches are good for.

Not only DDG, we developing Bubblehunt (https://bubblehunt.com) - common-based search platform, where you can create own search system without code.

Add interesting sites and resources in your profile and get your search system. Now it's public beta, you can add unlimited resources, but now 1 link - 1 indexed page. And we working on deep indexing system. We have crawler, but we need improve our platform, architecture and other.

On our platform now >150.000 resources, that handpicked and added by users.

I think when you are designer and add 1000 best resources for design - it can be better search system for this topic.

And you can provide your opinion for ANY topic. It can be more transparent, flexible, democratic search system, where people select best resources for search. And where every opinion is important and can be different.

Sounds cool! But why do we need to use a Twitter or FB account to sign up? I am trying to eliminate the closed silos from my life right now, because they represent the polar opposite of "transparent, flexible, democratic".

I agree, we will soon be able to register via Google and mail. Initially, we chose to twitter or facebook to register real people. But we often hear that we need registration without social accounts, so soon we will do it :)

Thats neat but it does discourage poking around at new sites and seeing what else might be out there and more useful. I remember in the early days of stackoverflow - thats how I found them... random google searches. Then I bookmarked it.. etc.

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