Comment by murukesh_s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by murukesh_s | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I switched to bing long time back and haven't felt any difference. They even copied google look and feel to great extend. I did it after google started showing more details in my search timeline than i wanted to see, with it's integration with gmail with which google started scanning my emails for ticket purchases, product orders etc and whenever i searched that product - it says you have purchased this product with order tracking number blah blah.

I am sure bing/msft also does everything they can to 'understand' me, but at least they don't see my browsing history or emails.

Now back to beating Google - I do believe it's possible, but Google will soon catchup with any potential competition. They will catchup because it's their bread and butter and they have perhaps the worlds biggest concentration of technical personnel. The best way to beat any product/company is to be considerably better than it in at least few areas, given the scale of web indexing, that is a very very tough job only few companies can pull through.

Microsoft has/had a good chance to beat Google, but Microsoft is considered a bigger evil/corporate than Google, so they have a slim chance to emotionally overcome Google, not to mention technical capability. But they can perhaps open source bing in an effort to beat Google, provided they have the will and moolah to do so. When I mention open source, it's not the code, but the underlying search index, exposed as an API, free of use for anyone/any product. That will dramatically shift the emotion as well as the usage towards bing. I even mentioned this during an internal bing meetup event (I am part of a bing beta testers group), but of course no one listens.

A startup can also try to beat Google in their wildest dreams if they can associate themselves with the younger crowd like snapchat did and the younger crowd somehow finds it hip/cool to not use Google and use that service instead, and provided they get a decent web search data/index from established competition like bing or they manage to index themselves. These are few of the possibilities.

I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about Microsoft making their index public. Maybe among certain crowds like this, but what would it gain us? I couldn't just send a PR to help improve it; the only benefit I can see is transparency and perhaps a fun, maybe even useful visualization.

Also, the image of a "hip" Google competitor like Snapchat seems tremendously unappealing, personally.

> I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about Microsoft making their index public.

It's not just about consumers, but a plethora of other startups who can then use the index to build something creative on top of it. For e.g., you currently have bing/google customise certain type of websites with custom view for quicker access (IMDB, Wiki etc). However there is a limit a big company can be creatively about this.

Imagine a search engine where any user can submit a custom widget under a market place and consumer users can then install that as a plugin. For e.g., stock brokers can install stock widget, programmers can install document/stack overflow search and so on as a quick widget to see the top result without opening the link.. since it is community maintained, it will be proactively maintained by the community itself. That alone can topple something like Google if there is enough momentum (E.g. see VSCode overtaking Sublime text.) That is just one possibility. And it can also improve the search results as users may voluntarily come up to improve the result accuracy.

Other possibilities include voice based search, gesture search, integrated search within any mobile or smart watch app etc. With current licensing model, other startups have severe limitations in obtaining search results from the wast internet. This could explode and perhaps take over everything.

Ah, that makes much more sense now. You want to enable a community of plugins/widgets/apps built on top of the index. That's fascinating. I feel it would probably require some centralized base set of widgets similar to what Google already provides. That way the average user can just type "5 minute timer" without having to manually install the widget first. Quality/security outside that base set might be nightmarish. People put a lot of stuff into search bars.

May I remind you about when it was hip and cool to use Google? Google's tried to keep that image going as long as possible, but as a giant corporate behemoth, it's hard to realistically expect that to hold up forever.

That's very much true; I should have been clear my objection was primarily to something Snapchat-like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com