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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I actually just wrote a post on "Is Search Solved?":

https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/

In which, I actually discuss the fact I think Google is not going anywhere, but... I do think their search algorithms are starting to breakdown.

However, it really doesn't matter. They have the market share, the money, and more importantely, the best search query parser (for the moment). Even if their searches do get worse and worse, people aren't going to jump ship.

So I fully agree, "Google doesn't need innovation", they simply need to keep users happy - which IMO they are doing well enough (although we've started to see cracks).

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For me a key point of search stagnation is the search field / keyword search. There's so much more we could do if we enabled users to be explicit about search _context_ but it's hard to express that with the humble search field. Googles solution to context has been collecting tons of data on us and trying to guess. But what if we enabled users to be explicit about context e.g. looking for restaurants enabling users to express "I'm looking for a romantic location we haven't tried before for an evening with my wife" vs. "I'm at a client at 1pm and need a quick snack on the way"

I agree, I use https://duckduckgo.com for the majority of my searches now and it just keeps getting better. Plus ddg has much better privacy policies.

DDG misses the mark for me way too often.

Simple query like "pizza near me" shows awful results. Places that are 10+ miles away. I live in a big city. There's hundreds of pizza places closer to me than the ones it shows.

Movies -- doesn't show listings close to me like google.

No sports scores, like Google.

etc etc. I applaud their efforts, but it's got a long way to go to be anywhere even near Google in terms of utility.

DDG is basically a reskin of Bing search. They only do indexing on a page if a webmaster manually submits it.

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