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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

I'd happily pay one or two dollars a month for search that was significantly better than google. But making a better search engine than google is... highly nontrivial.

Even if you get a few million users paying a dollar a month before you stop sucking, your total revenue is barely equivalent to google's orange juice budget. They have thousands of engineers working on making search better plus a pretty good working search engine plus huge infrastructure. What do you have?

edit: Oh yes, and if you do manage to make search better in a way that google hasn't thought of, your best bet is to sell it to google.

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> for search that was significantly better than google

Why aren't you using Duck Duck Go? [ http://duckduckgo.com/ ]

It's 10 times faster than Google to find stuff if you're a programmer, you can just press J, K like it was VIM and just focus your eyes on the green box to scan like 100 webpages instantly.

It's even faster if you don't use Chromium but a browser with a sane and configurable BACK button (ex. Opera ex. BACKSPACE) instead of moveyour-hand + ALT + ARROW nonsense.

Set homepage to DuckDuckGo and just press backspace with pinky to get back to entering a new search. IMO even if you want to end up at a google service like Google News it's faster, ex. "!news wikileaks"

Really? I don't feel this way at all.

As a long time user of google and someone who has given DDG a significant 'chance' I am still using google as my default search.

Part of the reason is information density; I make a search on google and just instantly get more on the screen, and probably because I am so used to google i absorb that information much more quickly. I look at DDG and my brain hurts just a tiny bit trying to parse it all.. not sure how to explain it exactly. But as someone who really is into the idea of a search engine made for power users / programmers.. ddg just wasn't doing it for me.

Re keyboard shortcuts: this is not a selling point for me, nor should it be for any power user. It is trivial to map backspace to the back button in any leading browser. I personally use 'b' for back, 'j' for down, 'k' for up.

Well it's a completely different cognitive heuristic. Duck Duck Go the heuristic is continuous rapid scanning. For Google: send, receive, digest.

I believe the brain tends to only evaluate around 7+/-2 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_... ) chunks at a time for each comparison anyway so I prefer the minimalism of Duck Duck Go. Which displays 7-9 results in my visual field at the default zoom level. But I agree my original claims were perhaps a bit hyperbolic and there is definitely a role for consumer preference in the search engine market.

I think perhaps we can agree Google is perhaps a bit too rigid in only offering it's single namesake search prompt and should provide further variations of its core product to cater to a variety of heuristics for visual processing of information.

Yeah, there's definitely a major technological hurdle. I was more curious if anyone is actually willing to pay for search. So far, it's been running on the ad-supported model.

Also, I don't have any illusions about killing Google at this point. You don't need to kill Google to make a niche search business that produces a profit, was more my thinking.

> a major technological hurdle

I don't think it's a technological hurdle at all, scraping websites is fairly standard nowadays. The challenge is a logical one. You just need to mentally think up of a better logical algorithm than Page Rank.

Page Rank is a very robust heuristic with many perhaps unwitting parallels to social psychology. How people gain status in groups and social norms are created is similar to how websites rank. Perhaps you could catch up on social psychology theory or other seemingly unrelated fields to see if any sparks fly about how you could apply it to the web.

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