Ask HN: What would it take for you to switch your search engine? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would it take for you to switch your search engine?

9 pointschris_f16 comments

Search engines have very little user lock-in. For the most part, users just have to visit a different website or change their default search settings to switch.

But it is incredible difficult to get people to switch to a different search engine (just ask Bing).

The HN community is different than the average web browsing population, but what would it take for you to switch your search engine?

(To be fully transparent, I am building an alternative web search tool, so I have additional interest in the answers to this question in addition to it being a good conversation).

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I have tried several times (bing, ddg) to switch away from Google, but I have been disappointed by the results.

I don't really know if other search engines would improve over time as I "trained" them on the subjects that I search for (as I have unwittingly done with google).

As a recent example, Google knows full well that when I search for "hugo" that what I am after is results related to a template engine, not about a film, line of clothing, politician, or poet.

I am currently unwilling to suffer through the bad results phase in the hopes that I can train the search engine up. Even then, once I have trained the search engine on my profile, what will I have gained other than teaching some other aggregator about the things I like?

Interesting, I get "hugo" as the first organic result on Google and 2nd on Bing (and DDG, which is the same as Bing in most cases).

All of them hedge their search intention bet by also providing film information in the side bar.

"Even then, once I have trained the search engine on my profile, what will I have gained other than teaching some other aggregator about the things I like?"

I guess that's the real answer. People are more likely to switch if they have a problem with the search engine they currently use vs. something "better" coming along.

"Better" in search relevance is super subjective as well.

Explicit queries need to be explicit. I'm pretty sure I've had queries where no combination of quotes/plus signs/etc. will convince Google to not "helpfully" expand to near matches or break out phrases, clobbering anything I was looking for in noise.

I wonder if it would make sense to have a few "intent disambiguation" radio buttons to pre-prioritize results. Something like this:

"Purchasing Intent" => comparison shopping sites, retailers "Informational Intent" => Product info pages, review sites "Support Intent" => Forums, blog posts, and Stack Overflow sort of sites

NOTE: #0 is PRIVACY! I'm tired of using a search engine to find e.g. This +That When some results WILL contain both parameters BUT many of others listed contain only This OR That!

Here's my favourites, some of these actually use Google: https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.ecosia.org/

Privacy certainly seems like it is the main reason people would switch. Also second time someone mentioned not requiring all search terms to be present. Quotes around each term definitely helps, but Google doesn't always respect that. Google also has a "verbatim" search option as well.

Correct on the search engines, below are the search indexes used by each:

Qwant = Bing

Startpage = Google

Ecosia = Bing

Google gets worse all the time but its still better than everything else.

Once upon a time if you wrapped something in quotes, Google would search for exactly what you asked for. That hasn't been the case for several years.

I use Google for security research. It tries so hard to protect users that its ruining its search results for anything technical.

Yeah, + used to work and then it was switched to quotes to serve that purpose, but now that isn't total respected either.

I used to think a true research search engine that actually respected boolean operators would be a good thing, but it seemed that the market was so small it wouldn't be worth the effort.

Bing actually respects quotes pretty well.

I want results to be direct links, not something else that redirects.

I want to be able to use URL query strings to specify stuff.

I don't want intrusive CSS/JavaScripts. I have my own settings for fonts, window width, colours, etc, and don't need yours.

I want to be able to tell it to randomize result orders.

I don't want the search to index text which is only available when JavaScript is enabled, try to guess text from pictures, try to follow form submissions at all, etc.

I want to be able to enter advanced search queries, including based on parts of the URL, based on keywords, both exact and approximate matching, and to be able to exclude based on the keywords, based on protocols, on what features the web page may include, MIME types, etc.

I don't want it to try to guess what I mean and correct it; it should instead search for what I type in.

I should hope for good results, when they are available. Options to customize this may help, and maybe also the ability to specify submissions with keywords for feedback so that users can indicate if it is good or not, with the ability to control how well this functions (perhaps with cookies).

If it uses cookies, document what each one does, in order that the user may edit the cookies using their cookies manager to the settings they want. But, allow it to work with cookies read-only or disabled, too.

The search engine should work as well in Lynx as it does in Firefox and other browsers.

It should not be HTTPS-only (although HTTPS is good to have, it shouldn't be mandatory).

It should abide by robots.txt and not index that which is disallowed by the robots.txt.

The user agent string and other request headers it uses should be documented.

I do want it to index plain text files too, and not only HTML.

Another good thing to have would be the ability to set cookies to cause it to permanently exclude certain things by default, if the user wants it (see above about documenting cookies).

I want to be able to get the results in plain text format (and possibly also JSON, CSV/TSV, etc) if the Accept header specifies such a thing.

"I want to be able to tell it to randomize result orders."

That would be a pretty fun feature, I've never seen anyone mention that before.

The reason for this is to avoid problems when the top result is always same one and others will then not be looked at much, so that if random mode is selected then you can have a better chance to look and see if it is good.

Besides the obvious privacy, I do NOT want custom search results.

I want the same search result as someone on the other side of the Atlantic, with a completely different browser history.

Before I answer what would I get in your search engine, that I won't get in Google (assuming I don't care if Google tracks everything i do). All I look in a search engine is am I getting the results for the things I am looking for. I don't see any difference in results between Bing and Google. But I still use Google. I felt some how I like the results on Google (the way they present). Not sure why I don't like the way Bing presents.

Privacy is a big motivation, but to your point, not for most people.

The core benefit is it attempts to pull in the best results from different vertical search source based on search query intent.

Real world example, I play the guitar and search online for guitar tabs (music notation) all the time. I like a website called Songsterr for that, and historically I would search Google for "Songsterr" and then search that website.

Based on my site's model, when someone searches for "{song name/band} tab", it knows to hit the Songsterr API and also display those results directly on the SERP. Same goes for other niche topics, like hiking trails or podcasts.

Right now there are about 30 of these curated data sources for different topics integrated, but I have a list of hundreds of them to add.

The idea is that long term, there will be niche data sources that provide more relevant results for targeted topics.

I agree with you completely. I think Bing is pretty good, but using Google just makes me "feel" comfortable that I am getting the right search results. It's kind of crazy. I just have confidence in it.

Less obviously commercial results. I can’t seem to search for anything on Google without getting the ‘buy X’ interpretation of the term, even if it is not something typically associated with buying something.

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