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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

"I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board."

How will you find out about the better alternatives? Are you certain there aren't good alternatives to translate, maps, flights, shopping etc? For any language? I know for a fact that google translate is bad for some ideographic languages and as a result there are competing services that companies have started to use instead (DeepL, etc).

If the competition is better, how will you know? Are you going to dedicate time to hunting down alternatives and testing them out when the Google product is the only thing on screen and it works?

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I think you're overselling your point here. if I search "maps" in google, the google product is the first hit, but several major alternatives are right under it on the first page of results. FWIW, DeepL is also on the first page for "translate".

I don't actually want to discover new products by finding their homepages in my search results. when I am looking for something new, I want to read a review in a publication I trust or at least a discussion among real humans in a forum.

If you search for "route to <city>" on Google, you get a Google Maps embed with directions above search results from services like mapquest. That's what I'm referring to. (Do many people find mapping services by searching that way now? I don't know.)

I am constantly trying new things. I just ditched duckduck go for the third time. I'm using firefox since 2 months. I am aware of alternatives. I WANT to ditch Google too but I get value from it atm that I cannot find elsewhere.

How would you bootstrap such a company?

The solution as I see it is to forcefully break-up Google, such that these services can have their run as independent companies (Maps, flight search, product price comparison, etc.). This has been done before with big companies (e.g. break of Bell Systems into 7 companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)

And what good came out of the remains of Bell Systems afterwards?

The way Google: ship it and make it work really, really well.

The product was so good that people noticed. They were able to take this and leverage this into being search for a really large property, like

Back in the 90s there were lots of search engines. People didn't pick Google because it was hard to switch, they converged on Google because the product was that good - there was Infoseek, HotBot, AskJeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite ... the list goes on.

It's a theoretical problem to have a significantly better search engine and not find users for it.

I'd argue that Google was able to win specifically because they had so much competition. They weren't fighting against one or two massive entrenched competitors in an established space. Search was still pretty new at that point and Google's approach to it was innovative.

Google also had lots of space to improve on its competition when it came to metrics like latency, which paid off. Nobody really has the option to beat them on latency now. That's not really Unfair in any fashion but it is an example of how it would be much harder to dethrone the ruling search engine in 2020.

> People didn't pick Google because it was hard to switch, they converged on Google because the product was that good

That's not how I remember things from that time. I started to use Google, because it was faster than dogpile and the other oddly named search engines.

It wasn't a quality reason. There was the expectation that a search for information would take longer than a single click, so a little digging wasn't an issue.

My experience was that the quality of the search results were much better.

I experienced that as well, but the reason we used Google at that time was the speed that was sorely lacking is all other offeri we used.

Most of those independent companies wouldn't have a good revenue stream no? I really doubt Google Maps is sustainable simply by selling API access.

It and especially the more niche google products seem to be provided as a value add to their other services (i.e search in this case).

Awww, you mean parts of the monolith would have to compete on merit with all the other companies that are having to compete on merit?

What a terrible shame...

It will be a terrible shame when I no longer get real-time traffic on the small streets, yes.

I use OSM multiple times per week, but I still start GMaps anytime I need to drive somewhere.

Google Maps is essentially TripAdvisor with better search, but fewer reviews. In addition, Google Maps is probably the most used GPS routing software these days.

They would do fine standalone, either following a path like TripAdvisor or Garmin or both.

I just use both DDG and Google if needed via !G. That way i get more results from different sources.

DDG has an IRC channel on Freenode, I went one day asking about result quality when searching for Python stuff because it used to send me on documentation pages for old versions.

Something happened, because a few weeks later it appeared that DDG started getting me results for the current version of Python.

You might want to try to reach out to DDG if you have some improvement suggestions.

Someone will mention better alternatives here, after all I've been hearing about how ddg blows Google out of the water a couple times every week here for years.

Generally speaking, HN posters are not the people who are going to be harmed by anti-competitive behavior or Google filling the first screen of results with their own products. It's ordinary people who use the web.

You could probably argue that ordinary people don't care about quality and they're best served by using the vertically-integrated Google product, though...

Ddg is acceptable but it doesn’t blow Google out of the water at all.

It’s miles ahead for me because of tracking etc, but I can’t see how anyone could think the actual search results are better

Every time in the last couple of years that DDG hasn't had a decent result, and I've used '!g' to see what else might come up, I've been very disappointed... usually a grab bag of crap sites with barely any relevance to my original search direction. We probably have very different searches.

What about translation tools or maps. Hear of any good ones on here?

I may be an outlier but I haven't had a good experience with DDG for a while.

I don't really feel like I would recommend it.

As DDG was mentioned, feel free to come check out Runnaroo.

Similar to Startpage, the base for organic web results is Google, but it also includes additional vertical sources layered in to provide greater relevance.

It also respects literal searches with quotation marks, which is a common gripe on HN.

Still very new, but improving and growing rapidly.

Example search for React.js - https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js

Existing monetization comes from the new Web Monetization API [0] standard (through Coil members) and as part of the Brave publisher program.

[0] https://webmonetization.org/

Thanks for the heads up. I did some quick tests and it’s much better than DDG and 2020 Google, at least for my use case.

It's mostly been word of mouth for me - Japanese friends telling me DeepL is way better for Japanese, people on HN complaining about Google Chrome performance vs Firefox.

And competitors are coming pretty close to other Google stuff, Apple Maps is actually getting pretty good for me right now but mainly lacks the metadata about things like restaurant menus + the flexibility of routing like cheapest train fares or searching by last train and what not that Google has - honestly seems like low hanging fruit. Nobody gets close on search yet though, I've tried and failed to stick with DDG many times now.

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