Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

Honest question. I have used DuckDuckGo and Brave Search and although they seem to do the job for generic searches they really suck for very specific searches.

How likely is for one of these search engines to catch-up technologically to Google's sophistication? I really can't see a clear trajectory for them to compete with Google's quality.

View on HN

on the contrary. for what it's worth, I think google search is finally open to disruption. the tech required to compete with them is finally commoditized enough that it's financially doable, plus, and most importantly, they've screwed up their search results so much now that google search is just not that good anymore.

I also think that they're "too" clever with their search to their detriment. We tend to think in terms of text search and are looking for results that match what we want. I'd prefer not to have a machine assume I actually intended something else. Just give me great text search where I can perform various inclusions/exclusions and you'll win the market

Exactly. If I search for "red car" with quotes, I don't get why I get results about purple wagons.

It's like going to a pub and ordering a steak and getting a burger instead. No, I don't want your damn burger, I am not going to pay for it, I'm just going to try another pub. But wait, there's no pub that delivers what you've actually ordered.

Another hypothetical example that obviously doesn't give you purple wagons anywhere. Why not use a real example? Should be really easy if this is such a widespread problem.

> the tech required to compete with them is finally commoditized

What are you referring to? Not even DDG has their own index.

What makes Google a lot more useful than the alternatives is the vast amount of “widgets” they have.

For example when searching for a persons age, in shows up instantly in a large font on top. When searching for “champions league today”, you will get all soccer games for today neatly presented right inside of Google.

I haven’t seen another search engine that makes accessing this type of information this easy to access. And the sheer amount of widgets and engineering power behind them probably makes it harder to catch up to Google for the small players.

DDG also has widgets. But they don't have good localized results. That's where Google really excels. Any non-English search queries are just bad on alternative search engines. Maybe they're impossible to get right if you don't have programmers around the world or there's just no focus on those for the other search engines.

I think text search is what actually matters most. Image search, book search, maps, video search, widgets are just conveniences.

I don't actually look for the widgets or Wikipedia results.

They will never catch up because Google is the only one dedicating enough engineering to match the growing amount of information, and their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results.

There is a growing sentiment, mine included, that Google search isn't getting better. In fact, I feel it's markedly worse for many queries. The problem for me are all the blogspams out there. These -should- be easy to just punt, but alas, they do not. I'd gladly switch to any search that didn't show me such results.

My growing disdain for Google isn’t even about their tech. In the beginning, Google’s SRP was an ad or two, followed by ~10 magically-relevant <a> links. For some years they were praised for a restrained approach.

Today, the SRP is ads, the info box, the Reddit-cluster, the Quora-cluster, images, videos, “people also searched…”, “did you mean…”, and somewhere near the bottom a couple of those good ol’ fashioned links for old time sake.

Do not want.

I share the sentiment. Unfortunately it means other engines struggle even more, because they are all using roughly the same basket of techniques. I’m familiar with the claims that DDG and Brave serve equally good or better results.

An insightful breakthrough in quality that vastly reduces the computing and engineering required to serve great results that keep up with expanding information, similar to what Google did for search 20 years ago, would be wonderful, but it won’t come from DDG or Brave unless they can develop new models that completely replace their current search products.

I don't know if it's really Google getting worse or the web (or perhaps even the world) is getting worse. I have the impression it's more the latter than the former, and suspect other search engines will struggle with blogspam just as much.

I think it's both. Google does seem to editorialize search results but the web's also becoming more obsessed with SEO and some sites are just hard to search, either internally or with an external search engine.

Brave is already comparable in quality to Google IMO, to the point where I maybe go to Google once every couple of weeks, if that. Superior, if you're searching for anything at all "controversial" that Google bans or demotes. And where it knows it's lacking, it gives you the option to mix in Google results if you'd like. I'm very impressed with Brave Search. I'm also disappointed and annoyed that Apple completely controls iOS search engine selection and doesn't allow adding custom search engines at all. Safari is the best mobile browser hands down, except for this "inconvenience". iOS Brave is worse than Safari, at least for me.

>their level of effort sets the pace of increasingly high user expectations for search results

The results are not relevant. Either the expectations are not very high, either they do a poor job.

They actually had better search results before using very sofisticated algorithms and trying to outsmart the users.

Google search results are not very relevant and are poisoned with lots of spam.

Most technical aspects of searching were solved and are now common knowledge.

It amazes me why no one is trying to do a better engine. It doesn't have to do everything Google does, it just has to do text search.

Maybe it's hard to get money from search unless you also track users, store their data and sell ads?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com