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Comment by tandr | Hacker News Reader

I think the fact that after a long while there are new search engines (Kagi was introduced very recently on HN, now this) should be a wake up call for Google - their search has lost some shine for quite a while. Hopefully something will come out of this - competition is good.

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My first search on Alexandria was "UTC time". Google gives me the current time in UTC, which is all I needed. Alexandria gave me...a lot of links to click to find what I'm looking for.

Google search is a lot better than people give it credit for.

I agree, Google's instant answers are quite good and have improved but actually searching to find a site seems to be getting worse and is riddled with paid sites on the top.

When I need a clock I'll be sure to use Google.

Strictly speaking, that's more in the domain of BonziBuddy or Alexa than internet search engine.

What Google arguably struggles with is surfacing relevant documents, that is... search.

You still have the current UTC time in the top links. Googles knowledge graph is a part of the problem with their results.

This doesn't add up, at all. I have a clock on my computer. This new search engine doesn't function like a clock for you, so Google Search is better.

Kagi does this. I have switched 100% to Kagi, not affiliated.

we're exploring adding instant answers in clean way at Breeze; leaning towards using open-source library &/or external API to compute vs. building in-house

also adding premium tier that's alerts + ad free + feeling lucky that would take user to top result, which is a UTC page, re: https://breezethat.com/?q=UTC+time

I just tried breezethat and had to scroll past 6 ads (two screenfuls on my iPhone 10) to see a single result. I know ads are necessary but this is punitive.

yes, mobile is awful right now; we've mostly fixed that issue on laptop / desktop

4 of 6 are google's and have to include -- iterating some designs internally that refactor how they're presented on mobile

I have been using Kagi since it was introduced here on HN.

I find it absolutely great to use.

I find its results to be of much better quality than Google.

Google search shows a lot of SEOd results which are absolutely horrible in quality, filled with Adsense ads, and have Amazon affiliate links in them.

Kagi is a breath of fresh air for me.

I also use You.com sometimes. When I am exploring something for the first time, you.com is my place to go. It gives one a good lay of the land which is missing from others.

I still find Google to be the best for looking up code syntax, simple solutions and so on.

But when I am looking for something that depends on opinion, I find Kagi to show much better results and not SEO vomit. (When one wants direct facts even Bing is sufficient.)

On some days my Kagi usage surpasses my Google usage.

Competition is definitely good. But this thing is a toy compared to not just Google, but all the other major search players out there. Hopefully it will continue to advance.

At some point, AI and NLP and raw processing power will have progressed so much that "search" is not a problem anymore, and I think we're getting there. Google can up their game but it won't matter much. The only thing they have left is brand recognition.

IMO search has had its goalpost moved. It used to be about scale, technical challenges, bandwidth, storage, etc. It is still about that, but a significantly harder challenge to solve has come up: searching in a malicious environment. SEO crap nowadays completely dominates search, Google has lost the war.

Simply put, I believe that Google sucks at search, in the modern context. It is great at indexing, it has solved phenomenal technical challenges, but search it has not solved. Why do I have to write site:stackoverflow.com or site:reddit.com to skip the crap and go to actual content? Why can my brain detect blogspam garbage in 0.5 seconds of looking but billion dollar company Google will happily recommend it as the most relevant result above a legitimate website?

I feel this 12 year old XKCD is still relevant: https://xkcd.com/810/ .

> but billion dollar company Google will happily recommend it as the most relevant result above a legitimate website?

Because the site most likely is laden with Google Ads, it's in their interest to show you that garbage and not what you're actually looking for.

You can just append “Reddit” or “stackoverflow”, you don’t need to write “site:Reddit.com”

No, I've seen SEO spam sites starting to take advantage of this trend by mentioning "reddit" on their pages.

Google has necessarily arbitrary criteria by which pages are ranked. Because Google is the game in town, anyone with a primary goal of driving traffic will pursue those metrics (i.e. SEO). To the extent that those criteria deviate even slightly from actual good results, large parts of the internet will dilute their content to pursue them, which both lowers their quality and further drives down the gems of the internet.

The ranking would have to vary over an infinite spread of purposes for webpages, and it would have to converge almost perfectly to what is actually most helpful. Among all the technical problems, Google will not optimize correctly against ads for the same reason that websites trying to drum up affiliate purchases and ad revenue won't put content quality above SEO.

When recipes return to having the recipe and ingredients first, followed by an optional life story,I'll revisit my assessment.

Google Research is also one of the top (NLR|IR) R&D gigs in town - they discovered BERT, a model that has re-defined how NLP is down and the respective paper describing it already collected 800 citations by the time it was published based on a pre-print spreading like a wildfire.

This technology is now part of Google search.

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