Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikbye | Hacker News Reader

1. A decent search engine is something you can solo. Sounds like you are thinking of creating a google.com equivalent, which is something else.

BTW: What problems have you identified that google.com has, and what are your suggested solutions?

2. It sounds like you have to decide if you want to make money or solve problems you deem worthy of solving. If it's the latter, make money first. Funds allow you to work on passion projects, even hire a team. Passion projects are not much fun if you worry about paying bills.

3. Problems like global warming is something you won't solve on your own, but a single person can still create valuable contributions. It's not abstract. Simply work on anything that reduces/captures emissions, anything reducing energy use, or technology that replaces that which is heavy on emission.

View on HN

A search engine is not easy to do solo, unless you're targeting a specific niche. A better Google is far more difficult than most people realize. Finally, even if you could pull it off, a lot of people are very attached to their search engines and won't switch easily.

Looks like you didn't get the nuance of the way I answered, I specifically stated creating a google.com equivalent is a big challenge. Either way, OPs statements were poorly phrased, too. A search engine consists of a lot of moving parts. Indexing is not a challenge too great for a solo dev, I've done it myself several times. Crawling is not too challenging for a solo dev, done that, too. A web frontend for the actual searching of the index? Trivial.

Doing any of this at google.com scale? Not happening.

I suggest, like you, OP look into niches. That's how you can break down every one of his 3 statements.

A search engine that specifically rules out every mainstream site? I'd be into that. A search engine built specifically for devs? Again, great. A search engine for blogs not built on Wordpress? Great. An academic search engine? I'd like that, too.

I agree, people are attached, but there are ways to mitigate, at least Duck is trying with their bangs.

A better way to mitigate is creating a niche, like you're suggesting, which is what I only hinted at. Even though I am attached to a particular engine, or website, I would use, IN ADDITION, niche engines.

OK yes I somehow misunderstood your point.

I like the idea of searching with big exceptions. Specifically not searching mainstream sites sounds very interesting. In theory it would penalize those that are successful, but then they would be picked up and prioritized by the bigger search engines, so it could be a hit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com