Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

As with most supposed Google killers, it suffers from the small issue of being terrible.

Right now I'm in Los Angeles and looking to buy a roll of film. When I search for "where to buy film in los angeles":

- Google gives me three top Maps results, all small photo stores relevant to my search, a Yelp results page, some relevant reddit discussions with recommendations, and then sites for some individual businesses.

- Yep gives TripAdvisor results for movie theaters, Fandango, ZipRecruiter results for film jobs, film studios, and some more theaters (and also an article about rent control for some reason).

>Right now I'm in Los Angeles and looking to buy a roll of film. When I search for "where to buy film in los angeles":

I remember I was in school they'd teach you how to formulate search queries. You wouldn't ask questions like "how to bake a cookie", you'd use keywords like "cookie recipe". Search engines have progressed much since those days, such that you can ask questions and it would mostly know what you were looking for, but obviously a less sophisticated search engine can't do that?

I’d encourage all those who believe this is just a keyword issue to try to find a search on Yep that produces film stores in LA. I just tried like 10 incantations to no avail

“Film store in los angeles” gives me DVD stores on yellowpages.com as the 3rd result…

To be honest I'm not even quite sure what you mean when you say "film stores". It could mean stores that sell photographic film, or stores that sell movies. Presumably you mean the former, but I certainly wouldn't call stores that sell film as "film stores". They'd most likely be photography stores or maybe at big box/department/pharmacies. In that respect, asking for "film stores" is like asking for "bacon stores".

Man I admire how you want yep.com to be successful. I want it too.

At this point anyone who will even try to build a search engine will have my backing because God this world deserves another search engine.

> stores that sell photographic film, or stores that sell movies

You'll be happy to hear that Yep selects neither for top positions: https://yep.com/web?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all get this perfectly right.

Other searches are much worse.

"los angeles, where to purchase roll of film" top 3 results: https://i.imgur.com/UxEXD0N.png

1. The movie Battle: Los Angeles on Vudu

2. A fake viagra spam with "la" in the domain

3. The LA muncipality definition of an "Unincorporated Area"

I am not from the USA but I was going to respond to say I don't know if "film stores" have existed for decades, so searching for "photography store" or "camera store" would be far more appropriate... but sadly Yep fails at "photography store in los angeles" and for "camera store in los angeles" only gave one good result :(

I can't wait for the upcoming FilmStores.app that needs to use your microphone, gps, and camera.

Even if you don't understand the intent, google does. That is what makes it so good. So do a few others. After you compare, yep has a ways to go :)

https://www.google.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://yep.com/web?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://neeva.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://search.brave.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles

Similarly, I searched for the name of my product (Streamie) and just got porn results.

I mean..

"Camera store Los Angeles"

and

"Photography store Los Angeles"

Both pulled up full pages of results wkth just websites of stores that sell film.

Your search-fu is atrophied, if it ever was any good.

Non-ML heavy search engines search for identical text on the page. So if you want a store that sells film, you need a keyword combination that would appear on their website; not a vague question or request to a mystical search AI.

That's searching for specific types of shops, which is different from looking for film. (Your second search is also meh, including truly only 1 relevant result)

> if you want a store that sells film, you need a keyword combination that would appear on their website; not a vague question

Do you suspect "camera stores" in Los Angeles include neither the words "film" nor "Los Angeles" on their sites?

All my keywords are found in every first page Google result (" Top 10 Best Film Camera Store in Los Angeles").

My First Try

https://yep.com/web?q=Camera+store+in+Los+Angeles

Pick the first result.

It's https://www.camphotobur.com/

Which is, admittedly, in Burbank.

1. You're right people should do that

2. It doesn't matter, because not everybody will and it's easier to make a better product than educate and change the habits of the world.

(Especially when it's now okay to do both on some search engines, but only one option on others, with no instruction manual on which is which)

First the SEO industry owned google for these question searches, and then Google realized that just making them work was easier than trying to change human behavior.

Kagi returns as the top two results:

* a Yelp page with the title "Top 10 Best 35mm Film in Los Angeles, CA", which seems to have the results you're looking for

* A reddit discussion where someone asks the exact same question, and gets some seemingly OK answers

The rest of the results are a mix of film rentals, film school, instructions on how to get a filming permit, etc.

Even duckduckgo does not seem to be able to do local search. Especially outside the US. Only Google seems to be able to to do it for some reason.

But in general terms both Google and Duckduckgo seem to be broken and they give almost the same results for most other queries. Which has become universally bad in a lot of cases. With either SEO spammed sites on top or just the wrong results shown, with the search engine ignoring words in the query. Hopefully these alternatives find a solution to that so that atleast non-local search improves.

The search space is really broken. So as long as a search engine can actually search even if it cannot do local to begin with, would be a great start.

Google is a large, horizontal platform. My intuition is the next Google killers will be specific to verticals, health comes up on HN a lot. All that to say, if I were yep I would focus on search that avoids big, corporate, SEO stuff and connects users with thoughtful, small creators. I would not focus on commerce eg film, as it’s a crowded vertical full of Google, Shopify, Etsy, and other large e-commerce players.

These already exist. Product searches start directly at Amazon. Food delivery searches start directly at Doordash.

Good point, I’m sure more exist today and will be created in the future.

You mean like PubMed?

> small creators

That's roughly what search.marginalia.nu does.

Yeah, my goal is to expand to add more verticals in the same rough neighborhood of exploration and discovery.

At least in the intermediate term, I don't think it's possible to create an "everything"-offering like Google's. I also don't know if that is desirable either, at least not if the goal is to encourage a sense of agency on the Internet.

> Yep gives TripAdvisor results for movie theaters, Fandango, ZipRecruiter results for film jobs, film studios, and some more theaters (and also an article about rent control for some reason).

So, the search engine from an SEO company is actually showing results from industries that are highly SEO optimized. (Movies, Jobs, Travel are all huge SEO consumers).

Also, for those not in the USA, it suffers from lack of regional contextualiation.

In Google, if I put my suburb in, I get the Wikipedia page for the suburb, a map showing local places, the local high school website, etc.

In Yep, the only results are for my suburb's namesake in Ohio.

We don't process visitor location in any way at the moment. There is no local search on Yep yet.

If it stops Wikipedia asking for donations I’m all in

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