Why it’s impossible to compete with Google Search | Hacker News Reader

Why it’s impossible to compete with Google Search

theverge.com

47 pointsisaacfrond24 comments

“People who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it” ― George Bernard Shaw

Is publishing an article 'interrupting'? I find it hard to believe that the Verge editors are going after Google competitors and tapping them on the shoulder to let them know it can't be done while they're doing it.

Also, the quote is actually not attributable to Shaw. Seriously, look it up. It's one of those motivation porn fake quotes.

Uh, i never heard this quote. It‘s driving me nuts that people literally interrupt discussions working on solutions by saying how it‘s impossible and blocking… instead of just trying to find a way and think about all the alternatives, that they haven‘t even thought about starting to think about. Thanks for the quote.

No worries. Here's a whole bunch more related quotes: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/impossible-quotes

:-)

I thought that was a Chinese proverb. Turns out the origin is unknown: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/26/doing/

Pretty sure Confucianism greatly values conformism, so such proverb would be uncharacteristic.

I should have left off the name.

I donno, Kagi has pretty much guaranteed google is now my third most-used search engine. I know I'm just one person, but I've nearly excised google from my life, and it's great.

I haven't gotten around to trying out Kagi, but I had the same experience with DuckDuckGo, and I haven't used Google search in enough years that I'm no longer sure of the number. Suits me just fine. At first, I would search on DDG and fall back to !g if I didn't find what I wanted, but I haven't bothered with that in a long time.

All the recommendations for Kagi. I never imagined I would pay for search, but after using it for free the value proposition was abundantly clear.

Yeah, thanks to Kagi I haven’t used google’s search in a long time, and I’m happier for it.

Kagi made me realize how truly toilet-paper tier Google's "product" is. Kagi lets me block domains. Kagi doesn't fill my first search screen with ads.

F google.

For me who started using Google around two decades ago it is even more infuriating:

Google, both search and everything else, used to be top notch.

People love to talk about how google feeds them SEO blogspam, but when I moved to DDG I got nearly nothing but garbage sites with a ton of padding. Every search engine I have tried besides google is actual dogass tier garbage that takes me easily 5x as long to find some kind of useful info.

I do, however, have Adblock and personal blocklist to filter out garbage sites, and I maintain a record of 300+ sites that are worthless as far as search results are concerned.

> have Adblock and personal blocklist to filter out garbage sites, and I maintain a record of 300+ sites that are worthless as far as search results are concerned.

If you want to pay to save yourself some effort, I have found Kagi

- to provide better results

- to have working feedback (so if a search provides wrong answer you can report it and a human will look into it and verify it and the search will stop providing wrong info)

- to let me push sites down or even block them completely without doing anything client side

Yes, I am really happy with Kagi, no like other things I push for I am not paid for it, and in the case of Kagi I even pay for it (I don't have any other deals either, but some of the things I push are open source or otherwise freely available).

This article makes a good point to the cost curve of competing, and also demonstrates why monopolies are bad as they build barriers to entry into the market to reduce competition. The only way to defeat something that has cornered a market is to change the landscape of the industry. "Search" isn't really search, it's knowledge fulfillment. We don't need to crawl webpages to find information if the paradigm changed to where websites submitted their sitemap to an aggregator with periodic updates. Then it becomes a knowledge network and search becomes "Lookup" instead. I still believe RSS can take out Search; as long as it is expanded to include consumer products, maps, and the like.

Except that ChatGPT has instantly brought a highly credible competitor in some fields.

You mean a mildly competent competitor that lies?

As opposed to a torrent of SEO blog spam articles full of inaccuracies, platitudes and deceptions.

> highly credible competitor in some fields.

Some fields within Search? Or some fields which aren't Search? I'm curious to see if ChatGPT actually made even a small dent in Google search's market share or if the market itself shrunk due to it. All I see is hype, while Google's ad revenue from search increases (unfortunately).

ChatGTPs main contribution was filling Google with so much garbage that it is quickly becoming useless

Hold my beer.

Thing with Neeva is that it was marginally better not 2x nor 10x better.

Not enough for people to make the switch.

If I were to take on Google, the approach would be search plus something else.

No one will beat Google just on traditional search.

Because everyone are starting from the wrong end, instead start from selling ads.

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