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Comment by acatton | Hacker News Reader

Its search index, in my personal opinion.

A quarter of the websites on the internet are behind Cloudlfare/Akamai with anti-scraping enabled. Of course they want to end up on Google, so Google/Bing get a green light from Cloudflare.

IMHO, that basically makes it impossible for anybody else to spin up an index and compete with Google Search. They cannot just scrape, they also have to work around anti-scraping measure by these CDNs. They have to maintain these workarounds, while trying to scrape as much as google has scraped so far, which is already a feat in itself.

Once you have this, you have everything: a critical mass of users, ads, data set for AI, ...

I dare anybody to scrape Reddit or Stackoverflow from scratch today.

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Like you said, Bing has their own search index. Why isn't everyone using Bing?

Because Google's index is much larger.

According to estimates[1], Google indexes ~60 billions pages and Bing is only ~4 billions. If these numbers are close to reality, Bing index is 7% of Google's.

IMHO, this leads to all the problems people complain about Bing. The algorithm is shit because they have less data to fine tune it, people use it less because the algorithm is shit or the results don't show up, so they cannot collect data to fine tune the algorithm more, ...

[1] https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/

I'd dare to say one of the reasons is quite simple - Bing's ugly UX.

When Google was just starting to gain popularity its search results weren't much better than Altavista's. Yet, its interface was much cleaner, it loaded and spewed out results faster, the overall experience was better. Bing is the Altavista. The user is bombarded with cookies, logotypes, ads, maps - all that complex layout right from the start. As a user you feel napalmed by information, and nobody likes that.

It has been a long time so I honestly can't remember. I thought Altavista had a relatively clean homepage.

I do remember yahoo's home page was terrible, although I think there was a clean search.yahoo.com page no one knew about. Back then (and even now) having the search page load fast was pretty important so this always seemed like a nasty own goal.

Because Google has conditioned users and the web content creators according to its UX and content standards. It's a vicious cycle.

This assumes people will still want to search for information in the future…

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