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Comment by drakaal | Hacker News Reader

I work at http://samuru.com we have about 70% unique searches. With out the hordes of default install users who type in the product slogan of every commercial, or try to get the Jeopardy questions before the clock runs out, we don't have a great cache hit ratio.

Combine this with the fact that Google is doing more and more to get Cache Collisions in their results (returning results that don't contain all the words in your search because it deemed word unimportant, or using synonyms) and it is hard to compete on speed.

That's why we don't. We compete on the idea we have better results.

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I just tried "temperature princeton tuesday" and didn't get a useful result on both your site and bing.

IMHO it's queries like that make google so much better than the rest.

Our latent search isn't fully rolled out. In some of our other products this works very well.

Samuru we had to balance Speed against all of the latent search we could do. And we do a few tricks to make the latent search not impact the Main search, but Weather is slow when you work in the volume we do because we can't cache every Geo, and National weather service isn't fast.

Interestingly, I searched "android securerandom" on both, and Google has the first result as the javadoc and the second as a blog post explaining a serious vulnerability in it and how to mitigate it.

The same search on samuru has no results about the vulnerability.

Do the search again. We have two indexes, a shallow one for things we have never seen and a deep one for things people have searched for. The results have changed likely since your first search. This would not be an issue if we had only 15% new searches.

Good to see a google alternative. Also, I'm very curious: is this really written in PHP?

No, what gives you that impression? It is python, running on Google AppEngine

ah, it's because I think that I've see the .php exntesion somewhere

Was using Samuru from July - half September this year. While I applaud the way it just searches for what I ask for, no more no less, there was just one major issue that made me turn to DDG: loads too slow. The way I use it is as default search engine in Opera. So to search, I do Ctrl-T, start typing query, hit Enter. After the Enter it sometimes took more than 5 seconds to show the results. I don't know why that is but it's just too long in comparision with others, sorry. It seems better now, but it's still slower than the competition.

We do more. The we just don't have enough user base to get good caching. probably you are the first person to do most of your searches and that slows us down, where as DDG and Google likely have seen a query like yours before.

I like to think that the summaries vs. the snippets make up for some of that, we get you more info in one go.

We also lose a bit because we return about 50 results at a go instead of 10.

Little cosmetic bug, doesn't seem to effect the results — http://i.imgur.com/ttof6iD.png

Will look in to it.

I just tested Samuru vs. Google with the query:

speed of the iss

I think Google clearly won in this case.

> I just tested Samuru vs. Google with the query:

why is grass green?

Samuru clearly won in this case

They both appear to have relevant results.

Apparently you need "What is the speed of the ISS" to get an answer, though if you're looking for related links, you get http://issondemand.com/ as the first result, which is less... stellar than the result google provides

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