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Comment by sirkneeland | Hacker News Reader

Search is really really hard to do, isn't it? I mean there aren't that many search engines, and even more prominent "alternative" engines (like DuckDuckGo) are often pulling results from Google and/or Bing...both of which have made fairly gargantuan investments in the technology and infrastructure behind their search engines.

Could there be some other technical genius way of doing it? Well...I'm sure there is, but would Yahoo really have the in-house talent to discover it before Google or Bing (or another wealthy potential Search entrant like Apple or Facebook)?

Sure, Marissa has been buying up talent, but that has primarily been mobile devs...

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Yahoo used to have a stellar research group with tons of expertise in search, but alas, no more. There might be a few stragglers left, however.

You are assuming their search has to be very good. Would it make a difference if the search was merely good enough. Search engines will generally get the most popular stuff well enough (eg "Justin Bieber") and it is the longer tail where they distinguish themselves. But does Yahoo need to distinguish themselves there?

Google became popular because of their excellent performance on the long tail. Yes ~30% of all queries are for the same 50 search terms, but 50% are unique or nearly unique queries.

Yes, they surely do. Bill Gates pursued a "good enough" search strategy 10 years ago that cost msft the business.

I'm developing buzzsumo.com, which focuses on searching for fresh content on a topic.

So when you search for "startups", you don't get official sites about startups, but rather the most popular stories about startups that's being shared the most.

What about purchasing DDG? Is that off the table? I don't know much about how that might work.

DDG doesn't have its own search engine. Instead it gets its search results from existing search engine (including Yahoo).

They get their results from 100+ resources, including their own search bot (duckduckbot), if I recall.

What I am sad about is there are no search engines that can return pure search results. The results you get are now tainted by DCMA takedown notices, censorship, and other various legal mechanisms.

Presumably there are specific domain names which do not respond to DMCA requests, while the search engines do. The others would respond to DMCA requests and thus results for them would be useless/dead. A project could aim to index these DMCA proof domains specifically?

I don't have a problem with the DMCA but I believe using it to censor a list of links is abuse and breaks the US's first amendment.

If you click on the notice, the links are right there. This is what I do when I see it in the google search results.

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