Ask HN: Did we all give up on a better search engine/experience? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did we all give up on a better search engine/experience?

14 pointsrokhayakebe11 comments

Have we settled for Google?

No. I think Google is still the best of its kind in many product areas, but every day I am looking for the new thing that wildly exceeds it, even if only in one area - I feel we're stuck in a local maximum right now that will look laughably restrictive later. In particular, I desperately want to find an alternative to Google for News. Google News is so laughably, self-evidently bad that I have to believe either nobody is working on it or that they enjoy pottering about in their IDE more than they like reading news. Well, it could also be that that whatever they are doing now maximizes revenue for Google even if it doesn't serve consumers very well, so that they know it's bad and don't care, but I don't want to be so pessimistic.

Seriously, I want to go and (metaphorically) kick in someone's door in Mountain view, wipe the nearest whiteboard with a startled junior engineer, and write a a new set of UI priorities for that project before security arrives to eject me from the building. It should be one of their best products, and it's a joke.

Public visibility of a Google product and the size of the team working on it often aren't correlated. It wouldn't surprise me if News is a very small team that's spending most of their time doing maintenance.

I often want my searches to be confined to long form content like blog articles or magazine articles, but google insists on including vaguely related shopping sites, discussion forums or company product pages in the results. They had a prominent search in blogs option in the past, but it's now available only via some URL parameter hack.

I'd really appreciate a search engine that confines itself to blogs.

I gave up on "better" but I still use DuckDuckGo (because I don't like the idea of Google). The important thing is being able to type the !bang things to search a particular website (with their own search engine) but I find myself increasingly typing !g

Nope, DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, make it yours too.

What kind of improvements would people like to see? I haven't really thought about it much, but I feel google finds what I need.

I am not sure, this is a "you don't know what you don't know case," but certainly this cannot be the best today.

Vertical search continues to be Googles largest threat. New kinds of AI based vertical search experiences will lead the way.

What example of vertical search engine do you have in mind?

For example I do not buy it when people call Amazon search a vertical SE. They just have search for their own database.

Google always finds what I am looking for, which is the task of a search engine. Why is that settling?

No!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com