Therefore a competing product doesn't need to be as good as current Google, only as good as it used to be. Still hard, but far from impossible for someone with money.
What may be harder is Cuil's second problem as mentioned: Finding a revenue model. You can't compromise your data by manipulating searches (lessens quality) and you can't compromise your integrity by prioritizing ads (lessens trust). I'm sure a lot of people would pay big money for the answer, which no one seems to have (as demonstrated by Twitter's descent into ad trickery such as camouflaging the ad disclaimers).
Actually, I appreciate that feature very much. I like that when I search for Python, Google knows as a programmer I mean the language not the snake. Doubtless there are herpetologists who appreciate that Google knows they mean the snake.
Try and search anything even remotely technical or specific. Google brings back a few thousand irrelevant results, often with stuff like 'not found: word you were actually after' underneath in grey. Sometimes even when you do add quotes or speech marks around the term.
A better Google would be one that doesn't assume people want 'any old possible answer' and tries to answer specific queries as easily as general ones.
While there seems no barrier to entry, just consumer habit, google is faster than it used to be, despite a larger web and more users.
Speed of search results has been shown to be extremely important to users. Google's many large server farms, close to users, is a huge capital investment. Google has doubled down on this advantage, with google suggest, which requires even more power. For example, google has much lower latency than DDG. Replicating those server farms would be expensive; I'm not sure than even all of AWS could do it.
When I first used Google in 2000, I immediately knew they would come to dominate search, because their product was so much better. It's not enough to be as good as Google, you have to wipe the floor with them.
As others have pointed out, the Amazon Echo is a viable approach to doing this. Shame it sucks for anything but the most trivial queries right now.
Perhaps the answer is to do what Craigslist did. In a few categories, ones you have to ask for such as "Shopping" or "Jobs", there are ads, or product ordering boxes, clearly identified as such. Non-commercial information is not polluted with ads.
I rarely visit sites out of a band of 15 or so, and I only use Google to find pages within those sites (which itself follows a normal distribution). I.e. I know I want a page from stackoverflow, or Wikipedia, or arxiv, or Reddit, or Yelp but rather than navigating to those sites I just cmd+T in Chrome, type keywords, and scroll to the site's link on the result page which is almost always at the top anyways.
I'm sure others use Google like this too (varying on your culture's go-to sites), so does it even need to exist as it does right now? I could imagine a new app that indexes just within this band of sites. And Google or some other app is relegated to "the rest" for rare occasions.
Add interesting sites and resources in your profile and get your search system. Now it's public beta, you can add unlimited resources, but now 1 link - 1 indexed page. And we working on deep indexing system. We have crawler, but we need improve our platform, architecture and other.
On our platform now >150.000 resources, that handpicked and added by users.
I think when you are designer and add 1000 best resources for design - it can be better search system for this topic.
And you can provide your opinion for ANY topic. It can be more transparent, flexible, democratic search system, where people select best resources for search. And where every opinion is important and can be different.
Something like Alexa, or other voice assistants, are probably closer to what that Google killer would end up looking like. Good thing that Google got in there early.
Killing another search engine is exactly how Google got big.
There isn't anymore. It needs to be fundamentally different.
I rather believe, smaller and more niche search engines like zomato(for restaurants in india) etc would get better of google very soon. Like, imagine a search engine for online learning resources with filters like beginners/intermediate/advanced, books, courses, etc; that would be so much better than what google has to offer right now given it indexes a lot of quality resources.
This is all the more true on mobile, where the search is meant to initiate an action: buy something, make a reservation. Being able to complete a circuit in one place gives competitors in some domains a powerful advantage over Google.
Personally, I find duckduckgo to be an excellent option; it does almost all of my search for me, with none of the privacy issues.
if you make it your default search, you can revert to google by using the banged g operator (g!), which will anonymize and then submit your search string to google. very seamless; very convenient; more privacy.
disclaimer: no personal affiliation with ddg
However, my understanding is that Google CSE would basically replace site search and can be configured to operate identically, and isn't slated to disappear.
Page and Brin were right on the problem and the solution for the time.
While I want my startup to be still more successful, I'll thrilled if it is as successful as what Page and Brin did.
Over time, hardware gets cheaper, and the cost of building a search engine declines. This has not been matched with a reduction in ad density. The cost improvement is going into Google's profit margin. That indicates a vulnerability.
Google has some striking weaknesses. The two I focus on are provenance and business background. I've done work on business background (see "sitetruth.com"). That tries to find the real-world business behind a web site that's selling something, and then uses the data available about real-world businesses to check it out. That can then be fed into search result ordering. SiteTruth is a demo; it's running off free data sources. Paying for higher quality data from Dun and Bradstreet and other non-cheap sources would make the business background check much better.
Google's other big weakness is provenance. Search engines should find the original source of information. Much of the Internet is sites scraping other sites, linking to other sites, and commenting on other sites. We see this on HN all the time, where someone links to an article, but the actual source is two blogs deep. The original source should be the primary search result, perhaps annotated with notes about the more heavily promoted sites mentioning it. This means more attention to when something appeared and better matching of content. Google already does this for news. For ranking purposes, attention metrics for scraper sites need to be credited to the original source, not the scraper site.
One possible customer for such a system is Bloomberg. The people who get those expensive terminals could use both of those features. Then offer it to the better universities, so that students grow up using something less consumer-oriented with Google. That strategy worked for Facebook.