Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
by joantorres on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @02:40AM
(#20447960)
Why do you say there is no business model in a search niche? StackOverflow and pleny of listing sites (Tripadvisor, Yelp, Zillow, Capterra to name a few) have been successfully built in this exact premise and the user experience of searching for restaurants, real state or software on these sites is usually much better than searching directly on Google due to the availability of custom filters and the amount of domain-specific metadata that the global search engines cannot read. While it's true that most of these sites heavily rely on SEO to drive inbound traffic from the big G, there is no doubt that they are perfectly viable businesses.
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Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
by repolfx on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @05:16AM
(#20448582)
StackOverflow and those other sites aren't search engines. They may have search engines in them but not many people use them (the only time I reach StackOverflow, booking.com etc is via search engine referral). They're user content hosting and curation sites.
Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
by joantorres on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @06:29AM
(#20448858)
Technically you are correct, in the sense that they do not crawl the web like Google or Bing do. But from a user perspective, they do provide a very useful service of aggregation, discovery and comparison of structured data that is way more effective than using Google search queries, if you know the type of information you are looking for.
Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
by kordlessagain on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @07:13PM
(#20454787)
It's the corpus that matters, mostly. The StackExchange sites are Q&A formatted and with an SKG graph (such as in solr), you can do topic extraction on questions OR answers which then leads to being able to match other answers (with links) to other questions, among other things. With related topics, many other things come to life.