Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

Re:Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine compara... by pydry on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:32AM (#29417334)

Early 2000s google index ran in a garage. The current google index has dedicated power stations.

It's a bit like the car industry - you could run a startup from your garage in the early days but you need titanic amounts of capital to compete now thanks to vertical integration.

Major governments and billionaires can compete but everybody else is locked out of the market (most "startups" use bings index).

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Re:Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine compara... by mleonhard on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:28AM (#29427859)

Google's datacenters are huge because they save user behavior data, not because their web search index is particularly big. Also, Google Search wastes a lot of resources on the "search as you type" feature.

Running a search engine in your garage is feasible today because hardware and connectivity have improved much faster than the size of the WWW.

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Re:Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine compara... by pydry on Friday December 03, 2021 @05:55AM (#29428636)

It's the frequency of updates that chews power.

Also, that user data is used to improve search results and mitigate webspam that didnt exist in 2005.

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Re:Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine compara... by R0b0t1 on Thursday December 02, 2021 @04:31PM (#29422941)

I was thinking about exactly that. If they used simpler index would they be getting better results? There's not a lot of selective pressure so they just keep adding to the index algorithm.

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Re:Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine compara... by abdel_nasser on Thursday December 02, 2021 @07:48PM (#29425209)

whatsapp was run out of a single cabinet.

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