On my IOS device, under Settings -> Safari -> Search Engine, I have a drop down with options, including Bing and DuckDuckgo, but defaulted to google.

On Macos, with Safari running, Safari -> Preferences… -> Search, Search Engine I have a drop down, defaulted to google, with Bing and DuckDuckgo amongst other choices.

Agreed on google”s effort to get their search engine as the default. However I just don’t understand how changing search engine is impossible given what I’m seeing on my devices? Nor does it seem over the top onerous to my eyes.

So here's a challenge, try adding a search engine not on that list. You can see the search engine I'm working on in my profile if you're interested (I don't want to hijack this thread with self-promotion). I challenge you to change to a new competitive option like it. You simply can't. That is a clear monopoly over distribution.

On desktop in Chrome, as noted it is not something any typical consumer can do easily. But even if they could, Google does not allow you to set the New Tab to another search engine, even by setting the homepage to one. So every new tab opened on Chrome takes you back to Google search, even if a consumer figures out how to change their homepage. As for changing the nav bar search, no ordinary consumer is going to be able to work out how to change a search URL pattern. That is clearly intended to prevent consumers changing.

So I stand by my point, especially on an iPhone, you simply cannot change your search engine to a new search engine like us. It is impossible.

That being said, I try new search engines from time to time and always get back to google, because non of the others have worked for me (in a professional context). I probably do 200 searches per day and google is most likely to give me relevant info on my first query (maybe 80-90% success rate). All others I have tried have been around 40-50% win an avg. of 2-3 search queries to find my result. That is a huge daily time sync on 200 searches per day.

I will also test your search engine.

And before having tested it, I have some unsolicited advice ;) At least these are things that would make me switch: 1) you are strong in my vertical. 50% of my daily search queries are professional. Probably 10-20% are programming related. If you were better 20% better than google at delivering results for that subset, I would probably use you. 2) If you had very strong support for my locale. Based in Germany, 50% of my private searches are in German. Most search engines, apart from google, suck in German. My assumption is their market share is so small that they don‘t put effort into any language specific search syntax understanding. German or large language groups like Spanish, Hindi, French come to mind. 3) If you can‘t become a default search engine on safari, maybe you can role your own browser (chromium fork or something) where you are the default. You could package it as: MySearchEngine App. It is actually a fully functional browser, but users really use it because they want to use your search engine. That might give easier access than having to manually navigate to your website in safari.

</ end of unsolicited advice />

I think most of the search startups are doing their own mobile app. On iOS, the system search and browser remains Google/Safari (and the App is essentially just a wrapper on Safari for browsing). But at least it is something. I think you'll see more people doing desktop apps, although the dominance of Google through Chromium forks for this isn't a coincidence. It feels like the bad old days of re-packaging Internet Explorer with a custom homepage all over again.

Hell, I'd love to have the option to make the search results be completely language agnostic.

I also search in multiple languages but I also know that's an exception. The majority of the people in the world likely would only use a single language and it's easy to believe that search results are better for those users with languages separated.

There are cases when I'd even like REGION agnostic results, or least ones not bound by national boundaries. For example, I have an interest in my state history (MI), and there's plenty of relevant articles/commentary from the Canadians.

A Canadian/Indian/EU-based Google probably would've ended up with multi-lingual support, whereas a China/UK based one probably wouldn't have.

By the time Google got big enough for international considerations, there were already a bunch of baked in assumptions about their users, like them being monolingual.

There's nothing magic about putting a space between words or not. Similar to whether you hyphenate or not.

Which, of course, means that it is yet another barrier to entry for any would-be competitors.

Personalization is a double-edged sword. @pg once wrote about Google results becoming "what's true for you" rather than what's objectively true. And filter bubbles and subtle "personalization censorship" are also dangers. I think it's possible to have high quality results and privacy/anonymity, and it's not a binary choice. It's a challenge worth figuring out.

Unfortunately, while OpenSearch is great where it's supported, outside of Firefox, the only real support is for in-site-search on other platforms (where you type a site name and then a search string), and not for changing your browser search engine. And it doesn't work at all on iOS even for site search.

So unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem of how a consumer can easily change their search engine to something new on Chrome or Safari or an iPhone.

I don't want to sidetrack the discussion, but if you want to confirm the opensearch description, you can open our site in Firefox, then click the "..." in the browser address bar and then click "Install Andi Search". Or reach out and very happy to talk you through it.

Edit: When I click the address bar, I see an small "A" icon in the bottom row. When I hower over it, it shows "install Andi search".

[Edit: just saw the edit that you found it - thanks again for looking around for it too!]

[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/02/search-choices-enable-freedo...

> https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

> https://www.npr.org/2020/10/22/926290942/google-paid-apple-b...

etc, etc. Given Google pay a lot more for this privilege today than in years past, this may well have been part of the strategy.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch

On Firefox it makes it easier to talk a non-technical user through how to change their default search engine, and at least they aren't entering search pattern strings into a settings field as with Chrome.

  <OpenSearchDescription
      xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
      xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/"
    >

      <ShortName>My Search</ShortName>

      <Description>Personal Search</Description>

      <Url
        type="text/html"
        method="get"
        template="https://mysite.com/?q={searchTerms}"
      />

      <Url
        type="application/rss+xml"
        indexOffset="0"
        rel="results"
        template="/results?query={searchTerms}"
      />

      <Url
        type="application/json"
        rel="suggestions"
        template="/suggest?q={searchTerms}"
      />

      <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>

      <Image height="32" width="32" type="image/x-icon">
        https://yarnpkg.com/favicon.ico
      </Image>

    </OpenSearchDescription>

<link rel="search" href="/opensearch.xml" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="My Search" />

I then went to my site on Chrome iOS and it showed up under Settings > Search Engine > Recently visited. I then selected it and now anything I put in my url bar gets sent to my server. It's pretty sick.

I'm wondering do you see that as an option visiting our site (we have an opensearch description for Andi also) or other search engines like You with one?

Very curious.

That might be part of it.

BTW I really like what you're doing, and I'll definitely like to set it as default in Firefox somehow if I could just to try it out. My first tests were surprisingly good, I didn't expect it to deliver results which are accurate and which appear to at least match DDG. Nice one. [slightly unusual page format on desktop though :)]

For iPhone, iPad, and macOS, you could use Swift and SwiftUI to write a single search app for your service. Flutter is pretty good also, then you could cover Windows and Linux also.

What?

But let's try it. Go to Safari > Preferences > Search and choose the "Search engine" dropdown, and you'll see you have a dropdown with only five options.

Google reportedly pays $15B per year for that top spot.

Though, I couldn't add a keyword to your site in firefox with its "Add a keyword" feature. Might be due to the javascript calling some url behind the screen.

This is not a bad solution; I appreciate your browser rage.

Well, you can. I just tried it and works. Granted, you need a third party app, but it's doable.

I can block elements, and cookies in a site, define custom JavaScript or css, change the default search engine with one in a list o define a new one, and a whole lot of other things. All inside default safari.

Its name is Hyperweb. You can get it here: https://apps.apple.com/app/hyperweb/id1581824571

See my post above about iCabMobile, where there are TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.

There are also other browsers than Safari and iCabMobile on iOS, many of which give alternatives to their search engine choices.

Naturally if you think only users who choose the default browser are interesting as your market, I wonder if those users would take a chance on your alternative search engine?

I duplicated my post because you so pervasively in this thread duplicated your inaccuracies.

You are wrong about this, iCabMobile allows the user to very easily add search engines:

Settings > Tools > Search Engines > Add

Naturally I expect to be plentifully downvoted for this accurate information, just like pointing-out that iCabMobile has 25 search engines to was also extremely unpopular.

Or you are just talking about within your iCabMobile App itself, like anyone can do in their own app?

As far as I know, all the alternative browser and search Apps (including ours for example) are wrappers on top of Safari on iOS. And they are unable to change the iPhone's system-wide search or browser. That's the search engine accessed, for example, when a user swipes down on their iPhone home screen, and enters a query into the "Search" field that appears. Normally, that's Google and Safari at the iOS system-wide level.

Or are you saying that you are able to change these including adding alternative search engines under iOS Settings > Safari > Search Engine?

I'm curious how you're doing this if so, and I'm sure lots of other people would be too. My understanding is that App Store Apps or Extensions can not normally change the iPhone search engines, but I'd love to be wrong about that.

Firefox has removed the ability to set a default page for new tabs and requires users to install an extension to restore the functionality, which in fact provides degraded functionality. As originally implemented the new tab would load the new page instantly. With the extension, a new tab is created, focus is given to the URL bar and after a brief but noticeable pause, the chosen page loads.

Another way to think it is that Google pays Apple, so that they don't create their own search engine.

Just this morning I searched “air purifier” in safari and it suggested the wirecutter “best air purifiers” article

Or, it might be possible. But their constraints will make it far harder to build even a comparable search.

This bluntness does not go far enough. People do not change defaults, no matter how "easy" it may be to do so.

A default is a pre-made choice by someone other than the consumer. There is no set-up process where the consumer makes a choice. The choice has already been made. Consumers do not make this choice. Even if they could, in practice they don't. That fact may seem insignificant but it is worth billions of dollars.

If I am not mistaken, the current CEO of Google spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job. In probably the most important one, Google pays Apple a hefty sum to be the default search engine. It was estimated at $10 billion in 2020 and $15 billion in 2021.[1]

Defaults are effectively permanent settings. It does not matter how easy it is to change a default setting if practically no one ever does it. $15 billion is too much to pay for something that may or may not change. It does not change. It is money in the bank.

1. https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

I mean you could spend two seconds to search and realize you were in fact mistaken before bothering to write "If I am not mistaken..."

While the comment might be a little oversimplified, I think it's reasonable to say that those deals would have fallen under his ambit. And there's no question that Chrome and Android are the two central planks of Google's search distribution monopoly with consumers, along with the Apple deal.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-sundar-pichai-rose-to-be...

let's see:

> spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job

even if we take your convenient assumption as correct ("it's reasonable to say that those deals would have fallen under his ambit"), it's still wouldn't be a true statement. But feel free to point out which part is true if we relax any more assumptions.

Based on Pichai being the senior executive at Google responsible for Chrome browser and search defaults, as a matter of public record he held corporate responsibility for getting google search as the default search engine on as many devices as possible.

You stated that the original commenter was mistaken with no supporting evidence and a high level of acrimony in your phrasing. I'd be interested to see supporting evidence for why you think the commenter was mistaken, in the context of the other resources they provided.

> Pichai joined Google in 2004,[8] where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Google Chrome and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive. In addition, he went on to oversee the development of other applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. In 2010, Pichai also announced the open-sourcing of the new video codec VP8 by Google and introduced the new video format, WebM. The Chromebook was released in 2012. In 2013, Pichai added Android to the list of Google products that he oversaw.

Thinking about when Firefox defaulted to Yahoo. I wonder what switch rate was.

"Pichai started at Google leading product management for the Google toolbar, a critically strategic product that enabled default search queries on different web browsers to go through Google and allow them to track browsing behavior to power the AdWords targeting engine. At the time, Internet Explorer was the "installed by default" incumbent for many users, while Firefox was the alternative browser of choice."

"Pichai identified a weakness in Google's strategy, and Chrome began as a defensive play against the established browsers to protect and grow Google's search business (which still generates much of the company's revenue)."

https://www.productplan.com/learn/sundar-pichai-product-mana...

"Sundar Pichai is the one who introduced the toolbar, which led to an increase in user searches. It was later merged with Chrome, which became the most used web browser in the world."

https://startuptalky.com/sundar-pichai-story/

""Most people here didn't want us to do a browser, so it was a little bit stealthy. Once we had it up and running, I remember showing it to Larry and Sergey - and even then there was a lot of scepticism." But Pichai got his way: Chrome was released in 2008 and now accounts for nearly 60% of the market, according to NetMarketShare, while Internet Explorer languishes on less than 16%."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/07/google-bo...

"You know how Google's the default search engine for many Web browsers? That was Pichai's work."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/11...

"Pichai's portfolio includes Chrome, Android, search, ad technology, maps, social,commerce and infrastructure."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150226215637/http//www.forbes....

"Ten years ago, the Indian-born Pichai, 42, was a product manager at Google, and his domain consisted of the search bar in the upper right corner of Web browsers. He then persuaded his bosses to wade into the browser wars with Chrome, which in time became the most popular browser on the Internet and led to the Chrome operating system that runs on a line of cheap laptops called Chromebooks."

"Android runs on 1.2 billion devices around the world. It drives users to the company's hugely profitable search engine and the ads on its maps service. Google search and maps are available on phones made by Apple and Microsoft, too, but Google pays those companies referral fees. The more people use Android, the more Google can keep that revenue to itself."

"Google distributes the latest versions free under the agreement that device makers will highlight profitable Google services-especially search and maps-while their own brands and services take a back seat."

"Pichai joined the small team working on Google's search toolbar. It gave users of Internet Explorer and Firefox, the dominant browsers at the time, easy access to Google search. He proposed that Google build its own browser and won the support of the company's co-founders, though he faced an objection from then-CEO Eric Schmidt, who thought that joining the browser wars would be an expensive distraction."

"Rubin had introduced it, but Pichai created an interdisciplinary team with the search group, which had voice search technology and algorithms that could discern what information might be most important to users. "Sundar helped me to formalize a relationship," says Johanna Wright, the product manager who runs Google Now. "Because search and Android sit in two different buildings, we ended up doing a people swap.""

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-24/googles-s...

I doubt this. I'm guessing that 90% of Google Search's development effort is concentrated on defeating SEO, and as soon as a new competitor succeeds well enough to attract SEO attention, their results will suddenly turn to custard.

The competitor then has to combat the extremely sophisticated SEO practises developed against Google over the years. This is likely to be an even bigger barrier to disruption than building market share against Google.

At the least that's a perverse incentive, and at worst it's a corrupting influence.

Whether it is conscious or not, Google does better financially when there is more SEO spam in results.

That's why the better Google does financially, the worse the search results are getting.

However you're arguing as if new competitors had to monetize the same way Google does and that's not the only game available. Imagine a competitor that doesn't monetize clicks but works on donations (like wikipedia does). If results are higher quality than Google's the users will follow. Or maybe a search engine that promotes a particular product like a CRM tool for example.

Disruption typically doesn't come in obvious ways or else someone else would have done it (including Google and its gazillion dollars).

Why don’t you do a show hn so we can have a proper thread I’d love to learn more about the decision making of the AI.

So we're definitely planning to share what we're building with the community here soon. Andi's very much an alpha and a few things are broken, but we're working on a new release that fixes them, and then we're going to share it and learn as much as we can from the feedback and wisdom here.

Small bug I found:

   use the "go" command (e.g. go reddit)
   close the newly opened tab (e.g. reddit)
   click "Learn more about me"
   click the top left icon (Andi)
   => goes directly to reddit.com

One of the secrets with Google is search is that the top searches aren't searches at all. Number one search on google? "facebook" - it's people navigating. So the idea behind that is to let people navigate directly when they want to go somewhere specific, like "go youtube cute cats".

Interestingly, once I turned off my VPN, it works again, Firefox doesn't display the message either. Note that other web pages work fine on the VPN.

update: It work's with MozillaVPN, but not with my University's VPN. Perhaps UC Davis has flagged it from within their firewall.

I've conducted a number of professional searches about neuroscience, obscure R packages, topics on D&D and Pathfinder, and it has done exceptionally well. The one thing my obscure demographic would love is a replacement for Google Scholar, which I use all the time.

Thank you for trying it out and the great feedback too. There hasn't been too much discussion here about Google Scholar, but better research and academic results is something I hear a lot of people talk about as a growing problem.

Took a while to load, and only gave me short text of current conditions.

When I did "denver weather forecast" it gave a bit more and showed results on the right from Wolfram and others but they don't tell me anything. Wolfram is current conditions and wind tomorrow. Next one just meta description for weather underground.

It's going to snow tomorrow. That's what people are searching for.

Google gets this stuff and makes that info super visually accessible.

I really don't get the hate on their search quality. If it has gone down I haven't experienced this outside of mega spam things like recipes.

But I still experience the black magic of typing in some vague thing you are trying to remember and somehow they know what it is.

My own feeling is that the spam and ad problem (and therefore actual result quality) on Google is at its worst for categories like finance, health and travel. Commercial promotion has really taken over there. For many people, ads are essentially spam when they take over the entire screen of results (try, say, "best home loans in the US").

There is huge variation though. Some searches are still pure. Thanks again and please feel welcome to reach out to chat more about this!

I disagree. Two to three years ago I could get more what I wanted in a complex search once I tuned it properly. So Google had a twenty year run of good and useful searches. Google also worked to strong arm their monopoly, yes. But I claim they still served some quality after that. It's not that unusual for a monopoly built on quality to maintain their quality for a period of time after it achieves that monopoly status - institutional standards die but they can die over time.

I don't disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a lot of things that work this way that aren't actually monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into grocery stores would be one of the major challenges of starting that business. Competition for shelf space is a core concern of a lot of consumables. This definitely creates a lot of stickiness and barriers, and that comes with its share of downsides, but there are also good reasons that distribution systems work the way they do. Transaction costs are important.

It's a similar situation with the App Stores also. They are monopolies. We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software.

That’s true but at the same time I think most people are pretty happy with it. HN readers aren’t typical in this regard.

I’ve been writing software as my job since the mid-80’s and it’s only been in the past 4 or 5 years where I realized that I’m finally pretty happy with the tech I use day-to-day.

If I had any complaint it would be that app stores have made software too inexpensive. When I look at something like Procreate which I think cost something like $10, I’m blown away. This can’t be sustainable.

Here we have Apple with Google and Bing on their shelves. Microsoft have Bing and Google on their shelves. And Google have Goggle or Bing. Is that healthy or an oligopoly?

It's limited.

It's limited by our attention spans.

There's a reason web designers call specific pages "valuable real estate".

For example Google's search page, the one with the input, is probably the most valuable web real estate in the world, closely followed by the first page of results once you've typed your query and hit Enter.

I'm willing to bet $100 that the second page of results probably gets less than 1000th the hits the first one gets. Heck, make that 1 millionth of the hits the first results page gets.

Shelf space refers to the market with which someone competes, not whether people are thinking of a candy bar or finding a bathroom or a facebook post. Your argument commits survivor bias because it's ignoring the millions of other websites that exist and are being used. Being popular does not mean something is a monopoly, nor does it mean there's limited shelf space.

Following your example, if Google spammed Pixel ads on it's home page, the page would become less popular. One of the reasons it became so popular was it's strict adherence to focusing on utility.

Regardless of why exactly this is the case, it's not a healthy state of affairs.

Not to mention reddit is terrible outside of tech concerns. It leans conservative, young, male, and white. As a woman, contributing there is an invitation for harassment. Even when I don't contribute I do things like research cars to buy only to see forums dominated by "car guys" who mock safety standards, focus only on performance and the "get laid" aspect of cars, and are dismissive towards groups like "soccer moms." Well, I'm a soccer mom and felt wholly unwelcome in those communities and the advice there is actually terrible advice for parents wanting to buy cars.

Then there's a whole religion on gaming be it consoles vs consoles or vs pcs, or publishers or franchises and just endless tribalism. Politics is an absolute nightmare as you can imagine. The savvy reader will say "well you have to know how to sort the comments a special way and never visit the sub you want but the 'true' version of the sub you want, etc" which is a million times more hostile to non-technical people than scrolling past some google ads and finding an article about what they want from a reputable newpaper or consumer reports.

Reddit is just too wild west to be a google replacement. Worse, the good content is almost impossible to find. Google weighs popular discussions more than recent ones so it keeps giving me discussions from many years ago, even if I try to put the year in the search box. It has no idea how to crawl reddit and make it digestible for us and the reddit leadership want nothing to do with google it seems, for capitalistic reasons of keeping out a potential competitor and having their search be really good "any day now."

Posting to reddit is its own kind of nightmare, full of rules per sub, each different and with an algo that will decide if your question gets any visibility, often only getting mean spirited comments in return, if not harassment. For as far as facebook has fallen, I can still visit my town or neighborhood group and ask people what cars they like and get something of a normal discussion. At reddit, I'll be asked for nudes or just mocked/gatekept.

If anything if google is an old man at web 1.0 then reddit is an old man at web 2.0. I suspect google with outlast reddit as reddit looks primed to be overtaken, a bit like how myspace, slashdot and digg looked like unstoppable juggernauts during their time. Its "manboy" culture and its super hostile default subs and everyday misogyny, transphobia, and racism scare normal people away. Forums have always been the seedy underbelly of the internet but reddit is seemingly proud of being seedy, with spez coming out to say that he welcomes covid disinformation when reddit was recently called out about how its become the home of covid conspiracy theories.

If reddit was publicly traded and you asked me between google and reddit, I'd say buy google 100%. I think we'll be reading a lot more "what happened to reddit" articles in the near future, not "what happened to google" articles. Reddit becomes more toxic over time and that's just advertiser poison. Remember, it happily was the home of "jailbait" subs showing sexualized photos of children and "creepshots" showing non-consensual photos of random women until CNN called them out. If there was no call out, then spez would happily be selling those subs as points of pride and growth. "Reddit is the new google" narratives are very echo-chambery, shortsighted, and highly questionable. I think it forever remains this cesspool that chases away advertisers while Google continues to adapt to a new online world and continues to be vastly profitable. Meanwhile, Reddit has yet to make a profit.

Hell, Bernie, and then Biden were both top of reddit during the elections. In what way is that indicative of a "conservative leaning" on reddit. I'll give you young and male, but conservative? You've got to be pulling my leg here.

It was the largest Donald Trump fan site in the world (/r/thedonald before it was shut down for being so big its brigading tactics were damaging the site) and now /r/conservative takes that role. Before it was the biggest Ron Paul fan site. Its deeply pro-guns in nearly every comment section and any mention of Hillary or AOC is an invitation for angry comments and downvotes. Random subs are full of transphobic content and misogyny is near everywhere. /r/conspiracy is a right-wing paradise catering to right wing views.

You cannot talk about money or finance without being yelled at about how bad fiat and the fed are, which are right-wing talking points. You can't have a covid discussion without an army of covid skeptics yelling at everyone. You can't discuss police brutality without dishonest "but both sides" types full of racist dog whistles.

Its absolutely right leaning and token "liberal" positions like legal pot or better healthcare doesn't really change that. I know GOP voters with those positions but they always vote GOP for culture-war related reasons. Not to mention, being able to do drugs in your home is really neither liberal or conservative, its just in the USA only the liberal party is making any effort to make that happen.

Covid skepticism, which spez defends, is extremely coded right-wing, so even leadership acknowledges who reddit users really are.

The few liberal and feminist spaces that exist on reddit have draconian mod rules because of the constant brigading and some of them just give up and lock discussions because mods are exhausted and tired of fighting it. Just running a liberal or feminist or queer sub is a lot of work because reddit conservatives are constantly bridaging. This is not the sign of a liberal community. I mod a few subs and its just a nightmare out there. Just keeping conservatives from trolling and fighting with everyone is a big job. If you see "liberalism" its because the mods are keeping the everyday redditors away and trying to keep up the values and themes of that specific sub and its relatively tiny audience compared to the conservative majority.

Cherry picking AI spammed Bernie posts doesn't change the culture in the comments or what visitors receive when they post. I'm in a lot of Democratic, liberal, feminist, queer, socialist, etc spaces and I can guarantee you reddit is absolutely nothing like those spaces.

Also you are taking my comment out of context, not only is reddit conservative, but as a hypothetic competitor to google its extremely conservative. I can google for things without being hit with Ron/Rand Paul narratives, Trump worship, pro-gun narratives, covid skepticism, transphobia, or racist dog whistles. So just the idea that Reddit is as welcoming as a Google search is very, very questionable. Google will transparently present you ads. Reddit will drown you in propaganda, culture war politics, and harassment. As the meme says, we are not the same.

We can take a quick survey of /r/all sorted by "hot" as of this moment. The very first post I see with AoC is literally this:

"""AOC tells Joe Biden: Cancel more student loans to have "any chance" in 2022"""

The top posts? All in support. Where is the dominant conservative force that warps conversation around it.

HermanCainAward, literally a subreddit celebrating the deaths of the unvaccinated tops all regularly. How the hell is that "covid skeptic right dominant"?

Is your idea of "reddit is conservative" that reddit hosts conservative communities at all? Even if they're smaller than the left-aligned communities there?

EDIT:

Some other quick statistics:

Size of /r/conservative: 923k

Size of /r/lgbt: 864k

Size of /r/hermancainaward: 500k

The "lol antivaxxers died" community is literally half the size of the largest conservative subreddit. The LGBT subreddit is the same size as OP's bugbear /r/conservative. The very much Dem supporting /r/politics is an order of magnitude larger than either of those, at 8 MILLION subscribers.

Reddit is so large that having a potent conservative force is an inevitability - and much as we don't want to admit, for all the nastyness that goes on there, it's still a space that forces conservatives to be relatively speaking on "good behavior" (imagine if gab/voat/parler successfully displaced reddit), and more recently also forces their ideology to be heavily moderated (as in, to become more moderate), and watered down.

Also LOL at criticism of the car community for being bad at recommending SUVs. Reddits car enthusiast community is made up of people whose favorite car by and large is the Miata. Is the Miata a good car for a soccer mom? No. Is the Miata the car of dudebro conservatives? Uh, HELL NO!

I hate to say it, but sorry Karen, Reddit is for your son, not you.

Your loathing (for lack of a better term) of the discourse on Reddit has me wondering if the differences I perceive between our political and cultural tolerance stems from being on opposite sides of a few gnostic / agnostic boundaries, or if the difference between our demographic pigeon holes has spared me orders of magnitude of relative grief, allowing me the additional advantage of getting less overwhelmed by ambient asshattery.

I will readily admit that the latter could easily lead to the former; I guess I wonder if the 2 —> 1 causal order holds overwhelmingly in practice, and how to satisfactorily determine that in a way that manages to be honest, systematic, and compassionate.

I'm of the opinion that this is fine. Rather, the better approach here might be instead gatekeeping and exclusivity. Now, before you tear my head off for that, let me elaborate a bit.

Much of the issues of existing communities, seem to me to stem from an inability to deal with scale. A single heretic isn't a problem, but when the heretics outnumber the believers, they can then proceed to dominate the community. One potential solution I've wondered about is entry-restrictions and finer grained restrictions on permissions for a community. For instance, a community might be public view but member-only for posts/comments, with invite-only membership. Or perhaps memberships have to be approved by N randomly selected members.

The catch of course, is that what I propose is also yet another contributor to the death of the open internet, much like discord is doing.

This is not a comment on the search results itself - always appreciate the efforts to break out of the standard google results and surface other sources, but I found the interface confusing and the previews were also taking up a lot of space. A compact view would be better - or giving the option to turn the previews on / off.

With different views like compact vs visual, our feeling is that it's good to give people choices. If you get chance on desktop with Andi, try a search and then under Search Results, click "Change View", and try some of the other views. List view gives straight compact text results, and there is a Hacker view that presents results in the same information dense view as HN. That's my favorite. There is even a view Goggles that has a similar format to Google circa 2000 :)

I'd love to chat more with you about this, and it is a great topic for when we share what we're building in its own thread here. Just based on feedback, we have two fairly passionate groups of early users on this topic - some love the conversational interface and others just want it to look like Google. So the approach we're taking is to give people choice.

May I ask how you arrived at this observation? This is the first time I am hearing this. I know of NO ONE who uses any other search engine. The term "Googled" is not yet a proxy for other search sites.

Consumers use Google because it's the default and the only visible option when they turn their phones on. Unfortunately, that's what a monopoly on distribution looks like. People no longer make a choice and don't even realize they have one.

It's easy to game an algorithm, but hard to game a human - humans know garbage when they see it.

As an aside, whenever I get a prescription, included with it is a dense two page sheet of detailed information about the drug. I see nothing like that online with a search. Why is this sort of thing not online?

The interesting thing would be coming up with a sustainable business model for it. One way might be the users pay for it, either per-search or per-month. This way the incentives to provide good search results align with the interests of the people doing the searching, not the people being searched.

The people who want to be searched would have an incentive to make a quality site that the search service would believe would please their customers.

I can think of people willing to pay for quality searches - professionals looking for things they need, like programmers, lawyers, researchers, etc.

Even though I loathe ads, I wouldn't mind one simple, clearly designated ad spawned from keywords in the search. No tracking and no cross site linking. No result promoting, etc...

And yes, I believe that the current iteration of the web requires human moderation to be usefully searched.

Let's start pitting the searches against each other again.

I gave up after a few weeks and had to switch it back to Google. Google's not perfect - it's never been perfect, it was just better than the alternatives - but it's still less bad than others.

I mean maybe they was true and now they don't... But yeah good luck!

With the current Mozilla leadership it never even occurred to me that it could be a bug. I just assumed that it was something they do on purpose to get more money from Google.

Do you have anything substantive to support this? I highly doubt it is true given the fact that the verb "to google" literally means "to search the internet".

People don't change their search engine from something else to Google, because it is already the default search engine on the devices they buy and the web browsers they use.

So people do not make a conscious choice to use Google. The vast majority make no choice at all. Google is synonymous with search because it is already the search engine on their phones and computers. They are simply never asked which search engine they want to use.

Most consumers have no idea that you can even change your search engine. After talking with hundreds of users, they find it's either impossible to change (iPhone/MacOS) or too hard (Chrome).

If you're Duck Duck Go or Bing, at least you're in a very limited dropdown list if someone does want to try something else. If you're a new search engine startup, you're not an option at all.

I don't use google search if i can avoid it. I'll try 3 others first, and generally just give up. Google doesn't deserve any money.

There are five (very simply accessible) different choices for Safari on iOS.

But if you switch to iCabMobile on iOS there are TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.

I think you might as well be asking regular consumers to root their device so they can use whatever Apps from outside the App Store, or whatever search engine they want.

Also, even for a technical user, there is simply no way on an iPhone to change to a new search engine not already on a tiny list, and from talking with hundreds of consumers, I have not talked with a single non-technical person who could work out themselves how to change their Safari search engine to even one of the 5 limited choices, let alone a new option.