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Re:If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? by bsder on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:57PM (#30726786)
> Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine.

No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine.

I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down.

Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly.

Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ...

(/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)

Re:If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? by aghilmort on Friday March 18, 2022 @09:05PM (#30729796)
building Breeze, which does pretty much that minus the cool UI angle, and yeah, only way for it to work at scale is premium like neeva, kagi, etc.

we started out with topics and then moved to web, and are now folding topics into the web search experience, it's really hard stuff to get right

our first main filter was blogs, which is getting renamed to posts for a mix of reasons, adding forums shortly, along with other more specific topics

re: https://breezethat.com/ -- & better on laptop / desktop atm, premium version will be ad-free