I do think it's a lot harder to beat one of the largest tech companies in the world at their own game than carving out some niche for yourself not just in what is indexed but what you are doing (and then maybe taking over the world once that foothold has been firmly established).
Right now Google is tackling website discovery, fact retrieval, shopping, "what's the address for that site I sometimes visit", and so on, through the same search bar, mostly by guessing what you want based on your search terms. Like a swiss army knife, which is capable of many things but not great at any particular thing, I think this is in the end incredibly limiting. If two people search for "coffee", one of them wanting to find a place to buy it, and the next looking for information about the beverage; there can't be one best result. You get this weird dance where the search engine attempts to read your mind about what you want, and you're attempting to read its mind about which terms it expects to show you what you want. Very frustrating.
You can probably take any of these niches and make a superior product, something that isn't constrained to the search bar format.
Right now I'm really sort of down a rabbit hole of finding new formats for discovering and exploring websites. Previously I've built <https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random>, which led to the logical next step of <https://explore.marginalia.nu/>. They're just frivolous toys, but the more I dabble in this space the more I think there are viable alternatives to search bars and social bookmarking sites like Reddit and HN that deserve serious exploration.
I have never used mojeek for the simple fact that there’s no link to the app from your blog.
Having to guess (or google) what the actual url for the app is is a bit too much friction for me. Especially when I do most of my HN browsing on mobile.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1088622/how-do-i-create-...
https://you.com/search?q=How+to+create+a+list+of+strings+in+...
You are right. The second result seems more relevant. We'll look into whether we messed up the # Thanks :)
Certainly, a few of those are Bing/Google frontends, but many more are independent or weighted mixes of commercial and noncommercial indexes. I really like Kagi, Wiby, Marginalia (Search), and Teclis to name a few.
I found most of these through this post: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...