Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want better than I do.

Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google.

I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.

The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market wants.

That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.

But to be honest the internet is still the internet. The web still exists. Any lamentation at the loss of the "old" internet is that you don't have more angry uncles spewing political rhetoric on your motorcycle forum.

Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums? I certainly don't. Seems to me things are working pretty well. I do worry about the next generation but to be honest, the same was said about me.

Instead of complaining about the state of the web just be the change. Host your site, run your forums, live your life. Stop worrying about how other people should live their lives. Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

This x1000.

The only way to ensure that future people can continue to maintain things is to teach those who are interested.

While I think we need to scale back the opaqueness of tech to the average user[0], there will always be some who just know more.

[0] By which I don't mean "more configuration options", because the average user doesn't want those.

I mean make it easy to access the source - and just as importantly make it easy to use changes to said source, so those who think, hm, I want this, can learn to fix it themselves, or find someone who can.

Having the choice between "unwashed masses" and "curated to suit political agenda" I would firmly choose the former.

Before I get attacked on political agenda angle, please understand that it takes trained professional actively trying to remain objective to have impartial moderation. Many professional discussion moderators fail here and you just cannot expect neither unpaid volunteers (doing things out of passion which is not impartial in the first place) nor paid employees enforcing company policy (again very much partial) to remain objective.

The goal of moderation should be to allow for multiple angles of thought to emerge and not get drowned. Give me the tools to see those non-mainstream positions.

The unwashed masses are often filthy and malicious (on the internet).

Moderation, of the governance and oversight meaning, is unforunately very necessary to keeping any pool from becoming a cesspit. By some combination of technical, volunteer, and participant effort (membership fee, or service requirement), areas can be kept decent.

Without this, decent and would-be participants are run off by spam, scams, trolls and harrassment, political rants, religious rants, etc.

Admninistration web sites are now forcing you to use google(blink/geeko) or apple(webkit) based browsers. Asking nicely to restore interoperability with noscript/basic (x)html browsers does not seem to work, namely keeping the door open to alternatives requiring a reasonable effort of development, and not the army of devs of big tech.

This requires regulation I guess.

I'm not sure that's true. Just to pick an example, basically any type of product search now leads to auto-generated spam/borderline-spam websites that scrape reviews from Amazon, which are themselves often fraudulent.

I guess you could say that's "good enough" but only in the sense that someone being scammed at some point consents to something that makes them a victim of the scam.

For many searches, you'll see "reddit" autocompleted to the end of the search because Google's organic results are not good enough and people are trying to weed out the spam somehow, albeit in an imperfect way that restricts results to one site.

I guess you could call that good enough.. I call it morally irresponsible.

And the people trying to get their garbage spam sites to rank high are wise to the common tricks people use to attempt to get better results. Just today I accidentally clicked on a result that from the title looked like it would lead me to reddit. I should have paid attention to the URL because instead I was sent through a bunch of redirects to some terrible spam site.

I can't lab it up now, but that is the gist. And DDG has it while Google rarely has the same level of it.

For products, one of the worst offenders is Target. Yes, Target. They show up near the top of about 60% of my searches, including for things they simply do not carry. But hey, they carry a similar product that you might be interested in! (not)

SEO results make Google money, but they also make the results suck.

They could start penalizing sites that show different things to googlebot and a real browser again.

The could do a better job penalizing sites that just copy content from other sites.

They could penalize ad-laden sites.

They could stop prioritizing youtube results over text content.

They could allow you to blacklist sites again.

They could do so many things.

None of this is curation, put priorization of search result is exactly what a search engine does.

Have you read any of Google's advice to site owners? It amounts to "provide your users with what they're looking for, and do it with a fast and easy to use site". If you think SEO is an easy hack to get any site to the position 1 for any search, you're just ignorant of the landscape. All the "SEO" crap you see about keyword density or whatever, is just an industry trying to sound different and like they've got the key to position 1.

> They could start penalizing sites that show different things to googlebot and a real browser again.

Google is ridiculously good at this. Would be keen to see examples of a site that does this in a meaningfully negative way that ranks well for searches that matter.

I don't fully agree with all of your other points but I can see why you'd mention them.

Anyway - you’re right, nothing at all wrong with wanting choice. I think the point being made here though is that “layperson gravity” / mass market appeals / lowest common denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search will be a niche product, forever. Even if we’d both like that niche.

"Elitist" feels pejorative. Also a not-inaccurate way to describe a system which presents high barriers to entry.

Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines.

Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field.

Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyone had found out about it? That's not really a barrier in terms of difficulty - as soon as people got into the "in crowd" they could use it just like the rest of them.

Cost was one. Hardware wasn't cheap and it would seem to have no practical use except to satisfy one's curiosity. A PC for the kids cost about half of our family's monthly gross income. A modem would be 10%. And the phone bill caused tourette's like symptoms more than once.

Why is publishing documents so complex now?

my site is all html, why not.

When netscape came out if you were lucky to have ppp access setting it up on windows 3.1 was difficult but once you were up as long as no one picked up the phone you were fine.

But even this was too difficult for the average person who lived in an aol world where the internet was limited to aol.

Anyone I watch older than 50 years old is constantly frustrated by google, they just don't know what's good, what's not. I think they use it because it's the "norm" and that is the only reason.

And as far as everyone else.. I have no idea to be quite honest. I have a fairly big handful of non-techie friends who think google sucks but is good enough so there is no real incentive to change.

With any habit people don't change it unless they have a huge reason to. No one stops eating double cheeseburgers until their doctor literally tells them they are going to die. I think that's what we're up against here.

Hey, now wait a second there, you young whipper-snapper. I'm sitting here reading HN while I install Debian on an XCP-ng VM, and I hear I can't understand whether Google results are good or not? There are plenty of us over 50 that actually lived the early internet and watched it first-hand transform into what it is today.

Plus the topics were very Linux, DRM focused. Digg had newer more interesting tech topics

And somehow, there is still enough good, new content to keep the conversations fresh. Some of the best are when someone shares a personal story, then there are tens or hundreds of follow-up posts -- generally supportive or inquisitive.

I've had a number of replies get hammered, unfairly in my view.

Yet the signal-to-noise ratio benefits overall if we eat a little Type I error now and then.

Yes, and now imagine these same people, most of whom never bothered with basic google search options (eg. excluding entire domains, mandatory keywords, ...) presented with a search engine with a plethora of knobs and levers to tune it to their liking.

How well will they work with that?

That's an excellent demographic point.

A counter-argument is that the move from port 80 to port 443 is the elitist drift. Instead of innocently putting information out there and sharing in an egalitarian fashion, we now have certificates and gatekeepers and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

I’m sure that’s what Yahoo! used to think about Google before Google replaced it.

I’d say the for the bulk of Google’s visitors the results aren’t merely good enough, they’re insanely great.

Now, that said, the G monopoly is horrible and needs to die.

What pushed Google over the top for me was the sheer size of their index...

AFAICT, quality personalized search results isn't the goal for Google here.

I think the point of all that is generating revenue via advertising sales.

And while providing high quality search results might once upon a time have been a goal, both as a goal in itself and a tool to drive user adoption/engagement, that's no longer necessary as they have a (relatively) captive audience and a (relatively) captive customer base (advertisers). As such, quality search results are no longer all that important.

I'm not a Googler, IMHO, YMMV, etc.

Now they have millions of cell phones collecting data and the GPS location of everyone offline, they run extremely popular DNS servers to see what websites people go to, most websites (including educational and government websites) include google's trackers so on most websites every page loaded will ping at least one of google servers. They've got people uploading their personal and work documents to their cloud. They are swimming in data collected from sources outside of web search. Between that and the lack of actual competition it's no surprise they aren't investing in making searching the internet better for people. In some ways they profit from search results being terrible. If anything beyond the first few results on the first page is filled with spam and irrelevant websites the top few results to any search become even more valuable.

That depends on whether or not you agree with Google's definition of "better". What is better for Google is a set of results that make you most likely to click on an advert. Failing that, they want you to click a link, see the site, and either click an ad there or quickly return to Google where you'll click on an ad. The worst outcome for Google is that you'll click a non-paid search result, like it, and stay on that website.

This is the fundamental problem with search engines - if they work well and give you exactly what you're searching for first time then they won't make any money. A lot of what Google does is subtly trying to give you results that look great but really aren't.

Some walled gardens, like facebook, are decaying. Others, like tiktok, are vibrant, still fresh and new.

Walled gardens are a natural result of the pursuit of capital. If you burn VC money, but create no moat (it turns out the walls of a walled garden are also a moat, weird huh), then as soon as you introduce a clever algorithm that introduces 50% more ads to extract profit, your users will all leave.

As such, a business is incentivized to build these walls and moats.

How do we avoid this?

Well, we do have examples. Mastodon and other open source projects eschew walled gardens in favor of free software ideals. Web3 embraces a certain "decentralized" vibe which lends itself in this direction. Universities, and other public-ish institutes like DARPA, created the original internet and many of its technologies.

Unfortunately, open source projects will struggle to advertise or find users. They do not have the initial capital to get as much momentum as the VC-funded alternatives. Web3 seems surely doomed to end up also building walled gardens for the crypto-anarcho-vibe is only skin-deep, and many a regular business is now highly involved.

This leaves government entities. The government is the one group that is both well funded enough, and has motive to create protocols which prioritize the user's freedom over profit (after all, the users will pay taxes regardless of how high the walls are).

It seems to be out of fashion these days for the government to actually do anything though, so perhaps there is no more chance of that than of a free software project managing the same.

I know I get on people's nerves on HN by harping on user needs and FOSS usability and interface design and such, but I think we as a group need to start taking user needs much more seriously. Open-source alternatives will always be alternatives until without taking usability and the overall experience seriously.

Many, if not most FOSS software developers choose some commercial tools— count how many MacOS and Windows laptops you see at OSCON or FOSDEM. Consider how different the cost/benefit analysis would be for people without the most basic requisite knowledge to reason about software problems, let alone troubleshoot, or throw in a PR to address them directly. Commercial companies don't get these seamless experiences by magic— it involves research, design, development and testing to deliberately remove friction and stumbling blocks rather than assuming your use case is universal, or that docs are a suitable replacement for fixing usability problems. There's nothing stopping any open source project from doing any of it. Volunteering isn't unique to coding— people volunteer to cook and build houses and clean up trash, too. But developers run FOSS and developers need to deliberately incorporate those other perspectives into their projects to get the benefit.

Most of my search results at this point look like a spam ridden inbox from the mid-2000s.

This is absolutely true; however there are riches in niches.

The % of internet users who want X probably is lower, but I’d gander the absolute number of people who would want something like this is much bigger than it was a decade ago.

This community forgets that because we’re told by investors, the media we read, etc. to go after the biggest markets possible. “Hunt for elephants, not field mice,” they say.

Don’t forget that a niche market on the web can still be massive and small fortunes can be made building products and services for them. You might not even need to have investors on your cap table to bring products to market to sell to those niches if you know what you’re doing, but shhhh… don’t tell them I told you that.

Google is a drug dealer selling to the digitally crack addicted. The death of cocaine was meth, and the death of the web was google.

If one dislikes systems that allow tinkering then why read and comment on HN. I do not understand.

Maybe HN is not the ideal forum for discussions of "the market" (due to lack of interest and/or understanding), but maybe HN is a decent forum for discussing systems that allow tinkering.

You’re in the small minority. You’re a power user that thinks like a software engineer, and likes to deal with data in lists.

Most users are completely happy that Google tries to answer their questions and (usually) provides the right answer front and center.

There are no more websites worth linking to anymore... If you filter out all SEO spam there is barely few webpages left...

Google is desperately trying to hide that fact. Most of the web 1.0 can nowadays fit into small town telephone directory... You do not need mulitibilion dolar business to run web directory...

I thought like you that if even Google couldn't find anything it was not there, but after discovering marginalia I now know it is just Google that has become unusably bad.

For day to day searching I now use Kagi and for me it is easily worth 10 or maybe 20 dollars a month since it "just works" unlike Google and has a larger index than Marginalia.

For now though Marginalia gets the money since Kagi is still in beta.

This is just retrieving articles when I search, not actual websites. Interesting if you're looking for article related to search keywords I guess, but genuinely unusable for actually finding something specific.

I think it showed the man page first because that domain is highly ranked.

1. Yes Google search has gone to shit - even putting stuff in quotes now does not do an exact search (there is another checkbox you ALSO need to use for that). It tries to be too smart even when no user is logged in.

2. Giant mega forums like Reddit have really taken over. Instead of a dedicated forum people just go to subreddits. Personally I think it is good and bad and I still try to actively participate in both.

I think you have the cause and effect reversed. (Though I disagree with the meme that Google's results have gotten worse. For me, it's more useful than it's ever been. I often find the information I need without even needing to click on a result.)

You don't want that, I don't want that, and I am sure many people here on HN and similar gathering places for powerusers agree with us.

But "the next google" doesn't have to replace google for us, it would have to replace google for the average consumer (AC). And the AC likes the "simple box". The AC doesn't want to fiddle with customization options. The AC is used to walled gardens, advertising, "Apps" that are just wrappers around webpages.

So any "next google" will have to compete exactly at the "simple box" game to get the attention of the masses.

You are wrong; Open Web died or almost died because of walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Billions of people who hang out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter would hang out instead on Open Web e.g. websites, blogs, forums etc. if walled gardens didn't exist.

I kind of miss forums being the place where most discussion took place.

The "we answer your question" thing could be useful, but:

1. It should be in addition to (not instead of) the web search results.

2. The answers can't be wrong. Google often gives such a low quality answer that I no longer want to use it for this, besides asking about the weather and sunset/sunrise.

Speaking of doing less, I would love to see the web be more hierarchical or semantic (but not necessarily "the semantic web" as it's currently conceived). Google itself is what made the world reorganize itself. A world where that kind of search exists will reorganize itself around search, maybe not always for the better.

Concrete example of going from a hierarchical/semantic world to a search-based one: Instead of finding your socks in the sock area, which is inside your clothes area, which is inside your "do private things" area, let's say now every sock has a trackable chip in it similar to an AirTag and you just say "Alexa where's the nearest pair of socks?"

Pros:

No effort spent on putting your socks in the sock place. Just throw them anywhere.

Instant access to socks.

Cons:

Big Tech, with all its limitations and machinations, now mediates and controls the relationship between you and your socks.

You succumbed to the temptation to slack off, and now there are socks everywhere. The Roomba doesn't even work right.

1. Much clearer delineations between ads and organic search results.

2. For anything remotely commercial it wasn't the case that literally the first 4 or 5 results were ads, pushing organic results below the fold.

3. No AMP carousel

4. There wasn't a vomitous amount of those "tidbit" sections - there were only a couple and they were usually helpful.

i know what you're saying, but this isn't exactly a triviality

I agree, BUT I would like to share my experience moving from Google to Kagi. Google serves me primarily ads, whether it labels them ads or pretends the results aren't ads, they're mostly ads. I see the same horrible domains pop up frequently, and there's nothing I can do about it. Kagi gives me the ability to remove these domains from my search, and it is INCREDIBLE. How many times has Pinterest barged into your search results?

Now, one could argue that these are domains which no one wants in their search feed. So perhaps this could be solved by being less beholden to shareholders and an advertising model. However, what about domains which most people want, but I don't? For example, I was finding increasingly polarising political content coming from MSNBC. I didn't like their "human" angle on news, and I didn't appreciate their extremely polarising commentary. So I want to remove all MSNBC results from my search feed. I understand I am probably in the minority. Perhaps my political views don't align with the typical customer. Could a well designed search provider anticipate this need of mine without giving me some kind of method to tell the provider that I don't want to see MSNBC? I'm not convinced so.

So I think the answer here is both. Design a search engine well, and give users the ability to customise it.

More likely, it exploits human's cognitive weaknesses successfully with a simple way. It learns how how people get their dopamine dose. And there is no going back. You need more and more, more extreme content. More polarization. All you need to do is to open app and get that dose. Is it the same for search engine?

And people make more crazy stuff to get views. How this ends? Not well, probably.

These are firms that are meeting a legitimate need- and that’s the need to feel connected. Tik-tok provides that, and very effectively. Plenty of people get genuine enjoyment out of their product, and meaningful connections do happen thanks to Tik-tok

I don't think they fulfill some gap of the need of feeling of connected in a real way. More like a bandage. We have seen the development of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram. Their audience is fading on countries who have used them longer time, what went wrong? How is TikTok so good that they try to adapt it on their platforms as well? No way to connect?

Short video clips which might or might not lead for a real conversation. They might offer escape from reality in your lunch break at work.

I understand the perspective of "feeling connected". It brings people together with similar mindsets on entertaining way. Or at least people who seems to enjoy similar things.

On the contrary, is it different than some oldschool cults or religions? Cults which are using psychology writings as base for feeling mutual understanding of themselves. Or religions which share same ideologies and use it as a solution for their problems?

Technology is advancing, is TikTok a modern solution for finding your role and place in the world when it does not make sense and you feel you are alone with your thoughts? Maybe it is, maybe it then fills some gap.

I agree that TikTok is providing entertainment (well, that is what dopamine usually is). It is easier to hook people on short videos which are done by global audience versus Netflix where there is a limited amount of material and they cost a lot to make, when audience on TikTok is mostly making them free and you just pick suitable ones with your algorithms for showing the other audience.

However, there are many problems in this. How it can be abused and how it creates people living on their own bubble, like people on some extreme Facebook groups. When a narrative includes only content that boosts your own thoughts, a reality can be lost. We need some research on this matter, but for some reason social media companies are doing their best to prevent that.

Someone people also really get addicted on the entertainment and cannot stop using it. Well, same thing can apply also for alcohol, but is addiction risk closer to opiates for example?

I don't really believe that executives are thinking for the best of the people, so optimizing platforms to hook users is a quite dangerous play.

What kind of TikToks are you watching? Tiktok sees I like watching Japanese videos that compare American and Japanese culture so it knows to show me more of that. Trying to say that showing me videos I like is them just giving me a done of dopamine is such a weird way to phrase it. Should they be instead just constantly show me videos they think I would dislike?

This seems a little sensational. Many people (myself and most of my friends included) don't see _any_ "extreme" content or polarization. A quick scroll through my feed is largely nothing but magnet fishing, frog tracking, cats, DIY projects, and geologists talking about rocks. It's enjoyable and arguably a dopamine dose on-demand, but not necessarily a road down more "extreme content and polarization".

To clarify, I don't mean with "extreme" necessarily a bad things, just content which gives you "extreme" emotions.

This is the thing. I'm the power user in my circle. People comes to me for suggestions about pretty much anything involving tech. Sometimes just because they see me with different stuff.

So if I'm not the average user I may look for other options, as other people like me may do. If I find such options reasonable for the average user, that will be my recommendation to them.

People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster or better people want the customization. At my job we have paying users that requests features that indeed are work related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded people will disagree and they prefer to bend their work to fit a guru-s vision.,

Now my turn to ask, why do people like you think there is a generic and basic solution that works at the same time for the casual user and for the user that has a lot of tasks to accomplish? Is there some theorem that shows this, like "The GNOME theoreme of product design, keep removing features until the shit convergence to the local minimum where you find the minimum product and the minimum set of users possible.

Obviously there are exceptions, and some tools are so advanced that it's necessary to be able to customize them. No argument from me there. But for most tools, and most users, there's just no hunger for customization. Almost nobody wants to have to manage an array of options to do a web search.

What is even more shitty is when soem feature is removed like the System Tray and first they pretend they do not understand what you mean when you say this feature is very important, then after someone wastes his time to explain a n=th time again how working people use the System Tray features at work or at home the GNOME dude finally admits the issue and offers some workarounds that are not equivalent but are "possible to do but with lot more work".

On short, some people do work on the computer, some people use search engines for work to find relevant stuff, this people do not ask features like "please use the exact same padding everywhere because I am OCD" or "please make those buttons/corners or edges smoother so I don't cut my tongue when I lick my screen", this people want the customization to do a task.

I am not sure why simple people have a SEGFAULT if they randomly end up in the Advanced section of a settings section, what do they expect when they open Advanced? Google main page has a small link for Advanced search see https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 how many GNOME users got hurt by this link existing?

The Titanic didn't sink because of the arrangement of deck chairs, and Mozilla didn't sink because of any features they did or didn't provide (and GNOME didn't fail to achieve significant market share in the first place because of features either). The actual problem doesn't have anything to do with the stuff on the deck at all.

It's the one-two combination of vendor-lock in and bottomless marketing budgets. Since most of the value of the Windows platform and the Web is the immense amount of stuff that's built on top of it, there's a huge lock-in effect that prevents you from even reaching parity, much less exceeding it. And in order to overcome the marketing budget and pure inertia, you need to be ten times better, not just on par.

If GNOME becomes as usable as Windows, it won't have anything to do with what they actually do in the desktop environment itself one way or the other, whether it's continuing on the road they take now, or reverting everything back to the way GNOME 2 was, it's totally irrelevant. GNOME becoming usable will be entirely because of Valve investing in Wine, combined with a whole bunch of other apps moving to Electron and shipping Linux versions because heck why not?

Unfortunately, while they are probably already on par with Windows, they aren't ten times better than the Mac:

* The Mac has a bottomless marketing budget. Good luck competing with that, GNOME.

* They've shown a lot more restraint than Microsoft has, probably because macOS is considered a niche product to round out their catalog rather than being their one and only operating system like Windows is for Microsoft. They have even reversed course on a few anti-features, like adding back USB-A ports to the Macbook Pro even though it made the laptop slightly thicker. And unlike Windows RT, they didn't lock down the ARM Macs.

* Those tectonic shifts I mentioned that made Linux usable? They also make the Mac usable, because Wine is open source and Electron is basically its own operating system. Anything truly good that GNOME does, Apple can copy it just like Chrome copied all the really good stuff from Firefox.

What would work IMO is someone with money paying the developers and the designer but force them do do customer support, you don't play with the new shit until most tickets are resolved and customers waiting for response are satisfied. maybe a paid support would help too.

Market success has almost nothing to do with product quality. Well, okay, it does, but only in the sense that you need to not actually be a total fraud. You can get away with dismal quality as long as your marketing is good [1]. In formal terms, software development is a loser's game [2].

[1]: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26660679

This implies that the churn you're complaining about has nothing to do with market success. You might not like it, but that doesn't mean the failure of Linux on the desktop is actually caused by it.

"Hold on", you say, "professionals want options, like user-expandable RAM etc". No, that's the misconception about the concept of a "professional". Unless you are a hardware engineer, tinkering with your notebook's internals is the absolute opposite of professionalism, its either a completely misguided waste of time and money, or a perfectly fine hobby.

Real professionals get work done. Customizing their workspace is something they feel ashamed to do, because it's procrastination at best.

Just that exactly is the workspace changes a lot, the hardware internals are hardly ever a consideration for any professional, it's easier to just buy something that works well from the start (and hardware costs peanuts).

It's often said that people don't want more choices, they want to be confident in the choices they make. It's the strength in simple product lineups like good, better, best. Googles lone search box is good example. Apple's product line also tends to be a good example at times.

It is a box that gives you a screenfull of ads, some spam copycat sites I wish I could remove, and a lot of clutter. As many people on here have said before, it only gets away with it because it owns the web browser through Chrome, Android and its Apple deal for Safari.

From someone who tried the switch to duckduckgo and uses ddg as the default engine: I can't remember the last query I typed without adding "!g". Google doesn't get my queries because the service is shoved down my throat, it gets them because the alternatives I tried are worse wrt the total scope of my queries.

1. Wiki article 2. Github repo 3. API documentation 4. Introduction with Python Code(Not my fav quality article) 5. Guide in R 6. Research article

I can't quantify what is better. But Google didn't give me what I wanted but DDG and you.com did. So congrats. My only issue is seeing Medium articles above the web results. While Medium might have the answer in this scenario the top web result was correct but de-prioritized which was incorrect from my prespective.

UI is nice and fast, different too. Not sure if I love yet, but will keep trying. Thanks for the link. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/t-sne-clearly-explained-d84c5...

I didn't bother checking customization-options, the ux was hostile and the results did not give me what I want. Pass, sorry.

Too many products equate frictionless == featureless these days and there should be more power when the user needs it.

That's why we built a search extension that improves upon Google specifically in ways that it's weak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives

It doesn't need much--a single button with "Remove this site from future results".

That would solve 99% of the problem because it would destroy SEO optimization since whole swathes of people would have different criteria due to the blocked websites. It would also tell Google which websites suck if they didn't already know.

Alas, it would also destroy their ad revenue because once a site got overly scummy people would start delisting it.

And that's great if it works! The problem is that once it fails (and, at least in my use-case, it does so quite often), working with it becomes an absolute pain.

I, too, would prefer an omniscient box perfectly answering my questions. But it clearly doesn't exist. And a box with screws to adjust so that I can eventually find what I'm looking for is the second best thing.

I think it really depends on the product.

If it's something like Photoshop or Vim which are used by professionals for multiple hours a day and productivity is to be maximised, customisation is not just a nice-to-have but a necessity. Power users appreciate it too.

You're absolutely right in 90% of the cases, though I'm not sure which box web search would fall into.

I tend to agree. It's an attempt to deal with bad design by putting in switches, options, and knobs to tweak. That's because 1) it's easier than focus groups, A/B testing, and taking video of users using the thing, 2) design takes some artistic talent, and 3) it lets the programmer blame the users for the problem.

This is a vice of open source people. It's why Linux on the desktop has never taken off. "Just edit /etc/conf/foo/bar/prefs.txt" is not a design. Nor is "On the visual side, you can modify everything about the way things look, even being able to write your own custom CSS."

I'm critical of Google's search, but this is not the way to fix it.

Consider just few more search options, alongside "News", such as "Scholar" and "Noncommercial", for when you're overwhelmed by crap. And "Popular", for when you want the crap. Don't add another interacting dimension of tweaking.

When really innovative stuff is just about removing steps. If a process has 10 steps, remove as many as you can, and now you have something truly innovative on your hands.

I feel like Google did exactly that. Pre Google steps: search for XYZ, wait, check first link, second link, spam, spam, check next page. Post Google: search for XYZ, get XYZ.

I don't know how to easily fix that though. Simply "crawling the entire internet" is still not a simple problem, let alone doing something more useful with the result than google can. Ahrefs is an interesting business but not what people mean when they say the next google. "Machine learning" but I think google is all over this already (and has been for years).

Google does a bad job at getting user feedback about results while reddit does better so people search reddit, maybe a hybrid is an opportunity.

Or worse - Search for exact term: get a page full of "Missing X - must include X" links hidden in tiny text below a result, click "Must include X" get the SAME FUCKING RESULTS again, click tools, click the dropdown, select verbatim, finally see decent results

The old Google was able to do an exact search using Boolean expressions. Man, I miss that all the time....

It's not rocket science to provide a user interface for this. A combination of GUI configuration, keywords, and specific URLs for these cases would go a long way here without bothering the regular user in the slightest. Yes, it's probably slower than in earlier times, pure search volumina and its handling by AI weighting etc. considered. But there is also a "don't want" on the part of Google and the other players.

The useful ideas in here is the "just my data" search, linking into external providers across siloes. Of course, Microsoft, Google & Apple already have this as long as all of your data is held in their ecosystem.

Turns out the market doesn't know what it wants until market participants see what is being offered.

Google's simple box is not attractive when others can provide the same quality in search results.

That aside, a search engine needs to be really focused on privacy. Customising it implies that the user needs to log in and remain logged in. I'd much rather no do that with a search engine, and I don't want its behaviour to react to my identity either.

It's better to focus on the core basics and perfecting it than to add many features and try to support and maintain them especially if they are features that only 1% of the users use.

It's kind of like ad-blockers where you don't have to maintain a list of domains to block. Others do that for you. And then people could create hosted version of their simple box with all the infra taken care of.

site:reddit.com {search_query} site:twitter.com {search_query}

I hope to have this as default at some point because some of the indexed results by default are just terrible.

You are so on point with being opinionated though...

Google has preferences also.

It is not a dead end if you're building a tool.

Crazy from a privacy perspective, but potentially very seductive in terms of convenience.

I personally benefitted a lot from the ability to like the reddit app once and then see more real reddit results?

What TikTok shows to me is that users want specific things when they go to a site: for TikTok, they want fresh entertainment, plain and simple. I go to HN when I want tech discussion. I go to reddit when I want aggregation of niche topics. I go to costco.com when I'm looking to shop.

Google is frankly a horrible experience for ecommerce, it simply cannot compete w/ the likes of Amazon or any retail store website, really. Being a search portal, it's fundamentally incompatible with the concept of evolving through permanence of a hivemind; every new search is like reseting a would-be community to zero all over again, so you cannot gradually build up a collective commons on Google like you can on HN. Youtube has recently gotten pretty bad with cycling fresh content on the front page. For stack overflow sort of stuff, any other search engine does more or less the same. For trivia, Siri/Alexa are fine substitutes. The Google search properties have become mediocre on average; they're not particularly great at any particular thing.

Are many of these domains walled gardens? Yes, think of things like Doordash/Uber Eats grocery catalogs, a ton of brick and mortar shops are choosing to integrate with these delivery apps, and these catalogs are completely invisible to Google. News SERPs on Google are often garbage since they just link to paywalled content half the time, might as well just get a subscription from the actual news outlets. Etc.

IMHO, the next Google is already here, and it's everybody else wisening up to the simple business fact that they need to own the top of their funnels.