In Austria there is "geizhals.at" [1], which is a price comparison website for electronics, and they have the best parametric search engine I have ever seen. It's 1000x better than Amazon search.

However, there's no way Geizhals will ever expand into general search. The reason why they are so much better than the competition is that they are focussing on a small, profitable niche and presumably use manual data entry to ensure they have the best data.

[1]: there's a UK version too "skinflint.co.uk"

Just opened skinflint.co.uk to have a look. I was greeted by "Do Not Track detected only storing necessary information". That's wonderful!

I don't think I've seen a website that does that before and I think it's worth praising.

Geizhals is my go to for anything computer related. Somewhat amusing that such a good site comes out from this little country.

This is HN and we're not even pretending to be optimistic about beating incumbents, but it is much deeper than that - there is also a profound sense of defeatism directed towards European entrepeurs as well as the world at large. It is an indictment of the current nihilistic zeitgeist.

Well, it is a forum run by a Silicon Valley VC firm … so of course there will be a bit of “only SV can do anything interesting in tech” gatekeeping going on.

Idk, even people here in SV has given up.

> The only search product that comes close to this is Amazon search or booking.com (or maybe YouTube).

What is so great about those search examples?

Absolutely nothing, Amazon search is horrendous. Search by price is completely broken (and has been for years). Filter by exact phrase is non-existent. No way to search products by size, and on and on.