

Is there room for another search engine? - nurhafiz

I am developing a structured search engine to help web searchers find user-contributed information (yes, I know about network effect) in a way that is easy to perform sophisticated queries such as 'a list of jobs in industry A where the company has branches in B, C, D states and is founded by someone whose name consists of E'.<p>(the given query is just an example, though; it is not restricted to jobs)<p>The concept is similar to Freebase but not exactly a clone as I don't do clones.<p>I bounced this idea to a local (I'm Singaporean) forum and the typical response is "Why should users use your search engine and not Google?" even though I have stated that it is not meant to be a replacement for Google.<p>I am curious to the response of the HN community.<p>Is there room for such a search engine?<p>What kind of queries do you not use Google for?
======
arkitaip
Google is... lacking when it comes to vertical or specialized searches,
millions of database specific search interfaces on the web are a proof of
this.

Furthermore, I would never ever gauge the viability of an idea simply based on
feedback provided by random users on a forum, no matter how biz/tech savvy
they might be. You need a more robust process for evaluation your ideas that's
based on actual customer data. I suggest Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the
Epiphany.

Good luck with your idea.

~~~
nurhafiz
Thank you for the words of encouragement. I appreciate it.

------
revorad
There's certainly room for another search engine. Have you ever tried shopping
searches on Google? They're painful and I'm building something to fix that.
Another horrible search experience is site-specific search. Try looking for
some techcrunch articles about a topic or company. You'll get a ton of
results, but filtering them is nearly impossible.

I think there's great scope for innovation on the UI, as hipmunk has clearly
shown. Touch-based interactions, instead of typing and clicking, are going to
be important.

Is there any specific vertical you're thinking of?

~~~
nurhafiz
I have figured out a way, which I can't share for now, on how to make it as
vertical as it is horizontal (if that makes sense to anyone).

------
ig1
Are you familiar with Sparql ?

~~~
nurhafiz
Yes, but I won't touch that at all because I figured a way to make the search
engine usable for non-geeks (no offence to geeks).

I think sometimes we need to take a step back and see things from a non-geeky
aspect in order to come up with a practical solution.

