
Ask HN: Will there be a better Google? - kyloren
I was reading this book called &#x27;In The Plex&#x27; which talks about the beginnings of Google, how no one thought of using back-links in ranking web pages and how Larry Page used it to make Page rank it&#x27;s a fascinating book to read, and surprised to see how everyone missed an idea like that.<p>Fast forward to today, has search reached its climax? Can&#x27;t there be any other search engine that will deliver better results than Google? There was a time when people talked about social search for a while but that too died down.<p>So is there a new frontier for search? Will there be a better search engine in the next few decades?
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CM30
Of course. If history has taught us anything, it's that no company, product or
individual has ever remained 'on top' for eternity. Everything gets superseded
and replaced by something better, it's just a matter of when that happens
rather than if.

As for search in particular, yes again. There are plenty of ways a search
engine could work better than Google. It could read your mind and figure out
what you intended rather than having you try and write out your search query.

It could actually answer questions in purely conversation English (or any
other language), like what Ask Jeeves tried and failed to do years ago.

It might have results somehow tailored to your interests in a much better way,
and basing what comes up on both people/sources you trust, relationships
between them and new pages and your exact intentions.

Heck, it could just be better at finding generic pages than Google is at the
moment. I'm sure you've come across tons of situations where you searched for
a certain specific technical term, right? And then found all the results were
ones that only had the most vague similarity to what you wanted, with the term
you cared most about it in grey and strikethrough form underneath the result?
Even a search engine that realises you want a certain term in a certain
context (say, a discussion, or a long form article) would do better than
Google at the moment.

So yeah, there will be a better search engine at one point. Quite possibly one
that completely changes how searching works in general and finds results that
are far more accurate to what you actually want than anything available at the
moment.

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fairpx
The answer, I think, is in the book you're reading. Search was stuck long
before Google came. Then came Google and they made search better. Right now,
search again is stuck. Until someone comes up with a way that everybody else
is missing, to take search to a new level.

~~~
kyloren
I am yet to come to that point of the book. Where is the search stuck at the
moment? I can't seem to understand that.

~~~
Pamar
I suppose you are too young to have used Altavista? Or Yahoo "curated" link
lists?

~~~
marmot777
Oh god, I remember how exciting it was when Google rolled out. Goodby
Altavista and all the rest. Though I do have a place in my heart and gratitude
for Altavista. That search engine found me whatever I wanted to find. It
worked well. Google just came in and was better.

~~~
firebones
My memory of Altavista was that it was great for discovery of obscure but
interesting sites. Sure, you might have to go through 10 pages of results to
find one, but the experience was one of serendipitous discovery. It's lack of
precision (in favor of recall, making it seem less winner-take-all, SEO-
optimized) seemed to correlate strongly with the notion of "surfing" the web.
(And the use of the phrase "web surfing" likely declined as Google, and later,
the app economy, rose.)

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saran945
Though there are many better ideas like semantic search, entity search, Q & A,
deep search, etc. Startups could crack some market share from big players.
Building better search engine is not the big problem for startups, but from
business perspective, It's a marathon race - in terms of scale, investment,
making the user switching from google etc. also Google have billions of $$,
thousands of researchers working to improve the results, competing them is not
easy, hence many stay away from search engine development.

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insoluble
Imagine a search engine that not only gave you search results, it used
advanced AI to tell you in brief how each result applied to the problem you
are currently trying to solve. Currently, you have to waste time thinking
about each result to classify the contents, as for example, entertainment,
product marketing, opinions and rants, purely factual, legal, political,
social networking, media, API/interface, et cetera.

It would also be useful if the search engine could verify statements made on
pages and give an accuracy/honesty score for each result. This is particularly
important when the author of a page has a serious conflict of interest.
Perhaps the search engine could tell you what that conflict is -- to help
protect you from deceptive or incomplete information.

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endswapper
Maybe I'm at risk of being a fan, but the Google of tomorrow will likely be
better than the Google of today. And while they have expanded and evolved I
mean this relative to search specifically.

"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful."

The universally part has a lot of room to grow, and the useful part changes
everyday.

Not having read the book, but based on what you posted, the example is just
one of the giant leaps forward and a way they differentiated themselves as a
technology and a company. New leaps will present themselves through continuous
improvement and reassessing what is useful.

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jsmith0295
Probably not. Google will likely remain at the top, although they'll continue
to improve. It might end up being effectively a new engine decades from now,
but it will most likely get there by evolving gradually over time.

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alain94040
Absolutely. Search is still in the stone age. A new paradigm will come up, and
Google, like most large companies, will be too invested to the old way of
doing things, they will struggle to adapt. That leaves plenty of opportunities
for startups.

For instance: everyone seems to assume that search is about finding the _one_
page on the Internet that best answers the query. Wrong assumption. People
want answers, not pages. What about a search engine that combines facts from
two pages or more to answer my question.

If you are working on a startup in that space, ping me on AngelList.

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paulcole
>What about a search engine that combines facts from two pages or more to
answer my question.

Interesting concept, but why would I (as a site owner) want my content mixed
with my competitor's? I can see value to th en user, but what would the value
add be for indexed sites?

~~~
unimpressive
Search engines have never been about what websites want, so it doesn't matter.

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brudgers
The idea of a search engine is long since gone. Google is a
destination...mail, news, interesting links, etc. So is Facebook [just replace
'mail' with 'messages']. It's really the Yahoo/AOL/Compuserve model that works
over the long haul.

The future of actual search is something that gets out of the way like Siri or
Cortana. But there's not really money in search. The money is in siloing and
data collection.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Google is largely ads these days on anything commercial, followed by organic.
With the introduction of a 4th top placement ad its amazing how little organic
search is showing on a screen.

Type in a competitively commercial term like 'credit card' and think how it
was 10 years back. Its amazing how they have trained us to accept this. Or
maybe its just the lock of better options...

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marmot777
I'm not saying they're better but there are alternatives to Google that
address specific concerns. For example, DuckDuckgo seems to be getting some
traction with their promise to give you privacy.

That pitch resonates with a lot of people. I hope they don't do something that
would degrade our trust in that. I think they have a future.

Whether their seach measures up to Google's I don't know. I'm guessing they're
not there yet as Google is good but they'll get there and if they stay true to
their vision, they'll win over a lot of people. I worry because there are a
lot of temptations that could throw a company off it's core promise,
especially a solemn promise to protect your privacy, while others offer money
to go different directions.

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rm999
I consider search an essentially solved problem and I think most people agree
with me. When I want to find something I can usually use Google or Bing to get
to it within 10 seconds or convince myself it doesn't exist. Will search get
better? Probably, but going from 99% to 99.5% isn't very exciting to me.

If anything, I see Google and others moving in a direction of using context to
reduce the amount people search (e.g. google now). I think this pattern is
going to get much bigger in the coming years with better AIs and more
information about what the user is doing.

~~~
simbalion
I agree with what you've said but I wanted to add that there is room for
improvement on Google's model. For example, selling page 1 results is unfair,
but that is something google does.

I think DuckDuckGo is an example of how Google's methodology can be refined
and improved upon, specifically by not spying on users. It's a subtle
improvement, but I find the results I receive are actually superior and more
relevant than Google's, plus I don't have to worry about who is watching my
traffic.

~~~
FT_intern
I don't think it's sustainable to not spy on users or to not serve ads.
Keeping user data adds to relevancy and if there is no revenue, there are no
relevancy engineers.

~~~
simbalion
That might be true, but web-search is an absolutely vital service for cultural
health in the information age, like the telephone system used to be.

Every search engine does sell ads, which seems to be working for them all so
far. If that ever stops working, we might see web-search become a public
utility funded by tax dollars.

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mongodude
I don't think there will be a search engine better than Google in the near
future (may not forever). Best search engines today will have to throw results
based on user preferences to stay relevant and compete with Google's results.
Cracking the perfect semantic search (chat bots) may change this but Google
may have advantage here just because of the amount of data it has. Any great
algorithm, unfortunately will be limited by the data on which it will be
trained. Google has this unique advantage.

~~~
marmot777
I don't think search needs to be made better. There are more important
problems. That doesn't mean there aren't innovations to be had in search
engines but it does not have to be better search algos.

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qaq
I am not sure about general search but I think an option based on ranking of
author + knowledge domain would do well.

