
Ask HN: What do you think a successor to Google Search looks like? - igammarays
Thought Experiment: let&#x27;s rethink the search engine. How does a small team of engineers, with tiny compute resources, build a new kind of information-finder?<p>The old model of centralized crawling&#x2F;link&#x2F;text-pattern-matching (a.k.a. Google) seems so 1998. So arbitrary, so open to manipulation (e.g. the Boris Johnson story today). I want something fundamentally different, something that takes into the account the sheer size of the internet today. Something not manipulatable by &quot;SEO&quot;.
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tinytrader
What if your search engine was just made up of sites you add to a personalised
"pool" of sites. This way your news comes from a consistent source and/or your
technical questions are answered by your favourite dev community site, etc.
Certain sites could be tagged for relevancy around a certain search keyword.

That's my two cents :)

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igammarays
I like this idea. You can also start with a pre-populated pool of curated
sites for particular topics. You choose these seed pools based on your trust
of the curator, which could be a university research department, for example.

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tinytrader
Exactly what I was getting at :)

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QueridoGuy
I don’t think it’s easy to make such successor. However, I think the best
approach into making a better search engine is to start with meta search
engine, and collect analytical results of users decisions. At the same time,
that search engine needs to develop its own. If you stay with meta engine, not
many is going to find it authentic, and it would be a cluster. However when
you start as meta engine then you implement your own engine using it, that’s
when users will be comfortable in using

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freediver
Re meta not being authentic - would you say the same is true for DuckDuckGo?

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QueridoGuy
I guess the less harsh word that I wanted to say is reliable.

DDG has it’s own community. It’s growing, but I don’t think it will catch up
with google. There are other factors too.

As for authenticity. I think people interpret DDG as unwanted, unfortunately.
Because it was frequently set as home page as a bundle. If you search its
name, you will find people frequently asking “is it a virus”.

It’s hard to advertise an engine these days without being viewed as a forced
advertising. But there are better tactics like offering incentives.

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pi-squared
Think what problem you are facing with the web right now and how you would
solve it. Don't solve a problem for a thousand or a million people because all
of them will have different problems. Start with you. Do you not like the
interface? Do some css play, mockups on gimp or pen and paper.

What are your queries usually? Take a look at your own Google history, find
and try to group what you are looking for and what would you ideally find that
Google/other search engines don't satisfy.

I understand your desire to do something "revolutionary". But most things are
incremental.

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dorait
The current search engine has very limited context (your profile and the sites
you visited and the searches you have done).

What if the next incremental improvement is asking you questions about the
search to get better context before actually doing the search and giving you a
smaller set of usable results?

Just dreaming :)

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hans1729
Uh, you might want to look into the disciple of Information Retrieval.

I'm confused by your question: what exactly do _you_ want? It seems like the
SEO-story of Johnson caught you off guard, and now you're like "Google search
bad". Then: well, what exactly do you know about search algorithms? What
better product do _you_ want to develop? Asking HN before you learned anything
about Information Retrieval (because that's what it feels like to me) seems
inadequate.

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igammarays
I don’t know what I want. I just know that I don’t like the text-matching,
machine-learning path that Google has taken. The internet can no longer be
distilled into 10 blue links. Maybe.

Thanks for the suggestion about reading up on information retrieval. But maybe
the point of this exercise is NOT to use well established methods. I want to
rethink the interface and mechanics of search.

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ToFab123
I don't think it looks like anything. It will sound like something. Think star
trek computer.

