
Not only is it possible to beat Google, it could happen sooner than we think - Nuzzerino
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-beat-Google/answer/Mark-Nuzzolilo-II?share=1
======
electic
Where do you start with this one? But okay, here goes:

1\. The post assumes that the search result quality is not good. This simply
is not the case. Users say the search results are good. Could they be better?
Sure. Are they terrible? No.

2\. The post assumes users want transparency on the search algorithm. This
clearly is not the case. The whole reason that google became what it is today
is because of the lack of clutter and good search results.

If you remember Altavista then you remember users constantly having to fidget
with all these knobs in the advanced section to get relevant search results.
Lycos, excite, etc weren't much better. I remember using Google for the first
time and it just worked.

3\. The post assumes that users want deep customization. This again is not the
case. Users want less clutter, less knobs, and a faster search experience.
Google is delivering that.

4\. The post assumes that any startup with a better algorithm can beat google.
However this is not the case. Google has deep search integration with mobile
providers such as it's own Android OS and also iOS. it also has it's own
browser (Chrome) and has paid deals with Mozilla. Obviously, both browsers
default to Google when you type something in the search field.

Not to mention, the leading IOT devices all connect to Google to find results
when it needs to search the web. And for safe measure, Google has come out
with its own voice assistant device, Google home, to safe guard against any
shenanigans from Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa that might happen in the
future. It is heavily subsidizing the price to make sure it has a strong horse
in the voice game.

Integration aside, it also has scale. It crawls most of the internet several
times a day. That's no small feat and it is quite hard for a startup to just
replicate that with funding. I mean, even that won't cut it.

Google is now even using machine learning to understand relevant pieces of
information on a webpage so when you query it by typing on your keyboard, by
voice, or future mind control it delivers the answer you were looking for.

The only valid point the post makes is that Google has squashed competition by
buying any startup that remotely could threaten it's position...for safe
measure. I'll give the author that.

~~~
RandomInteger4
(1) My impression from using Google is that it's really great for technical /
scientific first page search results, but pretty horrible otherwise.

(3) No, I'm pretty sure users want more knobs or at least filter options.
Hell, even a simple domain blacklist feature would be amazing so that I could
get the woowoo psuedo science cruft -- which has been SEO'd to the front page
-- out of my results, so I didn't have to put any mental effort into visually
filtering out multiples from the same site. Hell, they could even collate
results from the same domain into a single grid folder to optimize the time I
spend searching through the search results.

Don't conflate Google's lack of innovation for an optimized experience simply
because it's Google. I love Google, but there is a massive amount of
improvement that can go into their search user interface. Same for every other
search engine, but Google is the leader in this space, so they get the brunt
of the criticism, and should they change, then others can follow suit.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> No, I'm pretty sure users want more knobs or at least filter options.

Nah, 90% either don't or wouldn't use them if they were there.

Sure, if you ask people directly if they want more options, they'll say yes,
who doesn't want more choices? But that's a different thing from actually
using them when they're available. The vast majority of users for a utility
service like a search engine just go with the defaults.

~~~
always_good
I once had users begging me daily to implement 2FA, being so dramatic you'd
think it was a principle they'd die for. It became a huge issue in the chat
daily. How can we take this site seriously if there's no 2FA? We have no
choice but to leave to <competitor> if you don't have 2FA!

Well, a year after we implemented 2FA, I queried the database for users with
2FA enabled, 3 people had it enabled.

Aside, only somewhat related to the previous story, the idea that users want a
bunch of knobs and levers is just an example of the HN delusion where HNers
regularly think they represent the population, like the person using the Lynx
browser.

~~~
jjeaff
The person/people on the Linux browser are hilarious. Half the time when
someone launches a new site and shows it to hn, they chime in complaining it
doesn't work on lynx.

The first few times I saw it, I thought they must have been joking or
trolling.

I don't even have time and budget to make my site work well on older versions
of IE. It would be insanity to optimize for the 12 people that use lynx.

~~~
dTal
If your page isn't at least readable in Lynx, then it probably isn't readable
by screenreaders or crawlers either. Lynx users aren't expecting pages to be
"optimized" for them, but it's not unreasonable to expect text content to be
accessible textually. All this whiz-bang JS frippery is shaping up to be Flash
wesbites, round two; it was bad then, and it's bad now.

Even _Facebook_ used to work with Elinks (don't know if that's still true).

------
lopatin
I suspected the author was dreaming when he said the lack of rich
customization of the search algorithm is taking away from the end user
experience. People don't want to learn about the intricacies of your search
algorithm. You're assuming they care. All they want to do is type their
question into the magical text box.

He also seems to not understand the value that search advertising provides.
Search advertising is a win-win for businesses and consumers. If you see it as
something parasitic that needs to be fixed, I can't take you seriously about
"how Google will be beat".

Then I read the last sentence, quoted below. Sigh. Nothing serious here folks,
carry on.

> I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized
> smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange
> itself can happen on a peer to peer basis (via a synergistic ecosystem of
> content curators, content providers, and content consumers).

~~~
QAPereo
How is search advertising a win for consumers?

~~~
lopatin
Consumers are often in a "buy mindset" when searching for something. The
phrasing of their search query can indicate it. For example, someone search
for "cheap office chair" most likely already has their CC in hand. It's a
search query that belongs as much on Amazon or Craigslist as it does on
Google. So when it's searched on Google, the idea is that the _market_ will
provide more relevant results than an algorithm designed for ranking articles
based around keywords and semantic equivalence of the content.

~~~
runeks
> So when it's searched on Google, the idea is that the market will provide
> more relevant results than an algorithm designed for ranking articles based
> around keywords and semantic equivalence of the content.

And the market does this in a relatively simple manner: by letting merchants
bid on search keywords, and showing the site of the merchant with the highest
bid, you force merchants to either lose money or be relevant.

In other words, the most relevant merchants to a search phrase will have the
most money to bid up visibility for that phrase because they make the most
money, on average, from users looking for this particular thing.

------
zilchers
This was non-sensical...someone will compete with google because Blockchain?
There’s no issue with current payment models, you don’t need a trustless peer
to peer system to beat google, you need to significantly change the nature of
what it is to search. If instead of finding q&a’s on stack overflow an AI took
my question, looked at my code, and answered / fixed it, that would be a game
changer. Using a different UI than google? Has happened, will happen again,
not really relevant (google itself has revved it’s ui extensively).

~~~
Nuzzerino
If you read through the rest of the comments here, you'll see these points
were debated or addressed already.

~~~
always_good
You may have responded, but I can assure you they were not addressed.

------
walterbell
What are some business models that could support a user-oriented search
interface? Probably not advertising, if ( _big if_ ) the new approach will
return better search results than Google. Subscriptions have only worked for a
few well-known services with exclusive content.

Would users be willing to learn a more powerful interface, if they consider
current search engine results “good enough”?

Could Wikipedia or Archive.org address a subset of the search market, since
they offer user-focused services? Archive.org already crawls a subset of the
web.

~~~
ybrah
Most people want the accessibility achieved through quick searches on their
phones. The only users that would use a more powerful interface would be
professionals. The professionals that would use it would be researchers,
developers, and health practitioners.

~~~
walterbell
I wonder what those professionals use today: google’s advanced search
interface, niche site search, social media search, libraries, paid services,
bloomberg, lexis-nexis ..?

~~~
ohtwenty
As far as I'm aware, in the Netherlands wrt health: specialised sites. Google
is all WebMD or unverifiable claims, or just doesn't go in depth. So you check
your UpToDate, or pubmed, your country's/specialization's current guidelines,
farmacotherapeutisch kompas for medicine
([https://www.farmacotherapeutischkompas.nl/](https://www.farmacotherapeutischkompas.nl/)
\- search for medicine and find dosage, interactions, etc). Google is often
good enough for a reminder, but won't hold up for specific knowledge or minute
details. So at most that Google the name of the service to search on there.
Which is why I use ddg - if I know what website/information store I'm going to
end up going to, I might as well use the !bang to go there directly. And you
know which tools to look at because you're given them when you're studying.

------
greglindahl
As someone who tried to compete with Google in search, it strikes me that
everything he brings up was also true, and well known, in 2007 when we started
Blekko.

Cuil, SearchMe, and Blekko didn't fall into the UI trap that he outlines. None
of us succeeded that well, but that's a different issue.

~~~
murukesh_s
What happened to Blekko? If you don't mind about sharing the "different
issue"!

~~~
greglindahl
Well, it's always hard to say why something didn't work, but we certainly
tried a very different user interface with our Izik UI, in which ambiguous
queries got up to 200 answers organized into categories.

~~~
Nuzzerino
I'm curious as to how it failed. Did people use the site, and hate it? Did
people join and then not return, or were those metrics unavailable? Were the
operating costs abnormally high? Did the company receive a lot of users, but
fail to receive enough revenue to cover even a normal amount of operating
costs? Seems like one could narrow it down with the help of today's analytics
tools.

I'm also curious if you have kept up with other web search technology efforts
since then or whether you moved away to other things. There's definitely some
things that don't add up.

------
rdlecler1
To get people to switch the new solution needs to be 10x better. It’s not
clear how you could do this without Google’s day network effects. Someone like
SoftBank would have to go out and bets $10b on a search startup, but even
then, Google is not going to be outsmarted by a new algorithm or interface.
We’d need to move to a whole new mode of computing. Mobile has been the
biggest threat yet.

------
murukesh_s
I switched to bing long time back and haven't felt any difference. They even
copied google look and feel to great extend. I did it after google started
showing more details in my search timeline than i wanted to see, with it's
integration with gmail with which google started scanning my emails for ticket
purchases, product orders etc and whenever i searched that product - it says
you have purchased this product with order tracking number blah blah.

I am sure bing/msft also does everything they can to 'understand' me, but at
least they don't see my browsing history or emails.

Now back to beating Google - I do believe it's possible, but Google will soon
catchup with any potential competition. They will catchup because it's their
bread and butter and they have perhaps the worlds biggest concentration of
technical personnel. The best way to beat any product/company is to be
considerably better than it in at least few areas, given the scale of web
indexing, that is a very very tough job only few companies can pull through.

Microsoft has/had a good chance to beat Google, but Microsoft is considered a
bigger evil/corporate than Google, so they have a slim chance to emotionally
overcome Google, not to mention technical capability. But they can perhaps
_open source_ bing in an effort to beat Google, provided they have the will
and moolah to do so. When I mention open source, it's not the code, but the
underlying search index, exposed as an API, free of use for anyone/any
product. That will dramatically shift the emotion as well as the usage towards
bing. I even mentioned this during an internal bing meetup event (I am part of
a bing beta testers group), but of course no one listens.

A startup can also try to beat Google in their wildest dreams if they can
associate themselves with the younger crowd like snapchat did and the younger
crowd somehow finds it hip/cool to not use Google and use that service
instead, and provided they get a decent web search data/index from established
competition like bing or they manage to index themselves. These are few of the
possibilities.

~~~
nickelbox
I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about
Microsoft making their index public. Maybe among certain crowds like this, but
what would it gain us? I couldn't just send a PR to help _improve_ it; the
only benefit I can see is transparency and perhaps a fun, maybe even useful
visualization.

Also, the image of a "hip" Google competitor like Snapchat seems tremendously
unappealing, personally.

~~~
murukesh_s
> I don't know if the majority of consumers would care in the slightest about
> Microsoft making their index public.

It's not just about consumers, but a plethora of other startups who can then
use the index to build something creative on top of it. For e.g., you
currently have bing/google customise certain type of websites with custom view
for quicker access (IMDB, Wiki etc). However there is a limit a big company
can be creatively about this.

Imagine a search engine where any user can submit a custom widget under a
market place and consumer users can then install that as a plugin. For e.g.,
stock brokers can install stock widget, programmers can install document/stack
overflow search and so on as a quick widget to see the top result without
opening the link.. since it is community maintained, it will be proactively
maintained by the community itself. That alone can topple something like
Google if there is enough momentum (E.g. see VSCode overtaking Sublime text.)
That is just one possibility. And it can also improve the search results as
users may voluntarily come up to improve the result accuracy.

Other possibilities include voice based search, gesture search, integrated
search within any mobile or smart watch app etc. With current licensing model,
other startups have severe limitations in obtaining search results from the
wast internet. This could explode and perhaps take over everything.

~~~
nickelbox
Ah, that makes much more sense now. You want to enable a community of
plugins/widgets/apps built on top of the index. That's fascinating. I feel it
would probably require some centralized base set of widgets similar to what
Google already provides. That way the average user can just type "5 minute
timer" without having to manually install the widget first. Quality/security
outside that base set might be nightmarish. People put a _lot_ of stuff into
search bars.

------
thisisit
Is it possible? Absolutely but it won't last very long. Google would have
learned from Yahoo's mistake. They will acquire a company if there is even a
whiff of serious competition. Whether that better algorithm will end up in
Google search is another matter.

------
elvinyung
It feels like this Quora answer explains why Google is successful, but doesn't
really discuss or provide any compelling evidence as to why the author thinks
it's "becoming more and more likely to happen soon".

Also,

> I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized
> smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange
> itself can happen on a peer to peer basis

...

~~~
apatters
"Number of people who tipped the author for this content" could be a very
interesting search signal. It costs you nothing to link to someone. It costs
you money to tip them.

~~~
notatoad
Yeah, but if it becomes known that that is a search signal, it effectively
lets people purchase their way up the search rankings by paying other people
to tip them. You'd have a much smaller pool of legit tips to overcome, because
so few people pay for content, before you could become the most tipped article
for any given topic.

~~~
TuringTest
You have just described paid advertising.

------
haglin
I have tried not to use Google, but I always come back.

Results from Altavista, Bing and DuckDuckGo are so much worse.

Note, it's not that Google has personal information on me. I'm not logged in,
my cache is cleared, I use a VPN and google.com/ncr when it was available. Not
sure how they do it. Perhaps their tracker sees how long people have visited a
page and then they give those pages higher priority.

Perhaps other search engines can do a better job, but they had over a decade
to improve their results and they are still far off.

~~~
477353468463695
In my experience, the main-difference between Google and other search engines,
aside from personalized results, is that Google tries very hard to interpret
your query.

For example, if you search for some programming topic, it will generally pull
results more towards the top, if they reference the current or a recent
version of whatever programming language/tool you're searching for.

That helps, if you just want to type in "how do i do this? [programming
language]" or similar.

In other search engines, you'll instead first search "how do i do this?
[programming language]", then possibly not really get any good results and
then instead search for "how do i do this? [programming language] [current
version]".

This is how Google worked as well, some few years ago. Knowing what keywords
to type in to get the right results was an actually valuable skill ("Google-
fu"). Today's Google is instead designed to minimize the need for skill in
phrasing your query. Great for the average user, but in my experience, if you
do still possess Google-fu, then this interpretation actually hinders you.

With other search engines, you get the results that your query asked for. You
know immediately when your query was ambiguous or just bad and can adjust
accordingly. And with that, you can more easily narrow down the results, given
that you know how to narrow down the results.

So, maybe give other search engines another try, while keeping that in mind. I
personally very much prefer other search engines, because of that, even if I
sometimes have to type one word more.

------
mevile
When I'm doing an online search and the top results are from quora I know I'll
be disappointed. The result will be on topic but the information will be the
same kind of one person's faulty rambling kind of thing seen in this post
here. There is somewhat good content on Quora, it varies, but it seems to be
way more miss than hits. Information from Quora is usually about as good as a
hit from some old PHPBulletin forum.

~~~
Nuzzerino
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-
group_homogeneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype)

~~~
always_good
I can imagine you smiling smugly and whispering "checkmate" as you submitted
an obnoxious comment of wikipedia urls.

Doesn't surprise me coming from the sort of person who submits their own Quora
ramblings to HN.

~~~
Nuzzerino
I tend to respond obnoxiously to comments that are themselves obnoxious. If
you check my history on both Quora and HN, you'd see that I am much more
active on HN than I am on Quora. I tend to use whatever medium gets the job
done. Best tool for the job and all. When you actually start submitting things
at all to HN, send me a message so that I can learn from the best as to what
the "proper way" to do things are.

The post got a lot of views, so I would call that a success. Not sure what
point you were trying to make there.

------
Animats
Yahoo tried to compete with Google. Yahoo was first with "vertical search",
about fifty special purpose question-answerers for weather, sports,
celebrities, etc. Then Google copied that. Yahoo switched to reselling Bing,
and gradually became irrelevant.

Cuil tried to compete with Google. Their idea was that their system was an
order of magnitude cheaper to run than Google's. But they never developed a
revenue model. Cuil went bust.

I tried a system which trimmed most of the ads out of Google result pages.
That got very little use.

Google does have search customization. It learns from your queries what you
ask about. At least if you're logged in, and possibly if you keep the same IP
address.

Google is already moving past search to question-answering. They're not very
good at that yet, but they're getting better.

------
tluyben2
I believe not; there is no need unless their ads become too intrusive. When we
have issues with a technical issue in China, I start the VPN and search with
Google. What takes my Chinese colleagues a lot of time, is immediately found
in Google, even for vague components. Specsheets they did not receive are
easily found on Google but not on the engines they have. It is not that we
cannot think up a better Google, but I believe that means better NLP, not a
better backend. Google would destroy anything that comes close, simply because
it will be something they can bolt on in no time and then they have the data,
money and infra.

------
PyComfy
I have ditched google in favor of Searx, a metasearch engine that anyone can
host

[https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/](https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)

[https://searx.me/](https://searx.me/)

[https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-
instances](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances)

------
future31
The Language Council of Sweden was adding the word “ogooglebar” to the Swedish
dictionary during 2012/2013 with Google with great force and success stopped
that from happening.

When searching for answers which Google has no answer for the answer should be
“this is ogooglebar”. So you don’t have to spend hours trying to refactoring
your query for hours. This would be a great improvement and a great user
experience.

This is Google’s akilles heel - never able to admit that they don’t know.

------
Razengan
There is nothing that can’t be “beaten” through research and technology.

I mean, someday, we will be encasing entire stars in artificial shells and
creating black holes of our own. What’s a single corporate entity that managed
to get a lead in barely the first stages of a relatively new industry?*

How about incorporating search tech into web servers themselves? Move it to
the level of DNS And other core protocols. Make individual servers
automatically index all content that passes through them. They could then
populate special caching servers with the indexes and results. When a user
searches for something, the query gets sent to successive search-cache
servers, kinda like a DNS lookup, until match is found or up to a browser-
specified depth.

—

* People generally did not care much about search engines at the beginning; they usually just had a small list of sites in their memory or bookmarks that they visited regularly, and found others through magazines, links or word-of-mouth. Search engines were merely a hit-or-miss convenience, often used for porn or “wares” I’d wager, then that convenience emerged to become the core way of discovering and interacting with the internet.

Does anyone here remember the point when they “switched” to using Google? I
personally can’t recall myself ever doing that. I think it just happened
casually, through a browser that defaulted to Google. I remember thinking how
ugly Google’s UI was, and preferred other engines for their “looks.” But at
someone point, Googling just became faster than any other way to get to what I
felt like looking up.

For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for
the default search. :)

~~~
jfk13
> For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for
> the default search. :)

Try Firefox: it's right there in about:preferences#search. :)

------
nocoder
I don't think Google search will be beaten. I think the whole current concept
of search by going to specific URL/app, seeing a list of search result will
become obsolete. We are already seeing that with voice based UI where you want
an answer not a list of pages. The second part will be that lot of stuff that
you care about will be known by google/Alexa and will be readily available so
no need of searching. This also is already happening with google launcher on
android where things like news and score about my favourite teams, travel
times to airport or workplaces being shown nearing the time of travel along
with routes so I don't have to search for any of these. This can be further
integrated with a cab being available just when you need to leave. All of
these earlier would have involved some kind of searches.

iMho this will be the natural progression. So if you are creating a better
google search please stop you will be out of business before you start. This
is no longer about standalone search but a larger ecosystem around the
information needs.

------
richard___
I've been thinking for a while that a conversational search engine is the next
iteration of search. If you query a human expert, you don't expect the correct
answer immediately - it comes by filtering out possible answers with
subsequent clarifying queries. The next gen search engine should be this way.

~~~
robotresearcher
I just add another word to the original query and hit return.

~~~
richard___
Let's say you're reading this research paper:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05407.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05407.pdf)

I want to know: "In Rob Fergus' paper intrinsic motivation and self-play, how
is it that the reward for agent A can be based on the time taken for agent B's
task, when agent A and B are run sequentially, and agent B runs after agent
A?"

Can Google answer this? No. Is NLP smart enough to answer this? Probably not.
But the question itself is hard to write in one sentence. Complex queries are
best structured as conversations, with clarifying back and forth, Socratic
method style, like if you're asking a professor a question about hard science.

~~~
Nuzzerino
Funny enough, I once was on a team that was working on this exact technology.
Sadly the company was dysfunctional beyond redemption.

------
hildaman
I switched to DuckDuckGo - it isn’t as good as google, but it is 90% of what I
need. For the rest I have to slightly tweak my search criteria - but that is
not a bad thing because it forces me to use my little gray cells.

YouTube and Gmail substitutes and then I am Google free.

~~~
igorbark
What do you use for maps?

~~~
477353468463695
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/](https://www.openstreetmap.org/)

------
oh-kumudo
So no evidence is offered, only imagination.

------
silverlake
Google will inevitably become a blundering bureaucracy like every behemoth
before it. The inevitable corporate politics will cause it to crumble from
within. My bet is Chinese companies will outmaneuver Google outside western
markets (US and EU). Also, Google is primarily an ad display company. Global
marketing firms should support competitors to blunt Google’s dominance,
especially outside the US. Finally, the EU will declare Google a monopoly. All
this will take a long time though, just like Microsoft.

------
boomboomsubban
A better search could be made and likely is out there already, but one sums it
up best. How often do your peers use Yahoo? Still, the company gets enough
hits to be worth billions. Part of that is a global market, Yahoo is big in
Japan supposedly, but part of it is your Uncle having made his decision pre-
dotcom crash.

