

Tell HN:  Why Bing is the future of search. - amichail

Google-style search is essentially a solved problem.  I wouldn't be surprised if Google's rankings are already close to "optimal" for the top 10 results.<p>This would mean that it would be <i>impossible</i> to ever beat Google because small ranking improvements would be insufficient to convince users to switch in large numbers.<p>The only way to improve search is using verticals as Bing is doing.<p>But you need to take this much further, opening up a vertical search API so that developers can extend the search engine in thousands of verticals competing with each other whereever there is overlap.
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pg
I suspect there are less incremental ways to beat Google. In this field, as in
many, the big advances will come from redefining the problem: from saying not
"we could make search better if we did x" but "if we did x, people wouldn't
need to do search."

Directed Edge is already looking at the world that way. I'm not claiming
they're the startup that will make Google irrelevant. Historical precedents
suggest it's still early for that. But it seems extremely unlikely that
nothing ever will.

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bsd_junkie
Actually, any service out there that tries to do away with the requirement
that people actively perform some effort would fit the bill for a potential
Google killer in a particular vertical. In other words, any recommendation
service that preferably can "learn" the habits of its users and then simply
recommend new content. DirectedEdge is just the latest player in this game. I
personally track the news recommendation niche. There used to be a service
called Findory that in my opinion came very close to being "optimal". But they
went under for some reason. The closest to Findory (and with some very cool
features such as computational lie detector for news) is
<http://www.euraeka.com> They have all three basic features - search (aka
Google-style), discovery (aka crowd-wisdom style) and recommendation engine.

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amichail
Recommendation engines tend to fail, with StumbleUpon being the exception.

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wheels
I'm not sure that's a meaningful statement in the startup world, since I think
it can be reduced to, "Startups tend to fail, except for the ones that don't."

If the incidence of such is higher within the recommendations space, it's by
less than a standard deviation.

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tallanvor
The danger of verticals is that people don't want to have to think about what
site to visit depending on what they're looking for. Sure, it would improve
relevance, but I think you'd find that the increased relevance isn't worth the
inconvenience to the majority.

That said, what people forget is that there are still many areas where Google
is not the king of search, especially at the enterprise level, so even with
Microsoft, Endeca, Autonomy, and other search companies, there's still room
for competition.

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amichail
_The danger of verticals is that people don't want to have to think about what
site to visit depending on what they're looking for._

These verticals should be integrated into one site and vertical selection
should be automatic (but taking into account implicit and/or explicit feedback
from users).

