
Y Combinator Challenge #16 - A form of search that depends on design - jmorin007
http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/y-combinator-challenge-16/
======
jfornear
No one ever seems to give any mention to Viewzi, a Dallas based visual search
engine that is pretty awesome from both a design and technical standpoint.
<http://viewzi.com>

Even though Viewzi is still in beta, the overall apathy toward them from the
tech crowd seems to point to the conclusion that maybe people don't really
want a design oriented search experience.

Regardless, good luck to Viewzi and others who feel called to create a new
approach to search, but the bottom-line remains... Branding is key, and Google
is one of the most well-known and trusted brands in the world.

In addition, even if you were to come up with some innovative new approach,
Google or some random programmer with BOSS could easily implement similar
features and render your hard work worthless. (see: Cuil)

Search doesn't need fixed where it isn't broken.

EDIT: I'm also tired of hearing people say that Google has no sense of design
when it is one of the most well-designed sites on the web. There is an art to
knowing what not to include, and Google does this better than anyone on the
web.

~~~
wensing
I am not finding Viewzi to be very intuitive. This is not what I expect from a
search results page:

<http://www.viewzi.com/search/hurricane%20tracking>

What am I supposed to do next?

~~~
richcollins
Yeah it is not well designed.

I think people confuse design with style. Just because something has style
doesn't mean it is well designed.

~~~
jfornear
I'm assuming you can't beat Google with 'style' alone, so my use of 'design'
pertains more toward the UX and process by which you finally get to the
results. Viewzi is pretty innovative by allowing the user to choose where the
results are to be pulled from and how they are to be displayed.

I think Viewzi's UX is quite brilliant, but the look on the other hand is too
heavy and flashy for my minimalistic taste.

From a design standpoint, Google is so successful because they match their
clean and simple look with their basic and straightforward UX.

------
tom234
I wanted to post a general discussion going about creating a search engine
since the Ycombinator crowd is a good crowd. How do you guys see Google
scaling in comparison with how the web is expanding so much? Do you think they
will keep indexing the web and adding new content? I personally don't see that
to be very scalable. What do you think Google is thinking about the future in
terms of incorporating so many webpages into its index. Obviously Google is
using a "pull" mechanism where it crawls and indexes. Do you guys see like
"push" mechanism like RSS that will work better and how would that affect the
search result? Is there any way besides index to achieve a different kind of
search engine? Another kind of content retrieval system is like the Digg where
the user "pushes" the content to Digg and therefore it is supposedly more
relevant and interesting, but the disadvantage of that becoming a search
engine is there isn't a lot of content that the user submits compared with
like Google. For instance Digg cannot support query like "c# string replace"
while Google will do that very easily because it crawled and indexed the MSDN
api pages already, while Digg users might never submit that same page to Digg.
My main concern is supporting so many content with different query and being
very comprehensive search engine like Google without this huge index and
crawling restriction? Any clues? I'm not dreaming about this and I actually
want to make it a reality somehow.

~~~
kleneway
In my opinion, yes, Google will keep crawling the web and indexing in a
similar (but continually optimized) way for the foreseeable future. Here's why
- let's say you work at Google and come up with an entirely new way to do
search. Here are your options: 1 - Go to Larry/Sergi with the proposal to
completely rip and replace millions/billions of dollars of infrastructure and
knowledge in favor of a completely unproven new idea. The cost and risk are so
huge they'd never go for it. 2 - Go to an outside investor with the proposal
to build it from scratch. If it's truly an amazing, innovative new approach,
they might fund it and you'd be able to build it from scratch without the
political nightmare of trying to rewrite the core product of a multi-billion
dollar public company. This is exactly what both the Cuil and FriendFeed guys
did (and yes, FriendFeed is very, very, very much a Google competitor).

One thing I always think about is in 100 years (or 1000 years), will we still
be opening a web browser, typing a few words into the same plain Google text
box, and hitting the "Search" button to get a page with 20 blue links and a
bunch of ads? I doubt it. So there's definitely a better way to do search, we
just haven't discovered it. My personal opinion is that some combination of
social search (i.e. FriendFeed) plus human-powered search (i.e. Wikia/Mahalo)
plus semantic search (PowerSet) will be involved in the next evolution. Of
course, if I knew exactly what that looked like, I'd be on a beach right now
instead of hanging out here on Hacker News. :)

~~~
tom234
Good reply. Thanks for replying. I personally think it ultimatily boils down
to content that the search engine has. That is the index in this case for
Google. I think the semantics and the semantic web will make a huge
difference. How I look at it is that because Google's result for "c# string
replace"
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=c%23+string+replace](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=c%23+string+replace)
is much better than Mahalo's <http://www.mahalo.com/C#_string_replace>, Google
is good. I was thinking about how the search will be in the next 2-3 years.
The main problem I see with is the discovery of new content in search engine,
and I think Google basically brute forced the whole thing by trying to index
everything and hope that the results are there and which works alright for the
query above. It basically boils down to 100 thousand crawlers and huge index.
If social search engine cannot discover this page
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fk49wtc1.aspx> for this query "c#
string replace" for instance, it is game over. Google is alive because of
these kinds of results. My main concern is how to discover new content and
without the burden of updating the index and bruce forcing the whole thing by
indexing every word on a webpage. I know Google indexes pieces of webpages but
still it is ton of words to index. I just see huge problem with creating huge
index like Google and maintaining that index which is also a lot of work. Also
I don't have the resources (money) to create a huge index, which is another
main reason.

Good discussion by the way.

~~~
kleneway
Yeah, I had some thoughts a while back on one way this could work using social
search: [http://tchblg.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/why-friendfeed-
deserv...](http://tchblg.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/why-friendfeed-deserves-a-
one-billion-dollar-valuation/)

Basically, you'd get results back that are from conversations posted by your
friends, side-by-side with traditional results from a search engine (using
something like Yahoo's BOSS). Then, if you still didn't get the answer you are
looking for, you can broadcast the original query out to your online contact
list to see if anyone within your social network knows the answer. You
wouldn't get instant results, but it would likely be a very good, trusted
result. This probably works better for things like opinions (what's the best
Chinese restaurant in Seattle?) vs. a fact-based search like "C# string
replace".

I would seriously avoid trying to take on Google or MS or Yahoo by trying to
out-index them. Cuil has millions in the bank and some of the world's foremost
experts in search at the helm, and things aren't looking all that bright so
far. There are lots of problems to solve in the world and lots of approaches
on how to solve them - solving search by out-indexing Google should probably
be pretty darn low on your "problems to solve today" list.

~~~
tom234
I will definitely check out your links. Out indexing Google or Microsoft live
search is definitely out of the question for me just because of the amount of
data among others. Social search with like Yahoo BOSS might work. I will look
into fact-based search using social search and conventional search or some
kind of combo.

------
prakash
The best articles on competing with Google are from Rich Skrenta:

[http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.htm...](http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.html)

[http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...](http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html)

~~~
tom234
Great article. Thanks.

------
tom234
This UI design is critical to search engine is just nonsense. All that matters
in search engine is the result. You can have the crappiest interface and the
best result, you will become billionaire. Simple as that. Design in search
engine doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the result.

~~~
arockwell
Design matters because I need to be able to interpret the search engines
results as quickly as possible. Google's lightweight design really shines
because it loads instantly and I can usually look through the result page very
quickly and figure out which link is the most relevant to my query and click
on it.

However, that's not always true, and I sometimes have to click on 3 or 4 links
to figure out if I need to refine my search or not. If someone found a better
way to organize the search results, so that I can determine which ones are
relevant faster that would be a big win.

I do agree with you that the quality of the search results are a lot more
important though, but presentation definitely does matter.

------
13ren
It wouldn't open links in a new window (FF2, linux); and I could find no way
to extract the URL of a found page.

Cool design though. Expectation management: I felt delight at the effect, then
disappointment that it didn't animate the it fully (maybe it's my low-power
subnotebook though).

