

Ask HN: Which websites actually have a useful search that Google can't beat? - photon_off

Everybody uses Google, Bing, DDG, or some other search engine.  But are the search giants as ubiquitous as they seem?  I think there's a great value to individual sites' search features, mainly because they go beyond the grasp of GoogleBot.<p>There was a post recently about Google's main competition being Bing.  I think that's entirely untrue.  I think their main competition is the long-tail of search that they simply don't have the dataset to compete against.<p>Here are sites that I can recall using the search feature, and it actually being useful:<p><pre><code>  - Wikipedia (half the time I use Google, though)
  - SearchYC 
  - Urban Dictionary 
  - BTJunkie 
  - StackOverflow
  - Delicious
  - Twitter
  - YouTube
  - eBay

</code></pre>
What sites do you find have a useful search feature?
======
iamelgringo
Bing's travel search is the best in the Biz as far as I'm concerned.

Wolfram Alpha is phenomenal for certain types of queries. I find their results
for companies pages to be so cleaner and more intuitive than either Google or
Bing's.

I think there are huge openings for competing with Google and Bing when
focused on a specific niche. Google's revenue per search query in the US is
$0.12.[1] And, I know I"m getting frustrated with their search results, and I
find myself using multiple search engines for different types of queries.

There's tons of room for competition in this market, and I don't know why more
startups aren't taking advantage of it.

<shameless plug>

This is the reason that we're turning <http://Newsley.com> into a search
engine for economic and financial news. The news sections of Yahoo Finance and
Google Finance suck IMHO. We're trying to make financial news search suck
less.

We're focusing on building our index and results pages like crazy right now.
We're currently indexing the Economist, NYT Business and BBC Business[2].
Bloomberg News should be online this week.

After getting Bloomberg online, we're going to focus on getting the alpha
version of our search released.

We're making our results pages available as soon as possible, however, so we
can start building a bit of organic search traffic to our site even before
search is released. So far, it's worked great. Since we started releasing
those pages 6 weeks ago, our traffic has tripled.

In the meantime, each one of the keywords or tags below each article leads to
the results page for that specific term. Feel free to click around.

</shameless plug>

ref:

[1]
[http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1...](http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/why_1_of_search.html)

[2] <http://newsley.com/crawl_stats>

~~~
nostrademons
What are the particular queries where you've been frustrated?

~~~
iamelgringo
I'm finding Google less and less useful for queries about specific programming
problems.

I'm finding myself going to DDG and Stack overflow for answers to those
problems first, just because I don't have to sift through results from crappy
forums or Experts Exchange to get to answers for my specific query.

I do prefer Google results to Bing's results for those topics, because I can
query Google groups, which also tends to have higher signal::noise ratios.

As I said, Bing has Travel search down pretty cold as far as I'm concerned,
and I travel quite a bit. That may well change since you guys bought ITA,
which provides Bing's data. Brilliant move, btw. I do use
<http://matrix.itasoftware.com> a ton after a quick overview search on Bing
because of the domain specific language that itasoftware lets you use on your
searches.

Amazon does much better for shopping and product search. My first inclination
these days is to go to Amazon and look for a product. If the price seems
reasonable, I have Amazon prime and the product gets shipped to me for free in
2 days, or I can spend $4 and get it shipped next day.

I found myself living over at Edmunds.com when I was searching for a used car
to buy two months ago.

I think that the results from Wolfram Alpha on company financials are much
better laid out than Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. I'm much more likely to
use Wolfram than GOOG or YHOO to get an overview of a companies financials.

I think there's a lot that can be added when it comes to financial news
search, which is why I'm building <http://Newsley.com>

Looking for recipes on Google pretty much sucks. I'd much rather go to the
Food Network.

The reason that I think you guys are hurting at times in search results, is
because your mission is to categorize "all the world's information". So,
you're approach is to pull in as much information as possible, and then sift
through and sort though what's important.

If a site takes a semi-supervised approach like DDG or provides search over a
specific silo of curated content like Stack Overflow, then I think you guys
are going to be hard pressed to compete.

And on a certain level, it doesn't make sense for you guys to try and compete
with sites like Edmunds.com or Stack Overflow. You guys are looking for niches
that can provide the next $0.5 Billion to $4 Billion in revenue. Small
verticals like programmer searches, recipe search, financial news search
etc... aren't really going to be worth a huge investment for you guys to
dominate.

~~~
nolite
umm..what's DDG? (yes, I googled it)

~~~
boundlessdreamz
<http://duckduckgo.com/>

------
byrneseyeview
LinkedIn. Try asking Google for a list of all the Ruby developers who went to
Princeton and live in New York City.

~~~
photon_off
I did, and it let me straight to your post.

------
vaksel
stackoverflow is useful? they have one of the worst search engines I've ever
seen. If you are looking for anything more specific than "Javascript" you are
going to have a hard time finding good results.

if I need to find something on stackoverflow, I just go to google and do a
site:stackoverflow.com

~~~
photon_off
I personally hate typing out the whole "site:stackoverflow.com" before my
query. But you're right, it is better.

~~~
marcusbooster
If you do it often just make an alias for it in the browser.

~~~
photon_off
True. But that won't solve the problem for everybody. I will solve the problem
for everybody.

------
CohenYuval
Standard search engines can only help you find results to a search query you
can put into keywords. Often I want to ask the question "Am I missing
something important about X?" and that cannot be translated into an effective
search query.

We've built resourcey.com trying to tackle this problem. That is,
<http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/> is the answer to
"Am I missing something important about Hacker News?".

This is a different form of search queries we couldn't find a way to get
results for via standard search engines. If you think this functionality can
be somehow produced by a standard search query, do tell.

~~~
photon_off
This is great.

Right now, there are not too many metadata websites out there. Your site,
AboutUs.org, Alexa and ilk, moreofit.com and ilk, and comment aggregation like
BackType and UberVU, are all that come to mind when I think: "I have a URL,
what can you tell me about it?"

------
unfasten
Newegg. The Power Search, in particular. I find the ability to specify certain
features for a product extremely useful. The guided search is also nice to
quickly narrow down on more common criteria.

For example, here's the video card power search:
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/PowerSearch.aspx?N=100007709&#...</a><p>It
allows you to specify manufacturer, port types, memory/memory type, chipset,
etc. When I'm just starting to look for a new part or device being able to
narrow down the list that way is very helpful.

~~~
safetytrick
This is interesting though, Newegg has to change the standard search box to
something more guided to be useful. I think most sites have too little content
for a visitor to find anything useful with a search box. In these cases a
directory or tag system is a much better solution. Some exceptions to this are
web applications where users are looking up content they created on their own.

------
_delirium
Often at database-like sites, where I can get a list of something in a
selectable category that matches a particular term. For example,

IMDB can give me a list of all TV series / films / etc. with "Hobbit" in the
title:
[http://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q=hobbit](http://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q=hobbit)

Musicbrainz lets me search by track name, album name, artist name, etc.:
[http://musicbrainz.org/search/textsearch.html?type=track&...](http://musicbrainz.org/search/textsearch.html?type=track&query=I+Am+the+Walrus)

~~~
photon_off
MusicBrainz is nice. Thanks for sharing.

~~~
mdaniel
And is community built, so please contribute your CD listings.

I don't have any experience with their audio file (MP3, AAC, etc)
fingerprinting, but I can tell you it's a great experience to pop in a freshly
purchased CD and have MusicBrainz find it. I know that experience comes from
some other kind soul having input the CD, so I try very hard to make sure I do
the same.

~~~
bartl
>I don't have any experience with their audio file (MP3, AAC, etc)
fingerprinting

I do, via the desktop program
[Picard](<http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownload>). It really works well
for properly tagging mp3 files (and renaming files to fit the tags) -- once
they know the tracks. That often isn't the case with obscure, new releases.
But you can't win them all. It's a program that's really worth using.

~~~
nitrogen
Maybe it would be possible to identify tracks not known to MusicBrainz by
uploading them to Youtube and seeing who sends the automated takedown notice.

------
theospears
TinEye (<http://www.tineye.com>): a 'reverse image search'. You upload or link
to an image and it finds you other copies of that image on the web. This is
something you absolutely can't do via google, and is surprisingly useful, for
example to find uncropped or pre-photoshopped copies of images.

------
StavrosK
Whaaat? Wikipedia's search sucks (at least it sucked last year, when I last
used it). Now I use a Google search with the site specified to get Wikipedia
pages.

To answer the question, I'd have to plug my own startup, <http://historio.us>.
It's actually made bookmarking viable, for me.

------
tokenadult
I use Google for finding most pages with information on Wikipiedia, and I am a
Wikipedia editor who has read three whole books about how to use Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's search usability is a disaster compared to using Google to search
for Wikipedia pages.

------
petervandijck
amazon.com (their focus on products that they sell makes their suggestions
almost perfect).

------
eklitzke
I think Yelp is a good example. When you're looking for a local business, you
have a category/search term in mind, as well as a location. The single input
field in Google search is awkward when trying to fulfill this need.

------
gregable
More structured queries that those that main search engines offer. For
example: kayak, travelocity, etc. Bing bought out farecast for this reason.
These kinds of queries can't be done easily if the only input a user can
provide is in one text box. That isn't to say that web search engines could
tackle these areas, but they wouldn't have as much of a head start in the
technology.

~~~
bl4k
"flight to LA", "hotel room in New York next weekend", "metallica san jose
tickets" etc. will return structured results, in both Google and Bing, soon I
feel.

Google bought ITA and Bing bought Farecast for the purpose of getting direct
access to this data. Since they can't web crawl this type of data, I would
expect more acquisitions and/or licensing deals - such as the deal with
Twitter.

Google has a decent foundation already with queries such as 'population of
london' '<movie name>' (which shows local theatre times) and 'weather 94000'
etc. Full list here:

<http://www.google.com/landing/searchtips/#helpcenter>

~~~
gregable
Those queries don't even begin to give enough information.

Flight to LA from where, when, how long, economy/first, what times of the day,
etc.

Hotel room in New York next weekend which days, smoking or not, upscale or
not, which part of new york, which new york?

Metallica san jose tickets are closer and could generally get you the venue's
page that will then ask which showing, which seats, how many tickets together,
etc.

~~~
bl4k
Google would use all the information it has to make assumptions about defaults
to display. When you click-through to the site to make the booking or to drill
in further you can specify the details.

eg. 'flight to LA' can show :

    
    
      SFO -> LAX  Tod  Tom  Wed  Thu  Fri
      Orbitz      $187 $210 $299 $330 $450
      Travelocity $200 $350  -   $89    -
      United.com
    

etc. etc.

------
Freaky
Newzbin. Bespoke C in-memory search engine with full substring matches and
loads of metadata to play with, indexing data Google has no interest in.

I may be biased, since I wrote half of it. Funny seeing it turn into some kind
of zombie :/

------
pietrofmaggi
Mainly White pages, when I need to find same phone numbers, but for the other
stuffs I can think only at very specialized info like publications where
google is not a good enough choice.

StackOverflow is a good example for this, I can usually reach what I was
searching for in it with from a good google query.

~~~
photon_off
Thanks for sharing. Do you have URLs for the aforementioned White Pages and
specialized publications?

~~~
pietrofmaggi
Is this a joke? ;-)

Well, in Italy we have "pagine bianche":
a<http://www.paginebianche.it/index.html>

Which is simply the translation of white pages: <http://www.whitepages.com/>

Regarding specialized pubs, its a long time I don't use one, but this list
seems fairly complete:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines)

------
m0shen
For audio software -- <http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php>

------
lien
Google's search engine is good, but not necessarily the best. For small
datasets, I am using Apache's solr. Google's custom search doesn't produce as
great results. solr is also highly scalable. read about it here:
<http://lucene.apache.org/solr/>

~~~
lien
just wanted to point out that this is not a website but a tool to implement
for your own website...

------
JeffJenkins
The startup I work for will let you do queries using units of measure and
price filters in the query string. For example:

<http://www.shopwiki.com/LCD+TV+%3E43%22+%3C%241000?sb=1> (LCD TV >43" <$1000)

~~~
EricBurnett
[http://www.google.com/search?q=LCD+TV+43..100+inch+%240..%24...](http://www.google.com/search?q=LCD+TV+43..100+inch+%240..%241000)

~~~
aberkowitz
I looked at the results, and I found that Google has some problems parsing
content. For example "50in TV $1200 after $500 discount" gets included because
Google assumes $500 is the price.

------
AlphaSite
Every single forum search engine, ever. Google is awful for that, the tools
just arnt up for the job.

~~~
nostrademons
What, in particular, are you looking for when you search for forums? Example
queries and the tasks that generated them would be most helpful.

There is a fair bit of data on forums that is not exposed in the UI, simply
because no frontend engineer has had a chance to look at it. I'm a frontend
engineer, I'm potentially looking for a new project or some 20% work, and so
examples of where Google isn't quite working right are pretty helpful to me.

------
rschq7
lxrs are a good example of a kind of search that google can't replace yet:
<http://mxr.mozilla.org/search>

i also find <http://koders.com> to be useful

bing video search has lots of advantages when it comes to showing and
previewing results. (and google video search sucks)

for places photos i always use panoramio search. (compare their results to
google images)

Google Blogs search has been completely replaced with twitter search.

and i use thepiratebay.org to search for torrents. (but only backups of things
i own :))

------
jack7890
In addition to the travel search engines that have been mentioned, I'd include
Hipmunk.

------
andrewljohnson
The best way to search StackOverflow is definitely using Google.
site:stackoverflow.com

That's one of the first ways I will refine a search about a programming topic
these days, but no need to use stackoverflow.com search.

------
blasdel
Considered as a separate site, Youtube is actually #2 in search volume behind
Google and ahead of both Yahoo and Bing.

Craigslist and Facebook are both in the top 10 search engines.

~~~
photon_off
Where can I find a list of the sites with the highest search volume?

------
dagw
eniro.se is much better for looking up people or companies in Sweden
(basically yellow and white pages). I'm sure all countries have some sort of
local equivalent.

------
Dramatize
I'd say Torrentz for a torrent search engine.

~~~
photon_off
Why are you being downvoted? Sites that have useful searches was exactly what
I asked for. Thank you.

~~~
Dramatize
Hmm I don't know why. NP

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rrival
iStockPhoto - semantic, allows for moderately easy refining

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terryjsmith
PHP.net

------
duck
Intranets

------
slig
NZBMatrix.com

