

Ask HN: Did we all give up on a better search engine/experience? - rokhayakebe

Have we settled for Google?
======
anigbrowl
No. I think Google is still the best of its kind in many product areas, but
every day I am looking for the new thing that wildly exceeds it, even if only
in one area - I feel we're stuck in a local maximum right now that will look
laughably restrictive later. In particular, I desperately want to find an
alternative to Google for News. Google News is so laughably, self-evidently
bad that I have to believe either nobody is working on it or that they enjoy
pottering about in their IDE more than they like reading news. Well, it could
also be that that whatever they are doing now maximizes revenue for Google
even if it doesn't serve consumers very well, so that they know it's bad and
don't care, but I don't want to be so pessimistic.

Seriously, I want to go and (metaphorically) kick in someone's door in
Mountain view, wipe the nearest whiteboard with a startled junior engineer,
and write a a new set of UI priorities for that project before security
arrives to eject me from the building. It should be one of their best
products, and it's a joke.

~~~
scottyallen
Public visibility of a Google product and the size of the team working on it
often aren't correlated. It wouldn't surprise me if News is a very small team
that's spending most of their time doing maintenance.

------
lovelearning
I often want my searches to be confined to long form content like blog
articles or magazine articles, but google insists on including vaguely related
shopping sites, discussion forums or company product pages in the results.
They had a prominent search in blogs option in the past, but it's now
available only via some URL parameter hack.

I'd really appreciate a search engine that confines itself to blogs.

------
0942v8653
I gave up on "better" but I still use DuckDuckGo (because I don't like the
idea of Google). The important thing is being able to type the !bang things to
search a particular website (with their own search engine) but I find myself
increasingly typing !g

------
hardwaresofton
Nope, DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, make it yours too.

------
jpetersonmn
What kind of improvements would people like to see? I haven't really thought
about it much, but I feel google finds what I need.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I am not sure, this is a "you don't know what you don't know case," but
certainly this cannot be the best today.

------
biomimic
Vertical search continues to be Googles largest threat. New kinds of AI based
vertical search experiences will lead the way.

~~~
rokhayakebe
What example of vertical search engine do you have in mind?

For example I do not buy it when people call Amazon search a vertical SE. They
just have search for their own database.

------
carlosdp
Google always finds what I am looking for, which is the task of a search
engine. Why is that settling?

------
wittedhaddock
No!

