

The Google Killer no one talks about - drlisp
http://searchenginewatch.com/3640656

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strlen
Wow, this article demonstrates sophistry: "big sounding" but ridiculous ideas
in regards to the scalability challenges involved in search (has the author
ever heard of latency?), no mention whatsoever of the science-intensive nature
of search (page rank is a beatifull algorithm that captures the imagination,
but that's like narrowing down a commercial RDBMS to a B-Tree: there is _far_
more behind the scenes that requires hundreds if not thousands of domain
experts to research, implement and deploy).

This also missed the key thing Google has done: they're improved upon
Overture's "pay for performance" model by incorporating click through rates
into rankings which (when coupled to a scalable architecture that Overture
didn't have until take over by Yahoo and Project Panama) turned them from
"just another search engine" (I still remember our neighbours, both of them
engineering managers in enterprise software companies reacting with utmost
disgust to Google's IPO price: "they're only a search engine!") to the first
company to make search hugely profitable to advertisers.

The "next Google" will take yet another commodity field that's ignored (has no
clear winner at this time, not even seen as particularly technologically
challenging: remember, inverted indices have existed long before Google) and
make it a vastly profitable niche, while at the mean time "sucking up" Silicon
Valley talent as to create a "moat" around their business. The talent could
then yield secondary moats, much like Google's expertise at scaling out on
commodity hardware enabled them to create the scalability moat at a time when
all other players ran on mainframe hardware (with the notable exception of
Inktomi, which started on clusters of bottom-to-mid Sun SPARC hardware, the
kind that developers had on their desktops rather than enterprise and
mainframe class gear -- quite close to commodity hardware), afraid to tackle
the tough distributed systems problems.

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gokhan
This article is a waste of time. Please do not upvote it.

~~~
electromagnetic
I figured that by the title, which is why I checked the comments first. 'The
google killer no one talks about' - my first thought - if no one talks about
it it's likely not good and if no one is talking about it no one will hear of
it and it'll 'kill' nothing.

Thank you gokhan, you likely saved me 10 minutes of a boring hyperbolic read.
+1

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ErrantX
_We can even pose a question into the ether without even knowing which friend
will know the answer and respond._

And how many of them Google it for you? ;)

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Aaronontheweb
Although I liked the historical analogies, this article is all over the place.

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Indyan
Bah..I was expecting this to be about DuckDuckGo - the only search engine that
actually returns better results than Google.

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ohashi
Umm.... how does one organize and tap into all these people? There is going to
be some type of searching/ranking going on... somewhere.

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ck2
Many years ago I thought gigablast was going to be the next thing to get close
to the big three but now it's faded away. It really was impressive years ago,
all coded by one guy and ran on like 5 machines.

Now it's turned to greenwashing which is strange to see.

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wazoox
More interesting is the article linked about Yandex, the leading russian
search engine, I had never heard of it.

<http://searchenginewatch.com/3634912>

~~~
mahmud
Why haven't you heard of Yandex? they're all over httpd logs.

~~~
Dirt_McGirt
Ah yes, I can't imagine there is a person in the world who don't read httpd
logs on the regular.

~~~
mahmud
This is _Hacker_ News.

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cmelbye
tl;dr?

