
Why one search engine for the whole internet is not a good idea anymore - ferdous
http://dynamicguy.com/post/160792434677/1-search-engine-not-good-anymore
======
adamcanady
I work on Google Search. Having one search engine per country doesn't seem
like the correct approach to the problem.

> Every country has a mammoth collection of valid results for your query.

Having seen the corpus of content available from each language, this is
categorically false. Consider Wikipedia, which is a fairly ubiquitous
information source on the web that provides answers to tons of searches.
English documents: 5.4M, Romanian documents: 376k.

Perhaps the solution to the OP's woes is more tools for filtering. This post
conflates the ideas between language and country. Search typically returns to
you results and search features that are in the query language. Today's
solution where filtering is done through query refinement and query operators
seems to cover a lot of use cases already.

Further, by having an integrated product, ML models can learn behaviors
specific to certain locales where those behaviors differ from region to
region, and balance with more universal behaviors that apply to more than one
region.

~~~
svarnypetr
Agree and, as I work for Seznam, especially agree on the ability to train
models properly to satisfy local users. Not to mention that the user can
choose what should be the language of the results.

~~~
adamcanady
I guess I wasn't too far off geographically with Romanian Wikipedia :)

Keep up the great work at [https://www.seznam.cz/](https://www.seznam.cz/) !
Lots of interesting search features, maps, etc.

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sillysaurus3
Here's what I get for "iPhone price":
[http://i.imgur.com/VOE0Q1q.png](http://i.imgur.com/VOE0Q1q.png) which shows
the actual prices.

The thesis of the post seems to be that it's a bad idea to have one search
engine because people will reverse engineer it. That's true, but the billions
of dollars flowing into Google means they throw the smartest people at staying
ahead of SEO. It seems pretty effective.

~~~
dazc
For that query I get a range of prices (sponsored result) ranging from £0.00
to £300. Obviously, the £0.00 result is going to get the click-through despite
the £300 option being likely to be the better deal?

The organic results (below the fold) seem to be worse than would have been the
case 5 years ago.

SEO has been replaced with chuck money at adwords and hope some of it works.

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shubhamjain
> Sooner or later the internet will have to be decentralized.

It sounds like a pipe dream. Centralisation exists for a reason: it's far
easier to coordinate complex efforts within a single organisation, rather than
a host of unreliable entities. Supposedly, we develop a protocol where we
share the responsibility of crawling, indexing, and searching the whole web.
Isn't is unrealistic to expect that millions of computers (an optimistic
estimate considering number of Google servers dedicated to Search) would
voluntarily want to participate in the effort? Who ensures redundancy, speed,
and abuse handling?

If a single company commanding the whole power is untrustworthy, a million
entities having no stake in the game is multifold more.

~~~
pdimitar
I hear you. Nobody claims it's gonna be easy to go the decentralization route
however. Quite the contrary, it's gonna be extremely hard, probably even
harder than what it took to arrive at today's status quo. But IMO it will be
worth it.

Centralization and monopoly never end well. Only benevolent dictatorship
systems _kind of_ worked half-well, historically. I don't think we should just
blindly believe a person in a position of power is benevolent. We humans are
easily corruptible, that's the sad truth.

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maxhq
I couldn't agree more - one search engine is a terrible thing. But for other
reasons. It's amazing to see how in other areas people complain about
monopolies but when it comes to our window to the digital world, most of us
seem to be fine with it. One US monopoly that dictates what should be
important for us, filters what we see based on secret algorithms, forces us to
"optimize" _our_ websites in this and that way along their "standards". Google
has good technology but we should wake up and see they are not the altruists
they like to tell everyone.

------
vvvkkk
The author says a lot of correct things. When information belongs to one
organization, then there is no future. Do you really think that we will
receive information only from 1 organization? Monopoly on information, like
any other monopoly will not be eternal.

Today the information growing rapidly and they try to place everything on
first page - it is impossible to display all the relevant information on 1
page, it is very restrictive.

And I'm not talking about the fact that on this first page there are a lot of
advertising links and artificially advanced sites.

Model Yahoo has a future. And we are developing it: we are developing the
Bubblehunt project, where each user can create his own search engine. This is
decentralization, where each user can act as an independent information
provider, like miniGoogle.

A bit of advertising, sorry: [https://bubblehunt.com](https://bubblehunt.com)
\- tell me, what do we need to improve?

We strive to enable each user to influence the quality of Internet search and
make it more social, transparent and dynamic.

People are increasingly talking about the need to change something in search.

Google is an excellent search engine, but it hides from us a huge amount of
information. Every day born a lot of interesting resources and we get
information only from sites that are on the 1 page of search. They become only
more popular. And you need to pay money so people see your website!

Is this correct in your opinion? In my opinion, Google will make a huge profit
here and this is not very correct. People just do not have alternatives.

~~~
pdimitar
Feedback on your product: very bland landing page (I know Google does it too
but they can get away with it).

Consider showing some random examples from popular searches. I think
DuckDuckGo have been doing this a while ago -- was showing search result page
which was more relevant than what Google was showing.

Just one thought. Try to engage potential users. To me, your landing page says
nothing.

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jensenbox
One search engine per country seems like the wrong way to slice the problem up
to me.

Locality is missing from many queries because the data is generally not
relevant or is relevant but not available.

I would propose that instead of breaking it per country, breaking the search
based on what sort of content you are looking for.

Programming data or food recipes have nothing to do with locality but finding
the nearest place to get chocolate covered coffee beans is.

I know this is going to seem like total self-promotion but this article caught
my eye and thought that it would be valid to say I have been thinking about
this problem a while, which is why I built
[https://www.closient.com/](https://www.closient.com/) \- mind you I am still
building it but it does work.

Maybe I am not seeing the same problem as the author is but I do see locality
as being a critical part of merging the logical/virtual world with the
physical.

~~~
adamcanady
How does it work? Searching for book store
([https://www.closient.com/?q=book_store](https://www.closient.com/?q=book_store)
the underscore was autocompleted) gave me results that were 1200+ km away from
my current location. Other queries did the same.

------
robjan
The internet is quite independent of countries and regions. Sure, sites are
localised and internationalised but the idea of an "[insert country here]
internet" is meaningless. One of the major reasons that the internet is
successful is that it is effectively borderless.

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golergka
Personally, when I know that a certain topic is of high value to advertisers,
I don't even bother googling anymore, and try to find someone qualified
instead. For example, I recently was trying to look up theory behind working
out, how differenr muscles work, how nutrition works and all that - but
there're so many people who're trying to sell their courses, apps, books and
stuff, that I have no idea how to go around looking for unbiased and at least
semi-scientific source of information.

Edit: I would be thankful for pointers as to why this comment was downvoted,
so I can increase quality of my content in the future.

~~~
onikolas
Thankfully we still have journals and conference papers. Look for the ones
with high impact factor and go from there. That's what I did when I was
looking into creatine supplementation.

You can't even ask experts for their opinion since they are the ones selling
the stuff!

~~~
golergka
Good advice - but in my experience, reading the latest research in any field
requires a lot of more basic knowledge first.

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ztl8702
Of course Google has its short comings. But I don't see "a search engine per
country" is going to change anything. First of all, why limit the boundary to
countries? There could be vastly different areas in the same country or two
countries with similar culture and languages. Second not every country can
afford / has enough resource for setting up their own Google. Search engine
requires expertise that builds up through many years of experience. Instead of
reinventing the wheel for every country, why not work on better localisation
of existing search engines?

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Zanni
Google works surprisingly well with languages other than English. I've been
looking for Russian-language originals of some of Chekhov's short stories and
plays, and pasting, e.g., "Чехов чайка"into the search bar finds the full text
of The Seagull (on a .ru site) with no problem. I'm not sure how having a
Russian-only search engine helps here.

------
svarnypetr
Google is not the only search engine available. Bing has still a big market
share in the US, Yandex in Russia, and Seznam in the Czech Republic.
Nevertheless, the dominance of Google often means that SEO follows their ideas
but often we see SEO masters adjusting to these search engines too because
they want to reach also their users.

