
The Upside-Down Logic of Taking on Google at Search - timr
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/25568/
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astrofinch
Hypothesis: In the early days of the internet, people used the search engines
their geek friends recommended, which meant that the best search engine
(Google) became the most popular. Now computers are better established, and
people use the search engines that come bundled with their computer/browser or
the ones they're used to using. It'll only be smart geeks (who don't click on
ads) that try out new search engines (just like they're the only ones that try
out new browsers, like Chrome).

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dstein
What's going to defeat Google at Search is when generic search engines become
"good enough" and every website has an excellent integrated search engine. The
competition is catching up faster than most people think. In the future nobody
is going to ever type <http://www.google.com> into their web browser and
Google knows this. That's why they're pushing into Mobile and Facebook so hard
-- they're screwed if they don't.

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dkarl
This is a niche underneath two giants, but it's a sheltered niche. Google and
Bing can't copy them without producing strange side effects for their normal
users who make typos and copy/paste material into the search box. A slight
degradation of service for normal users (who don't expect /map or /time to
limit them to a single web site) is much worse than allowing a relatively tiny
competitor to have an edge in features.

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saurik
Google does this with name:value pairs, like site:yahoo.com or format:PDF. You
are concentrating on syntax here rather than semantics: the same thing could
be accomplished with the (poorly named) "slash" tag, letting users do
slash:map, slash:time, etc.; obviously, you would then want to restructure the
space of tags to make more sense.

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dkarl
I think people understand that text affects their search and punctuation
(usually) doesn't. The "site" and "format" keys are at least self-describing
in a way that "slash" isn't.

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gigafemtonano
Back when I was a kid in High School, I was proud of the fact that I could
enter enough words into a search string to find what I was looking for on
AltaVista. I was guessing what words might appear in the article / paper /
search result I intended to find usually, but it worked. When a professor at
college first recommended Google I resisted changing because I felt like a pro
at AltaVista, but in the end Google searches were just too easy to find what
you were looking for. Long story long, the only way you're going to beat
Google is making search more efficient than Google.

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wslh
In a side note: I really miss the Altavista's NEAR operator.

