
Why not beat Google? - a_mythical_bird

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a_mythical_bird
Today, everybody wants to be Googles good boy. We all hope for attention and
money which is exlusively distributed by Google these days. Entrepreneurs even
want to sell their business and their souls to godfather Google.

Is that real entrepreneurship - playing someone elses game as good as you can?
Why not go after Google itself? Linus Torvalds didnt write cool applications.
He rewrote the operating system.

I like the idea to rewrite the web. To reorder how the whole thing works and
turn it from monopoly to ecosystem again. I feel fed up with the whole
Googleweb.

~~~
ralph
Linus re-implemented an existing thing; Unix. He didn't go off and invent his
own OS with its own concepts, e.g. Plan 9. I think he's a bad example for your
point.

~~~
a_mythical_bird
Alright. You are correct.

Lets do it all completely different. Lets get rid of search and advertising
alltogether.

Any ideas?

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Tichy
I for one dream about beating Google. My scheme would have been a p2p based
search engine - by now there are projects trying to do that, but not with very
good results, I think :-(

I might have overestimated the demand for privacy, too...

I also think the social bookmarking things would have a chance in improving on
Google.

~~~
chris_l
How does a p2p search engine improve the results upon a non-p2p search engine,
e.g. Google?

~~~
corentin
We can imagine different search results for a same request depending on the
peers you connect to (if you connect to people you know). You would share a
dedicated subset of a search engine with your fellow Cthulhu programming
language fans, one with your coworkers, another one with your family, with
your bowling club, etc.

Google always searches the same, entire web whoever you are; maybe it is not
the best solution?

Yes, whether it is P2P or not is not very relevant to this problem. On the
other hand, P2P allows a not-for-profit, ad-free, "do no evil", privacy and
freedom of speech friendly search engine (because the infrastructure costs
would be shared between the users). I guess a big problem would be the
latency.

~~~
Tichy
Exactly, my thoughts would have been to avoid the costs of the data center,
and to provide more privacy. Although it is not trivial to protect the privacy
in a p2p scenario either.

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udfalkso
Well, I for one am about to launch a startup that pretty much goes head to
head with one of Google's properties. Maybe I'm nuts.

~~~
litepost
We're going more 'side-to-side' with our new product:

<http://www.litepost.com>

(We're hoping to introduce new ideas and more usable presentation methods,
without necessarily duplicating sheer technical superiority..that can always
come later.)

Anyhow, I'd say you're not nuts. Google's products all suffer from numerous
defects, not the least of which is usability (in many cases).

------
jrcapa
If you're going to beat up Google on searching, you're just playing their
game...

