Ask HN: Will there be a better Google?

15 点作者 kyloren超过 8 年前

I was reading this book called 'In The Plex' which talks about the beginnings of Google, how no one thought of using back-links in ranking web pages and how Larry Page used it to make Page rank it's a fascinating book to read, and surprised to see how everyone missed an idea like that.Fast forward to today, has search reached its climax? Can't there be any other search engine that will deliver better results than Google? There was a time when people talked about social search for a while but that too died down.So is there a new frontier for search? Will there be a better search engine in the next few decades?

12 条评论

CM30超过 8 年前

Of course. If history has taught us anything, it's that no company, product or individual has ever remained 'on top' for eternity. Everything gets superseded and replaced by something better, it's just a matter of when that happens rather than if.As for search in particular, yes again. There are plenty of ways a search engine could work better than Google. It could read your mind and figure out what you intended rather than having you try and write out your search query.It could actually answer questions in purely conversation English (or any other language), like what Ask Jeeves tried and failed to do years ago.It might have results somehow tailored to your interests in a much better way, and basing what comes up on both people/sources you trust, relationships between them and new pages and your exact intentions.Heck, it could just be better at finding generic pages than Google is at the moment. I'm sure you've come across tons of situations where you searched for a certain specific technical term, right? And then found all the results were ones that only had the most vague similarity to what you wanted, with the term you cared most about it in grey and strikethrough form underneath the result? Even a search engine that realises you want a certain term in a certain context (say, a discussion, or a long form article) would do better than Google at the moment.So yeah, there will be a better search engine at one point. Quite possibly one that completely changes how searching works in general and finds results that are far more accurate to what you actually want than anything available at the moment.

fairpx超过 8 年前

The answer, I think, is in the book you're reading. Search was stuck long before Google came. Then came Google and they made search better. Right now, search again is stuck. Until someone comes up with a way that everybody else is missing, to take search to a new level.

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saran945超过 8 年前

Though there are many better ideas like semantic search, entity search, Q & A, deep search, etc. Startups could crack some market share from big players. Building better search engine is not the big problem for startups, but from business perspective, It's a marathon race - in terms of scale, investment, making the user switching from google etc. also Google have billions of $$, thousands of researchers working to improve the results, competing them is not easy, hence many stay away from search engine development.

insoluble超过 8 年前

Imagine a search engine that not only gave you search results, it used advanced AI to tell you in brief how each result applied to the problem you are currently trying to solve. Currently, you have to waste time thinking about each result to classify the contents, as for example, entertainment, product marketing, opinions and rants, purely factual, legal, political, social networking, media, API/interface, et cetera.It would also be useful if the search engine could verify statements made on pages and give an accuracy/honesty score for each result. This is particularly important when the author of a page has a serious conflict of interest. Perhaps the search engine could tell you what that conflict is -- to help protect you from deceptive or incomplete information.

endswapper超过 8 年前

Maybe I'm at risk of being a fan, but the Google of tomorrow will likely be better than the Google of today. And while they have expanded and evolved I mean this relative to search specifically."Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."The universally part has a lot of room to grow, and the useful part changes everyday.Not having read the book, but based on what you posted, the example is just one of the giant leaps forward and a way they differentiated themselves as a technology and a company. New leaps will present themselves through continuous improvement and reassessing what is useful.

jsmith0295超过 8 年前

Probably not. Google will likely remain at the top, although they'll continue to improve. It might end up being effectively a new engine decades from now, but it will most likely get there by evolving gradually over time.

alain94040超过 8 年前

Absolutely. Search is still in the stone age. A new paradigm will come up, and Google, like most large companies, will be too invested to the old way of doing things, they will struggle to adapt. That leaves plenty of opportunities for startups.For instance: everyone seems to assume that search is about finding the one page on the Internet that best answers the query. Wrong assumption. People want answers, not pages. What about a search engine that combines facts from two pages or more to answer my question.If you are working on a startup in that space, ping me on AngelList.

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brudgers超过 8 年前

The idea of a search engine is long since gone. Google is a destination...mail, news, interesting links, etc. So is Facebook [just replace 'mail' with 'messages']. It's really the Yahoo/AOL/Compuserve model that works over the long haul.The future of actual search is something that gets out of the way like Siri or Cortana. But there's not really money in search. The money is in siloing and data collection.

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marmot777超过 8 年前

I'm not saying they're better but there are alternatives to Google that address specific concerns. For example, DuckDuckgo seems to be getting some traction with their promise to give you privacy.That pitch resonates with a lot of people. I hope they don't do something that would degrade our trust in that. I think they have a future.Whether their seach measures up to Google's I don't know. I'm guessing they're not there yet as Google is good but they'll get there and if they stay true to their vision, they'll win over a lot of people. I worry because there are a lot of temptations that could throw a company off it's core promise, especially a solemn promise to protect your privacy, while others offer money to go different directions.

rm999超过 8 年前

I consider search an essentially solved problem and I think most people agree with me. When I want to find something I can usually use Google or Bing to get to it within 10 seconds or convince myself it doesn't exist. Will search get better? Probably, but going from 99% to 99.5% isn't very exciting to me.If anything, I see Google and others moving in a direction of using context to reduce the amount people search (e.g. google now). I think this pattern is going to get much bigger in the coming years with better AIs and more information about what the user is doing.

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mongodude超过 8 年前

I don't think there will be a search engine better than Google in the near future (may not forever). Best search engines today will have to throw results based on user preferences to stay relevant and compete with Google's results. Cracking the perfect semantic search (chat bots) may change this but Google may have advantage here just because of the amount of data it has. Any great algorithm, unfortunately will be limited by the data on which it will be trained. Google has this unique advantage.

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qaq超过 8 年前

I am not sure about general search but I think an option based on ranking of author + knowledge domain would do well.