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Comment by fairpx | Hacker News Reader

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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There's the key question. What could you do differently than google for a niche or even mass?

I think privacy is massive but that leads to how will search engines that focus on privacy make enough money? Google offers a good search engine and a heck of lot of cool free software, all payed for by ads. Frankly, I don't mind targeted ads as they're far less annoying than random ads. I'm into the outdoors and tech and even went so far as to go into my Google settings and adjust it. No, I don't like Tango. What was that about in my settings?

So I'm not even 100% convinced that the trade offs in going to a completely private search experience are worth the costs. I don't know.

What are some other problems a search engine company could focus on? I'm not even sure what the top concerns are of users that would inspire them to migrate from something that is pretty damn good, frankly.

I am yet to come to that point of the book. Where is the search stuck at the moment? I can't seem to understand that.

I suppose you are too young to have used Altavista? Or Yahoo "curated" link lists?

Yes I have not used altavista but I have read about it, and I've read the book and I know search was stuck back then, my question was why the above comment says search is stuck at the moment, because I don't see search stuck at the moment.

I am not the OP but I interpret "research is stuck" as follows:

Remember Altavista (and similar search engines from the era?) it worked, but everyone was using the same approach so you got the same results when you searched for a given word... Then Google arrived and the quality of their results looked like magic.

In terms of "user experience" today does resemble then: Bing, DuckDuckGo... They return a subset of what Google finds, not something qualitatively better.

The pre-Google search engine I preferred during it's brief period of utility was 'WebCrawler' because it returned dumb results. Google doesn't do that any more, it's back to curated links with advertising being a large factor in curation.

Oh god, I remember how exciting it was when Google rolled out. Goodby Altavista and all the rest. Though I do have a place in my heart and gratitude for Altavista. That search engine found me whatever I wanted to find. It worked well. Google just came in and was better.

My memory of Altavista was that it was great for discovery of obscure but interesting sites. Sure, you might have to go through 10 pages of results to find one, but the experience was one of serendipitous discovery. It's lack of precision (in favor of recall, making it seem less winner-take-all, SEO-optimized) seemed to correlate strongly with the notion of "surfing" the web. (And the use of the phrase "web surfing" likely declined as Google, and later, the app economy, rose.)

some points:

Result quality has not really improved, all the while: more and more content is in silos that are not easily searchable. Spam/SEO/trust in content remain a problem, thus many people rely on social recommendations for content (which has its own problems). More and more content is in non-textual forms. Google (sometimes vastly) prioritizes content on their own platforms.

It's not. Search works great. I think that's the wrong way to frame it as being "stuck." Better to say where's the opening? The main one that I see any action around is privacy. There must be other opportunities that nobody's seen and acted on yet but will. It'll be interesting.

It's probably worth pointing out that if anyone has an idea for how to improve on search, they're not going to share it in this thread, they're going to complete it quietly and publish their product.

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