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Comment by clpm4j | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious to know whether this view is at all reflected in the wider population outside of tech. For myself, being a tech-y person in SF, Google is good enough 99.9% of the time. I have a hard time believing there is a significant percentage of 'normal' people who think Google is a paint point in their daily lives, and good luck to any company who tries to break the "just Google it" habit that we've all developed over the past ~20yrs...

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I've started hearing from non-tech people complaining about the spammy results in google results.

Feels like "trust" that they're actually seeing the best results are going down.

That said, many of these same people rarely actually google things outside of simple factual information that Google does okay at (e.g. height of the eiffel tower). Their experience of the internet is mostly through various social media filters (e.g. Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)

I also suspect this is part of the reason Google is giving worse results. Most of the actual content being generated on the internet is now occurring in various walled gardens that either pollute search results (Pinterest!) or don't show up (Facebook).

It's a tough problem for a company built on the open web that web mostly resembles a late-game Risk map with just a few big players.

Sounds like the internet has interpreted the parasitic value exploitation as damage and routed around it. By cutting off its nose.

>I have a hard time believing there is a significant percentage of 'normal' people who think Google is a paint point in their daily lives, and good luck to any company who tries to break the "just Google it" habit that we've all developed over the past ~20yrs...

To 'normal' people Google is the synonym for internet search and yea you are right nobody will be breaking the habit of "just Google it" anytime soon.

Google's lack of awareness regarding the power users is astonishing but a change needs to come from within Google not from outside because Google's top management just doesn't care what power users think.

All it takes for Joe User to change is one click to set the browser's default search engine - this is why google pays so much to Mozilla. There is not much that google offers that captures the user besides the trust that they are getting the best search results.

By now, Joe User has developed a healthy distrust/dislike of Facebook, but they stay there due to the network effect. Google has no such snares.

They have their family of apps tied to Google e.g. Gmail, Google Maps, Google Translate, Google News etc. That could be a drawback if you wanted to switch to a new search engine.

> All it takes for Joe User to change is one click to set the browser's default search engine

I'm pretty sure that takes a bunch of clicks and is confusing.

> this is why google pays so much to Mozilla.

Google pays Mozilla to fend off antitrust.

edit: Could Google disappear in a day? Maybe. People are still Xeroxing things but nobody is using a Xerox. Google have so much cash that they can pour into marketing that people would gradually drift back after any stumble, though. At the least they could get regulation passed that would be too expensive for newcomers to comply with, or that requires that Google be used as a middleman for some processing.

For non-English locales, Google sucks 99.9% of the time for popular queries since they allow spamming from big media outlets. A top result is literally composed of spammy SEO keyword content filled with a chain of questions in the article. So (I think) it sucks for 'normal' people in non-English.

I"m an engineer, but also a writer, so as my writer self i totally feel the inability of Google to find quality information.

Just from performance perspective I can see that the listicles and how to's are doing better then any other niche topics.

It's interesting how books somehow retained a certain "quality" to them. For example each book has an ISBN ID. Maybe it's because of the publishing cost?

What if there was a premium Web where each website had an ISBN-equivalent, and the dates during which it was "in print?" And to get one published you'd pay a fee to a central register, such as $100.

To the SEO listicle sites those 100 bucks are pocket change. To the high quality blog, it's maybe a deal breaker.

I'm wondering why SEO listicle books are not as big of a problem, and how to replicate that.

I guess there is no Google for books, and no ads/affiliate links. And there are libraries where books are manually curated using the Dewey hierarchy.

People pay money for books. It's a much harder sell for a web page.

Listicles do show up in print though. I see them at the grocery checkout stand.

Books have gatekeepers, publishing houses that put in work to market the book as widely as possible, get it reviewed in newspapers, arrange media appearances.

How many Kindle direct releases are going to get that kind of backing?

That's one of the biggest problems. You have to build something that is better than Google, at least to a certain subset of users that makes them ecstatic about the alternative.

So far all I've seen is shittier versions with terrible UI(you.com), or exact low-risk copycats going at it with the privacy angle.

- our UI at Breeze is currently awful - we're emphasizing date-based + topic filters - while we do come with privacy, not main angle for many reasons

1. direct link, https://breezethat.com

2. tons of date filter examples to get newest info or to go back in time, https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adotdotjames%20(date%20OR...

3. while there are several experimental topics in the drops menu at top, the best examples is probably our jobs filter at 14M+ openings, https://breezethat.com/x/job-search-beta

4. gradually merging topic filters into main UI

Google is a great search engine! However, from time to time I am still enjoying other search engines when I am getting good search results for some queries, just as someone who has been in prison for 20 years enjoys the fresh air once released.

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