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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

So even if you just take one of these commercial search verticals, such as product searches, you can build a compelling product that effectively takes a massive chunk of Google profits.

That will only work if users are willing to go to Acme Search to search for products and Google for everything else. If they're not, and they just stick with Google for everything until they can switch to a different search engine entirely, then you have to be better than Google for everything regardless of whether or not you can sell ads on the searches.

If you can't get users to use your search engine then it doesn't matter how good it is.

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People do this all the time. I don’t search Google when I’m looking for restaurants near me… I just use Door Dash, Uber Eats, or Google Maps (yes I know it’s owned by Google but it’s a separate product / UI from search) directly.

For restaurant reviews, I go straight to Yelp.

For used products, casual encounters, craigslist or ebay.

For products I sometimes do google and sometimes go straight to Amazon.

For friends, facebook. In fact this site is an example of one that is actually completely non-indexed by Google.

For the certain types of products rtings.com is known for I go straight there… Of course this one only applies if you know about rtings and it’s relatively niche still.

I think my usage pattern is not unique. Many people skip Google for certain verticals already, and often Google’s search coverage is not as good as the other service’s native faceted search. Google’s search is the catch-all last resort for me if I don’t know of a better alternative in the vertical I’m interested in.

I think this is more location (country, continent, city) dependent than you think, and you are probably more platform-savvy (being, that you are on HN), than the average person. People generally don't go to ten platforms, if they can get 90% of the way, on a single one.

Imagine a search engine that only indexes quality review sites (like Rtings), and has a comprehensive database across all of commerce. It would become super popular, and would be easy because there are very few quality review sites.

The hardest part is not selling out and becoming yet another shady bad review site/indexer.

I didn't know about Rtings and they look interesting. Who publishes them, do you know? It's not discussed on their About page. Also, in some ways they seem similar to Consumer Reports. Have you seen CR and how would you compare them? Thanks!

Sure the more savvy you are the more “better than google” services you know. But let’s be honest DoorDash, Uber, Yelp are all pretty much household names.

Being able to do the right google search also requires some saviness so probably a person who doesn’t know Yelp exists also doesn’t know how to internet.

To be fair, this is improving - chromium browsers let you specify a particular search engine with a keyword, even without changing your default. It almost certainly isn't mainstream enough and not enough is known about the competitors, but some of the groundwork has been laid

Does Chrome still spam your search provider list with every site you visit that opts in?

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