Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

Most interesting to me is that Inktomi had all the power to beat, acquire or replicate Google but didn't have the right mindset. They were operating under a few bad assumptions:

- search is a commodity for licensing (making them resistant to launching a "cleaner" engine that would alienate their clients)

- what worked for a smaller internet (100 million pages) could scale appropriately with the growing internet (100 billion pages) without rethinking everything

- "Page rank" only helped relevance (it was also about spam)

I think Google is stuck in a rut of their own right now. Here's some faulty assumptions I think Google is making:

- users always want faster, more direct answers (rather than controlling the filtering/categorization of their searches)

- users want Google to predict what they mean rather than clarify what they mean

- algorithms > human decisions

- users always want faster, more direct answers (rather than controlling the filtering/categorization of their searches)

That's a very power-user centric attitude, don't you think? As a power user I preferred to type long, complicated Sabre queries to find exactly which airplane flight I wanted. It was much faster, and I had memorized all of the complicated mnemonics. But that's not what a casual user would want to use.

Asking users to specify categories for what they want means requiring a certain orientation in their thinking which is shared by computer scientists and trained librarians. But to an average user, that's extra work. And think about how this might work if you're talking to an actual human librarian: if you start asking about TV shows, and then mention "The Big Bang Theory", do you think the librarian will ask you, "Did you mean the scientific theory, or the TV show?" That's only something a stupid computer would do. A smart librarian would take the context of the previous queries that you've made of him or her, and provide the right answer quickly and efficiently. Wouldn't you want the same thing from a search engine?

To be fair, faster answers + the ability to undo a do-what-I-mean guess lets me correct Google's assumptions pretty fast. The tools at the left allow for some quick refining as well; that's pretty useful when I need particularly fresh results, or a time window from when some news was breaking. And the fast completion is useful to refine a query before it returns results (though occasionally annoying when it erases quotes and the like).

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