Comment by weitendorf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weitendorf | Hacker News Reader

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To properly compete with Google search you have to:

1. Create your own index/crawl and true search engine on top of it, rather than delegating that back to bing or Google. In doing so, solve or address all the related problems like SEO/spam, and cover the “long tail” (expensive part)

2. Monetize it somehow to afford all of the personnel/hardware/software costs. Probably with your own version of Google’s ad products.

3. Solve user acquisition. Note that Google’s user acquisition process involves multiB/yr contracts with Apple and huge deals with other vendors who control the “top of funnel” like Mozilla Firefox, and that this is the sole purpose of chrome/android/chromebook/etc who you’ll never be able to make a deal with. You will probably at the very minimum need to implement your own platform (device, OS, browser alone probably won’t cut it).

4. Solve the bootstrap problem of getting enough users for people to care about letting you index their site, without initially being able to index a lot of sites, because you are not important enough.

5. Somehow pull all of this off in plain site of Google (this would take many years to build both technically and in terms of users) without them being able to properly fend you off

6. Somehow pull all of this off in spite of the web/web search seeming like it’s going to die off or fade into irrelevance

OR you can dedicate a decade of your life to something more likely to succeed.

I've heard more or less the same thing said about IBM, Walmart, Microsoft, etc.

There is one way to compete with Google search. Google search is a general search engine. But what if you only wanted medical information? information about cars? information about physics? electronics? history? etc.

Specializing makes for a much smaller scope of the problem, and being specialized means it could deliver more useful results.

For example, imdb.com. I don't ask google about movie stuff, I go to imdb.com because it specializes in movie info.

There are already extensive databases with search functions in most industries…?

Some of them charge a lot for access but they certainly exist.

I never go to IMDb directly as both it and its search function are noticeably slower than Google’s. So I just tend to Google “<movie name> IMDb” and click the first result.

I'd like to add to your #5. If Google deems you a legitimate threat, then they can just de-crapify their own search for a bit by going back to their old algo. It's extremely easy for them to fight back.

Is that true though? I think a bit part of the algorithm evolution is to combat undesirable forms of SEO. I would rolling back the algorithm to some older generation would make the results quite spammy.

That would be a victory for users.

A temporary reprieve, more like. Google will just wait for the competitor to fail and then go back to their old ways.

Yeah, that is what I meant. :(

I often wonder if banning (or very strongly penalizing) websites with affiliate links would largely get rid of spam results. Sure, some very useful websites have affiliate links, but perhaps it would be worth it to at least let users hide them?

The solution is to force feed all affiliate linked sites into a living archive LLM that digests them into a summary stripped of all links.

You run this bloated mass as a co-engine to your search. If you stumble upon any of the digested sites or articles you just have the site-eater blob regurgitate a html re-creation locally. They get no traffic, you get whatever they wrote purged of all links and with optional formatting to remove the fluff BS copywrite that many of these sites pad the tiny core of usefulness with.

I don't think it's a solution. The average person seems to already have a strong dislike of ads, or paying for something that would otherwise be free (likely funded by ads or aff links)

A solution could be more than one algorithm being used to rank results, i.e. other engines, other rules. They'll likely use many of the signals available to them that Google uses for quality and relevance, but highly unlikely a genuine alternative search would rank them exactly the same- and much more unlikely an SEO could rank well in multiple engines.

The aff links aren't the problem, it's the proliferation of pages that are created solely to rank and get the links clicked on. Sometimes the content is useful, sometimes it's padded nonsense.

> You will probably at the very minimum need to implement your own platform (device, OS, browser alone probably won’t cut it).

What do you mean? Google gained dominance just being a dot com URL. This in a time when competitors were already very well established.

Google got big when being a dot-com URL meant something and the primary way the average person accessed the Internet was through a desktop PC. Neither of those things is true anymore.

That's why you got to have an app. People install more apps than ever before, it's completely normal.

I don't think people associate search with an app. Search is something built in to the operating system or browser (a distinction which is disappearing too).

People use apps more than they use a browser. It's not a big deal to reform search to be an app, it will be natural. People listen to podcasts without knowing anything about mp3 files or file systems, they edit and upload their photos without knowing about jpegs, etc.

Imo you need to do all of this, plus be compelling different. Nobody is going to beat Google playing Google's game.

The Chinese did it. Nationalism is a powerful force.

You missed out the only thing that's actually important: give users a compelling reason to use your site over Google.

Google's dominance will never be upended by an incremental improvement.

How do you let the 99.999% of the population know that your site is better? I have seen friends and family now directly search in FB, if it does not return anything satisfactory, they open the very default browser that came with their device and type the query in the address bar, now whatever the default search engine is on their device that came preset gets the traffic.

Only people I saw manually typing the url are my office colleagues(mostly engineers of some sort), even management does the same(skipping the FB part obviously) and you can see it when they are sharing their screen and they want to search for something.

To pull people out of google moat, first step is becoming their default search engine.

This is backwards. The first step is innovating and creating a radically better search experience. This is then easy to market (and is likely to spread by word of mouth). Users love and it becomes the main way they search.

Eg see how chatgpt grew

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