Would you build a new search engine today?

Question

We've recently seen the launch of a new search engine funded by Marc Benioff.I think that Search Engines have been mostly commoditized, and that the company with the biggest budget pretty much wins the game.However, maybe there's space for a different kind of search engine.Would you build a new one today? If so, what would make it different from anything else?

new_guy · Accepted Answer

Googles mistake besides giving ads relevant to them and not what the user searched for is that they indexed everything (although not onion sites or anything like that) so the issue is garbage in, garbage out.
A new search engine would just drop the top x sites from its index, and be aggressive with dropping sites. Blog spam? Link farm? Quora? Pinterest? Wikihow? Don't index them at all. A Shitty wordpress site that's just copying stuff verbatim from other sites? Drop them. Over engineered SEO? News sites? Fake news? Satire sites? Don't bother with them etc. (or maybe put a clear disclaimer in the case of satire sites)
Make search about what it's supposed to be, discoverability.
There are so many golden sites out there to be discovered under the absolute cruft Google and the like bury us in. And the new 'you.com' isn't any better because they're just getting their results from Bing, and they've been caught taking their results from Google!

PaulHoule · Answer

Google's search results really aren't that good today.
Google keeps competition away because it is able to generate much more revenue per search than competitors. Worse results translate to worse revenue (e.g. if the #1 result was always the best, why look at the ads?)
If somebody else could make the money work they could definitely give better search results.

MrLeap · Answer

Sure!I'd design it the same way I designed the text editor I'm making ( https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1455511983512436737 )Hit the minimums. Be irreverent, elevate the ordinary.Manifest intrigue. If you can't do that, at least make your users feel weird.

literallyaduck · Answer

Search engines return millions of results and most users never get past page 1.
Curating content for by subject matter and then aggregation and spidering the resulting content would yield better quality rather than quantity.
Decentralization with cooperative subscriptions would provide a good search population rather than the unfiltered firehose of the current web.

EZ-Cheeze · Answer

I want a search engine for people who think like me and want the same things I do. There must be at least thousands of them and we'd be unstoppable together.

breckenedge · Answer

Yes. Google indexes everything. This isn&rsquo;t great for most of my workflows. I typically want to search a small network of reliable resources (StackOverflow, GitHub, Gitlab, Apple Developer documentation, etc.). You can narrow results somewhat, but the behavior feels janky. Combined technical docs and code search at scale is something I keep looking for.

fsflover · Answer

You don't need to build new search engines, because YaCy exists: https://yacy.net (FLOSS and peer-to-peer). But you can think of a clever way to restrict the search index, like https://wiby.me.

reflect · Answer

There may be some room for innovation in the way the results are handled, such as secondary searches and more powerful filters to make it easier to get where you wanted to without having to run a new opening search or using advanced search.Honestly I&rsquo;d be happy with a google that just let me quickly hide results from certain sites.

muzani · Answer

I contracted for a startup that was doing this. Google is huge and it has a huge flank, and it. There's a niche for certain topics, for example, where to buy fresh chicken. Eventually these things morph into their own products like Pinterest, imdb, or TripAdvisor.

tedyoung · Answer

Like any business that I'd start, I'd find a niche where general-purpose search is not very helpful. For example, code search, or drug information. Fine-tune the querying, synonym detection, stop-words, stemming, etc., for that particular niche.

freediver · Answer

Not only I would, but spent last three years building one. Kagi Search is today in private beta, with hundreds of users testing it.What makes it different is business model that aligns incentives and obsession with the user experience.

Grayhornet0101 · Answer

Yeah, because Google don't list some searches(popular searches) for users so that they might love to explore what others love, so I might build one that does that.

marginalia_nu · Answer

Frustrated with the limitations of what was available, I did just that.Turns out they are cheap to build and operate, and and an endless font of interesting engineering challenges.

huma · Answer

I don't, but I really appreciate those brave souls who try. A new, refreshing, honest search, like once Google was, is long overdue.

mrkramer · Answer

If it's not better than Google I wouldn't bother. Better search engine needs to focus more on language and linguistics to give better search results.Niche search engines or metasearch engines like Tripadvisor and Skyscanner are welcome because they come in handy where Bing or Google do not or in another words they are more specialized for certain niches than general internet search engines.