<story><title>What &quot;viable search engine competition&quot; really looks like</title><url>http://blog.nullspace.io/building-search-engines.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nostromo</author><text>I enjoy hating on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but as far as I&amp;#x27;m concerned Bing is basically as good as Google.&lt;p&gt;The problem for Microsoft is the same problem that faced Apple.  Being &amp;quot;as good as&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t enough to get people to switch.  You have to be 10 times better.&lt;p&gt;Back when Google launched, it was 10x better than Yahoo.  Bing seems to have quickly gotten to 1x, but hasn&amp;#x27;t moved much further.</text></comment>
<story><title>What &quot;viable search engine competition&quot; really looks like</title><url>http://blog.nullspace.io/building-search-engines.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lazyjones</author><text>Short and very informative, though I wondered why patents are no concern for a competitor of Google (they have various broad and trivial patents on using historical data, user feedback, moderation for better search results).&lt;p&gt;As the author wrote, aiming at feature parity with Google is probably a bad idea. DDG seems to do this right: they have some better features and one distinct advantage over Google with their stance on privacy. Perhaps Google will reach a certain creepiness factor with all the collected data they&amp;#x27;re factoring into search results (e.g. I have this suspicion that content from gmail is used too) and at some point it might work against them even for the average user (or am I just biased?).&lt;p&gt;One &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; that Google has failed to do properly is custom &amp;quot;site search&amp;quot;, i.e. providing a search interface for arbitrary websites. Perhaps this is another opportunity for a new competitor or even Bing (though their &amp;quot;site search&amp;quot; was shut down in 2011 apparently), there is plenty of demand (and lots of crappy custom solutions).</text></comment>