<story><title>Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas (2012)</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised that someone hasn&amp;#x27;t taken on Google in search. Cuil tried, and they had a huge spike in traffic at launch. Then people discovered the product was broken. Also, they didn&amp;#x27;t have a revenue model. They were able to build a full search engine with about 50 people and $50M, which indicates the price of entry isn&amp;#x27;t that high.&lt;p&gt;Over time, hardware gets cheaper, and the cost of building a search engine declines. This has not been matched with a reduction in ad density. The cost improvement is going into Google&amp;#x27;s profit margin.  That indicates a vulnerability.&lt;p&gt;Google has some striking weaknesses.  The two I focus on are provenance and business background.  I&amp;#x27;ve done work on business background (see &amp;quot;sitetruth.com&amp;quot;). That tries to find the real-world business behind a web site that&amp;#x27;s selling something, and then uses the data available about real-world businesses to check it out. That can then be fed into search result ordering. SiteTruth is a demo; it&amp;#x27;s running off free data sources.  Paying for higher quality data from Dun and Bradstreet and other non-cheap sources would make the business background check much better.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s other big weakness is provenance. Search engines should find the original source of information. Much of the Internet is sites scraping other sites, linking to other sites, and commenting on other sites. We see this on HN all the time, where someone links to an article, but the actual source is two blogs deep.  The original source should be the primary search result, perhaps annotated with notes about the more heavily promoted sites mentioning it.
This means more attention to when something appeared and better matching of content. Google already does this for news.  For ranking purposes, attention metrics for scraper sites need to be credited to the original source, not the scraper site.&lt;p&gt;One possible customer for such a system is Bloomberg. The people who get those expensive terminals could use both of those features.  Then offer it to the better universities, so that students grow up using something less consumer-oriented with Google.  That strategy worked for Facebook.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gboudrias</author><text>The quality of Google&amp;#x27;s search results has already gone down, thanks to results being personalized based on previous searches and other data, a feature it seems &lt;i&gt;no one&lt;/i&gt; asked for. And they continue to cannibalize themselves by making ads more and more indistinguishable from normal search results. I&amp;#x27;m sure that&amp;#x27;s made them a lot of money in the short-term, but everyone now knows they can&amp;#x27;t be trusted, as quality is no longer sacred (which was its main appeal back in the early days!). They are now in the same category of pedestrian ad peddlers as Facebook and Twitter.&lt;p&gt;Therefore a competing product doesn&amp;#x27;t need to be as good as current Google, only as good as it used to be. Still hard, but far from impossible for someone with money.&lt;p&gt;What may be harder is Cuil&amp;#x27;s second problem as mentioned: Finding a revenue model. You can&amp;#x27;t compromise your data by manipulating searches (lessens quality) and you can&amp;#x27;t compromise your integrity by prioritizing ads (lessens trust). I&amp;#x27;m sure a lot of people would pay big money for the answer, which no one seems to have (as demonstrated by Twitter&amp;#x27;s descent into ad trickery such as camouflaging the ad disclaimers).</text></comment>
<story><title>Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas (2012)</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised that someone hasn&amp;#x27;t taken on Google in search. Cuil tried, and they had a huge spike in traffic at launch. Then people discovered the product was broken. Also, they didn&amp;#x27;t have a revenue model. They were able to build a full search engine with about 50 people and $50M, which indicates the price of entry isn&amp;#x27;t that high.&lt;p&gt;Over time, hardware gets cheaper, and the cost of building a search engine declines. This has not been matched with a reduction in ad density. The cost improvement is going into Google&amp;#x27;s profit margin.  That indicates a vulnerability.&lt;p&gt;Google has some striking weaknesses.  The two I focus on are provenance and business background.  I&amp;#x27;ve done work on business background (see &amp;quot;sitetruth.com&amp;quot;). That tries to find the real-world business behind a web site that&amp;#x27;s selling something, and then uses the data available about real-world businesses to check it out. That can then be fed into search result ordering. SiteTruth is a demo; it&amp;#x27;s running off free data sources.  Paying for higher quality data from Dun and Bradstreet and other non-cheap sources would make the business background check much better.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s other big weakness is provenance. Search engines should find the original source of information. Much of the Internet is sites scraping other sites, linking to other sites, and commenting on other sites. We see this on HN all the time, where someone links to an article, but the actual source is two blogs deep.  The original source should be the primary search result, perhaps annotated with notes about the more heavily promoted sites mentioning it.
This means more attention to when something appeared and better matching of content. Google already does this for news.  For ranking purposes, attention metrics for scraper sites need to be credited to the original source, not the scraper site.&lt;p&gt;One possible customer for such a system is Bloomberg. The people who get those expensive terminals could use both of those features.  Then offer it to the better universities, so that students grow up using something less consumer-oriented with Google.  That strategy worked for Facebook.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orthoganol</author><text>If you think about it Google is used in a weird way these days, that&amp;#x27;s completely different from its early years, so it does make me wonder why &amp;quot;replace Google&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#x27;t be reasonable.&lt;p&gt;I rarely visit sites out of a band of 15 or so, and I only use Google to find pages within those sites (which itself follows a normal distribution). I.e. I know I want a page from stackoverflow, or Wikipedia, or arxiv, or Reddit, or Yelp but rather than navigating to those sites I just cmd+T in Chrome, type keywords, and scroll to the site&amp;#x27;s link on the result page which is almost always at the top anyways.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure others use Google like this too (varying on your culture&amp;#x27;s go-to sites), so does it even need to exist as it does right now? I could imagine a new app that indexes just within this band of sites. And Google or some other app is relegated to &amp;quot;the rest&amp;quot; for rare occasions.</text></comment>