<story><title>I could do that in a weekend (2016)</title><url>https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ascendantlogic</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s always two things that these armchair quarterback software devs seem to miss: Scale and Money.&lt;p&gt;Sure you can hack together a small Google clone using Elasticsearch in a weekend. Can you index all the worlds information and serve the worlds search needs with your little MVP? 99.99% chance no, even if you were given a few hundred engineers to scale it.&lt;p&gt;Even if you could do it technically, where are you coming up with the money to do so? That&amp;#x27;s not seed-round or even series A round money to do that. That&amp;#x27;s series D, hundred+ million dollar swipes of a VC&amp;#x27;s credit card just to get off the ground. Microsoft threw billions at it with Bing and still never became more than an also-ran. The only place that seems to have a real chance is DuckDuckGo, and I&amp;#x27;d be very interested to see how their story has played out up to this point.&lt;p&gt;Google benefited greatly from growing as the web was growing. Trying to index the world&amp;#x27;s information in 2020 is an astronomical task compared to indexing the world&amp;#x27;s information in 98, 99 era.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonas21</author><text>&amp;gt; Microsoft threw billions at it with Bing and still never became more than an also-ran. The only place that seems to have a real chance is DuckDuckGo, and I&amp;#x27;d be very interested to see how their story has played out up to this point.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s an interesting perspective when you consider that:&lt;p&gt;1. Bing has at least 5x the market share of DuckDuckGo in the US (and even higher worldwide)&lt;p&gt;2. DuckDuckGo uses Bing as its main source of search results.</text></comment>
<story><title>I could do that in a weekend (2016)</title><url>https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ascendantlogic</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s always two things that these armchair quarterback software devs seem to miss: Scale and Money.&lt;p&gt;Sure you can hack together a small Google clone using Elasticsearch in a weekend. Can you index all the worlds information and serve the worlds search needs with your little MVP? 99.99% chance no, even if you were given a few hundred engineers to scale it.&lt;p&gt;Even if you could do it technically, where are you coming up with the money to do so? That&amp;#x27;s not seed-round or even series A round money to do that. That&amp;#x27;s series D, hundred+ million dollar swipes of a VC&amp;#x27;s credit card just to get off the ground. Microsoft threw billions at it with Bing and still never became more than an also-ran. The only place that seems to have a real chance is DuckDuckGo, and I&amp;#x27;d be very interested to see how their story has played out up to this point.&lt;p&gt;Google benefited greatly from growing as the web was growing. Trying to index the world&amp;#x27;s information in 2020 is an astronomical task compared to indexing the world&amp;#x27;s information in 98, 99 era.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>3pt14159</author><text>Bing was my secret weapon when doing data science contracts that were MVPs or side features.&lt;p&gt;Take a couple million preselected strings they needed to match to and then run them through Bing, page through the results, and build up the corpus I needed out of something like mechanize &amp;#x2F; nokogiri &amp;#x2F; headless browser.[0] Then clean up the data the normal data science way then do whatever mathy stuff I needed to layer on for whatever app they needed. There you go mister client something that has billions of dollars of R&amp;amp;D behind it and cleaned up for your specific use-case. You want something better? Go off and hire a team of Phds and spend a couple years and 50x the money I charged you to get your RoC curves (or whatever) looking 10% or 15% better.&lt;p&gt;Haven&amp;#x27;t done this in a couple years due to a startup and then after that randomly finding a client I liked working with so much I haven&amp;#x27;t needed to take on random jobs again, but I&amp;#x27;m sure it would still work.&lt;p&gt;[0] I had also written custom tools to make this easier &amp;#x2F; saner. Also inspector gadget + CSS selectors goes a long way too.</text></comment>