But IMO it is a far cry from 2007 Google and only holds a candle because Google has nerfed itself.
And sadly, much of it isn't because they don't have resources for AI or even larger index but because of the same QA issues that Google has struggled with:
- including results that doesn't contain my search terms / too much fuzzing
- ignoring double quotes
Both probably in order to please the mythical ordinary/average user I guess.
Guess what: techies got me to change to startup Google and I guess we will get people to change to another search engine as soon as one is ready.
In the meantime I use DDG. The difference is mostly negligible now and when it isn't it is 20 times faster (I don't think this is hyperbole) to mash in a !g at the end of my DDG search than the other way around.
FTR: same goes for browsers. For me Firefox has always been best, but they have nerfed themselves and keep ignoring us techies to such a degree that I will - if necessary - pay monthly to get a safe, supported version of the same with my old extensions working, but not to Mozilla Foundation, only to the Corporation (the ones who create the browser) or someone else.
Do you realize how expensive and hard it is to build a search engine from scratch? It's not a coincidence that only state-size corporations have been able to keep a high quality web index going. Cliqz tried and struggled hard, until they decided to shut down. It's not a "market ripe for disruption". It's maybe the market with the highest barrier of entry in tech.
Independence on its own, would not be a competitive advantage. In reality, for the most part, people do not care enough about minor privacy violations. The outrage you see online rarely bleeds into the average user's day-to-day decisions.
I wonder how the next disruptive innovation is going to look in the search engine market?
>I wonder how the next disruptive innovation is going to look in the search engine market?
I think the search engine market will always be very closely linked to content distribution platforms. If the decentralised web continues to degenerate into an oligopoly of walled gardens then there will be no search engine market in the current sense. We will just use the search function provided by each platform.
I believe the question we have to ask is what the next disruptive content distribution platform is going to look like and whether that disruption can be anything more than yet another oligopolist stealing some share from the encumbents before getting bought by one of them (or not).
