There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers.
Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has a distribution monopoly through Android, its deal with Apple on iOS and MacOS, and on desktop through Chrome.
I'm working on a search engine startup. It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level. And despite being technically possible on desktop with Chrome, it is for all practical purposes beyond what any typical consumer can easily do.
Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google and clicking ads.
> It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level.
On my IOS device, under Settings -> Safari -> Search Engine, I have a drop down with options, including Bing and DuckDuckgo, but defaulted to google.
On Macos, with Safari running, Safari -> Preferences… -> Search, Search Engine I have a drop down, defaulted to google, with Bing and DuckDuckgo amongst other choices.
Agreed on google”s effort to get their search engine as the default. However I just don’t understand how changing search engine is impossible given what I’m seeing on my devices? Nor does it seem over the top onerous to my eyes.
Yes, but you can't add a new search engine at all! So if a search engine isn't one of the tiny number of options in that dropdown, you can't change to it. That applies on both iOS and MacOS. And that option is used for the entire system-wide search, not just Safari.
So here's a challenge, try adding a search engine not on that list. You can see the search engine I'm working on in my profile if you're interested (I don't want to hijack this thread with self-promotion). I challenge you to change to a new competitive option like it. You simply can't. That is a clear monopoly over distribution.
On desktop in Chrome, as noted it is not something any typical consumer can do easily. But even if they could, Google does not allow you to set the New Tab to another search engine, even by setting the homepage to one. So every new tab opened on Chrome takes you back to Google search, even if a consumer figures out how to change their homepage. As for changing the nav bar search, no ordinary consumer is going to be able to work out how to change a search URL pattern. That is clearly intended to prevent consumers changing.
So I stand by my point, especially on an iPhone, you simply cannot change your search engine to a new search engine like us. It is impossible.
I fully understand your point and defaults are very strong.
That being said, I try new search engines from time to time and always get back to google, because non of the others have worked for me (in a professional context). I probably do 200 searches per day and google is most likely to give me relevant info on my first query (maybe 80-90% success rate). All others I have tried have been around 40-50% win an avg. of 2-3 search queries to find my result. That is a huge daily time sync on 200 searches per day.
I will also test your search engine.
And before having tested it, I have some unsolicited advice ;) At least these are things that would make me switch:
1) you are strong in my vertical. 50% of my daily search queries are professional. Probably 10-20% are programming related. If you were better 20% better than google at delivering results for that subset, I would probably use you.
2) If you had very strong support for my locale. Based in Germany, 50% of my private searches are in German. Most search engines, apart from google, suck in German. My assumption is their market share is so small that they don‘t put effort into any language specific search syntax understanding. German or large language groups like Spanish, Hindi, French come to mind.
3) If you can‘t become a default search engine on safari, maybe you can role your own browser (chromium fork or something) where you are the default. You could package it as: MySearchEngine App. It is actually a fully functional browser, but users really use it because they want to use your search engine. That might give easier access than having to manually navigate to your website in safari.
The ultimate test of any search engine is always the results. While the project I'm working on is definitely still an alpha, I'd love to chat with you when you try it out. I don't want to take the conversation here off-topic. To your general points though, there are definitely opportunities to provide better results within specialist areas of knowledge, and for local markets.
I think most of the search startups are doing their own mobile app. On iOS, the system search and browser remains Google/Safari (and the App is essentially just a wrapper on Safari for browsing). But at least it is something. I think you'll see more people doing desktop apps, although the dominance of Google through Chromium forks for this isn't a coincidence. It feels like the bad old days of re-packaging Internet Explorer with a custom homepage all over again.
Multi-lingual search results in general; Google (and FB) just for some reason cannot comprehend that someone might have reasons to search in multiple languages or even regions. For instance, I at one point was an editor/fact-checker for an academic publisher and one project involved checking a lot of information from official government sources around the world, and Google did not know what to do with that.
Hell, I'd love to have the option to make the search results be completely language agnostic.
Don't you just set the region and language at the bottom?
I also search in multiple languages but I also know that's an exception. The majority of the people in the world likely would only use a single language and it's easy to believe that search results are better for those users with languages separated.
Yes, hence why I'd want an option for language agnostic results. It would be a terrible default.
There are cases when I'd even like REGION agnostic results, or least ones not bound by national boundaries. For example, I have an interest in my state history (MI), and there's plenty of relevant articles/commentary from the Canadians.
I don't think it's too niche, I think they're just American.
A Canadian/Indian/EU-based Google probably would've ended up with multi-lingual support, whereas a China/UK based one probably wouldn't have.
By the time Google got big enough for international considerations, there were already a bunch of baked in assumptions about their users, like them being monolingual.
Metager.org is my go to google search replacement. I imagine (although my German is non native) that the German search results are quite good. . . it being a German search engine. To be honest it the only search engine to get me off google - DDG is OK, as is searx, but I kept going back to the dirty G until Metager.
Also a fan of Brave browser here. The more people trying new things the better! I know some people don't like the crypto-angle with it, but I think it is a positive to test new economic models to support online content, personally.
How much of the German challenge do you think is due to German being an inflected language? So a search engine that can't figure out the inflected variants of a word are going to potentially miss out on a large number of the relevant search results.
In addition to inflections, another factor may be the tendency to use compound words, so that a relevant word in context might not have a space at each end.
In English, Google is pretty good at figuring out when to add spaces in your queries (if you have a typo with your spaces). Similar technology should help it with German?
There's nothing magic about putting a space between words or not. Similar to whether you hyphenate or not.
Maybe it isn't a big deal; my thought was that if you're crawling a website and trying to associate its contents with search terms, parsing an uncommon compound word into the correct parts is going to come up more often in German than in English, especially if you're smaller than Google and German isn't your main focus. Are search engines good enough now to know that a string like electricovenmonitor is about ovens but not covens or Venmo?
At least in part this seems to be due to the profiles that Google has built. Whenever I try to use Google in anonymous mode, the results become noticeably worse.
Which, of course, means that it is yet another barrier to entry for any would-be competitors.
This could also be a perverse incentive reflected algorithmically (whether on purpose or not). Google has better data and makes more money when users are identified. So they have a vested interest in making users think that they will get worse results in Incognito mode.
Personalization is a double-edged sword. @pg once wrote about Google results becoming "what's true for you" rather than what's objectively true. And filter bubbles and subtle "personalization censorship" are also dangers. I think it's possible to have high quality results and privacy/anonymity, and it's not a binary choice. It's a challenge worth figuring out.
Totally agree that personalization is a double edged sword. Problem is getting people to actually want to change their personalized feeds/results. Most people have no clue what they’re missing and this issue has huge “Medium is the message” like implications.
I disagree about google being the best. For a start, their image search is massively behind bing. They do 0 work to remove pinterest spam. And DDG is way ahead of google on normal adhoc search.
Thanks, just to let you know, yes, it does have an opensearch description. But in practical terms that doesn't help much even if a startup search engine adds it.
Unfortunately, while OpenSearch is great where it's supported, outside of Firefox, the only real support is for in-site-search on other platforms (where you type a site name and then a search string), and not for changing your browser search engine. And it doesn't work at all on iOS even for site search.
So unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem of how a consumer can easily change their search engine to something new on Chrome or Safari or an iPhone.
I don't want to sidetrack the discussion, but if you want to confirm the opensearch description, you can open our site in Firefox, then click the "..." in the browser address bar and then click "Install Andi Search". Or reach out and very happy to talk you through it.
Depending on the platform, you might need to right-click on the Firefox browser address bar and choose the "Add search engine" option from the dropdown (where a website has it). Do you see an option to add a new search engine when you right-click the browser address bar at all?
[Edit: just saw the edit that you found it - thanks again for looking around for it too!]
I concur. And would add that on Safari and iOS, it suits Google and Microsoft too keep others out; noting all options are Google, Bing or Bing sydnicates). And it suits Apple nicely; $15 bn from Google, pure margin. How much do they get from Microsft/syndicates? Meanwhile all search listed options in Chrome are Google or Microsoft (Bing and Bing syndicates). And, to complete all Edge options are Bing, Bing syndicates or Google. Disclosure: also alternative search engine CEO.
Presumably you count DuckDuckGo as a "Bing syndicate". I think that doesn't do it justice - many of the things I like about DDG are specific to DDG, and I could not care less whether the underlying crawl was run by Bing or not.
Yes, but I'm biased. Your perspective is as valid and I respect it. DDG does have some great features and we stand with them in fighting for user privacy. What benefits us all is a variety of different search engines and search services. It is the search engines that subtly determine our informational pathways, so variety is healthy. For one independent review of search engines and syndicates, including DDG see:
https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
100% agree. The more people working on this and building different features and trying different approaches the better. The more new search engines, the more everyone innovates, the better for the whole world. It is deeply unhealthy to have a single monopoly with its mono-search have 90%+ of the market. There are billions of search users with many different needs, and there is room for different approaches.
I see your point. I would have sworn that DuckDuckGo was added as a search entry when I installed that app on my ios device, however my memory is hazy from that long ago, so perhaps that search engine was added at a different point, like when it became big enough for Apple to notice them.
I'm a huge fan of DuckDuckGo. My understanding is that it took a significant amount of effort and public lobbying for them to get added to that list, and it was back in 2014 that was announced.
I suspect the big problem is that even if your search engine succeeds, once you get enough traction you'll just sell up to Google and everything slots back to normal 'do some evil' mode.
I don't want to get too off-topic, but personally I can promise you we will never sell to Google. This problem is very personal. As well as being a programmer, I used to work as a journalist, and I've seen friends in media have their lives and businesses destroyed by Google's ad-tech. And I've seen the Internet turn from a wonderful thing to become a cesspool of content farms, clickbait and seo spam. I can't speak for other search startups, but we will never run ads or use ad-tech or sell user data or invade people's privacy. We're just two people. But we're two people on a mission.
We pay nothing so are not included. On the other hand we are happy to provide a one click search from our search engine or eight other search engines/services, currently from our web app [0]. One click for Google (if that's your thing), one click for Bing or Gigablast search engine results, one click for Brave and some of the many Bing and few Google syndicates - DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Startpage.
Even if DuckDuckGo and Bing pay absolutely nothing, it's good leverage to make Google pay even more, and its already public knowledge Google pays a lot to remain the default search engine on iOS, to the tune of billions of dollars a year:
The OpenSearch standard is great and definitely an improvement where it's supported, but unfortunately as far as I'm aware in most browsers that's limited to site-search (in website search after typing a url). It doesn't work at all on iOS.
On Firefox it makes it easier to talk a non-technical user through how to change their default search engine, and at least they aren't entering search pattern strings into a settings field as with Chrome.
As far as I'm aware and the OpenSearch docs, support is limited to in-site searches on most platforms outside of Firefox (not changing default search option for example using Chrome on iOS). Would be really interested in the steps you followed if you're happy to share them.
I then went to my site on Chrome iOS and it showed up under Settings > Search Engine > Recently visited. I then selected it and now anything I put in my url bar gets sent to my server. It's pretty sick.
That's interesting, I don't get that option on Chrome on iPhone (Search Engine > Recently visited), except for the officially supported five (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DDG, Ecosia).
I'm wondering do you see that as an option visiting our site (we have an opensearch description for Andi also) or other search engines like You with one?
Thanks for having a look. The opensearch file is https://andisearch.com/andi.xml, and it's correctly referenced from the "<link rel="search"..." opensearch tag. If you have a look in Firefox you'll see it prompts in the nav bar. So I don't think that would be the issue. Do you see anything for other engines like You with the opensearch head item?
I'm thinking maybe Chrome on iOS has its own flavor of implementation and possibly it needs the filename to be "opensearch.xml" rather than looking at the <link> tag. I'm renaming the file to see if that makes a difference. If you had an example of another site where it worked, that would be awesome. At least one more platform where OpenSearch works for setting the default site search would be nice.
You have a section in Andi Search which lets you try and set it as the default (in Firefox at least) but it doesn't work. Is that what you mean, or am I doing something wrong/weird?
BTW I really like what you're doing, and I'll definitely like to set it as default in Firefox somehow if I could just to try it out. My first tests were surprisingly good, I didn't expect it to deliver results which are accurate and which appear to at least match DDG. Nice one. [slightly unusual page format on desktop though :)]
Thanks! I don't want to distract from the main topic too much but would love to chat with you if you're open to it. There's a thread below with @neffity and I made some changes (trying to get Chrome on iOS to use OpenSearch) and broke that for a little. Update is just deploying now. I sincerely appreciate the feedback and you having a look too! :)
Firefox supports an open search standard which is a big improvement, so that's probably where you saw this. It provides an easier experience from the nav bar to add a new search engine to the browser. In practice, while it's a huge improvement, I've found talking with users that it's mostly helpful if someone technical is talking them through the change.
Hello Jed, that sucks. I understand that custom search engine exclusion is a financial decision by companies that can get away with almost whatever they want to do.
For iPhone, iPad, and macOS, you could use Swift and SwiftUI to write a single search app for your service. Flutter is pretty good also, then you could cover Windows and Linux also.
That's simply not true. Even as a technical user who knows what you're doing, you get a hard-coded choice of exactly five - Google, Bing, Yahoo, DDG or Ecosia. You can't add new ones at all. If you wanted to add a new search engine (like the one I'm working on, or any other), there is no way to do it.
But let's try it. Go to Safari > Preferences > Search and choose the "Search engine" dropdown, and you'll see you have a dropdown with only five options.
Google reportedly pays $15B per year for that top spot.
A work around is to add a safari extension like "Keyword Search" and associate a key word to your search. Its nothing like setting a default search engine for a normal user, but atleast there is a way for the slightly more technical user.
Though, I couldn't add a keyword to your site in firefox with its "Add a keyword" feature. Might be due to the javascript calling some url behind the screen.
Adding a shortcut to a website to the home screen is a nice convenience. Unfortunately, it doesn't add it as a search engine to your iPhone search, or to Safari. Even with a PWA (progressive web app), the App is just a wrapper on Safari. For a startup like us, it is probably the best option currently available, and we've tried to make it a good experience. But it does suffer the same drawbacks as a regular App as a browser replacement. If you swipe down from the home screen and type something into your iPhone's search bar, you're still using Google and Safari.
I'd be interested in the steps you took. Third-party Apps on iOS can't change the Safari or system-wide options for search engines as far as I'm aware. Installing a third-party App just gives you a wrapper around Safari for browsing while you use that App only. If you swipe down on your home screen to use the system search, or open Safari itself, nothing has changed. I can ask you to install our App or another search provider's App, but it doesn't change your iPhone's search engine or add it to Safari.
Yes, I found it a few weeks ago. It changes how safari works and improves it quite a lot.
I can block elements, and cookies in a site, define custom JavaScript or css, change the default search engine with one in a list o define a new one, and a whole lot of other things. All inside default safari.
That's interesting. I didn't think an extension could change the search engines available under Settings > Safari > Search Engine on iOS from the defaults (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DDG, Ecosia), or change the system-wide search used. Do you see different options now under Settings for search engines and did it change your system-wide search too (i.e. swipe down on home screen and then use the built-in Search)?
Swiping down doesn’t work, it’s in-browser only in the address bar. As for in safari, I don’t get options, but if the extension is enabled it redirects the search to Kagi.
> especially on an iPhone, you simply cannot change your search engine to a new search engine like us. It is impossible.
See my post above about iCabMobile, where there are TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.
There are also other browsers than Safari and iCabMobile on iOS, many of which give alternatives to their search engine choices.
Naturally if you think only users who choose the default browser are interesting as your market, I wonder if those users would take a chance on your alternative search engine?
I replied to your duplicate post separately, but it is worth noting that even if you install an alternative browsing App and use it, the iOS system search (swipe down from the top to access the search bar) is still using Google and Safari. And even if you were to use another browser like iCabMobile, it also simply does not let you add in a new search engine not already in its own options.
> And even if you were to use another browser like iCabMobile, it also simply does not let you add in a new search engine not already in its own options
I duplicated my post because you so pervasively in this thread duplicated your inaccuracies.
You are wrong about this, iCabMobile allows the user to very easily add search engines:
Settings > Tools > Search Engines > Add
Naturally I expect to be plentifully downvoted for this accurate information, just like pointing-out that iCabMobile has 25 search engines to was also extremely unpopular.
I may not be following you, but are you saying that when you change search engine in your App, it also changes the default search for iOS and Safari system-wide?
Or you are just talking about within your iCabMobile App itself, like anyone can do in their own app?
As far as I know, all the alternative browser and search Apps (including ours for example) are wrappers on top of Safari on iOS. And they are unable to change the iPhone's system-wide search or browser. That's the search engine accessed, for example, when a user swipes down on their iPhone home screen, and enters a query into the "Search" field that appears. Normally, that's Google and Safari at the iOS system-wide level.
Or are you saying that you are able to change these including adding alternative search engines under iOS Settings > Safari > Search Engine?
I'm curious how you're doing this if so, and I'm sure lots of other people would be too. My understanding is that App Store Apps or Extensions can not normally change the iPhone search engines, but I'd love to be wrong about that.
> Google does not allow you to set the New Tab to another search engine
Firefox has removed the ability to set a default page for new tabs and requires users to install an extension to restore the functionality, which in fact provides degraded functionality. As originally implemented the new tab would load the new page instantly. With the extension, a new tab is created, focus is given to the URL bar and after a brief but noticeable pause, the chosen page loads.
Apple is operating a search engine right under our noses, hiding behind Siri. Applebot is regularly crawling the web. They’re probably much further along toward a privacy-focused search product than any of us would know.
"Web results" are. "Siri Suggested Websites" and "Siri Knowledge" are not — those are fed by Applebot. "Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot." — Apple's support document about Applebot.
I've wondered why no one has bought wolfram alpha and used it to power knowledge bases. Certainly it seems cheaper for Apple to have down that as a start point than to start from scratch. Maybe it's too technical for most users?
xSearch for Safari makes the search experience on the Apple ecosystem much better. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...
Makes switching search engines easy and you can use "bangs" like in DuckDuckGo to use other search engines within safari.
"Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore."
This bluntness does not go far enough. People do not change defaults, no matter how "easy" it may be to do so.
A default is a pre-made choice by someone other than the consumer. There is no set-up process where the consumer makes a choice. The choice has already been made. Consumers do not make this choice. Even if they could, in practice they don't. That fact may seem insignificant but it is worth billions of dollars.
If I am not mistaken, the current CEO of Google spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job. In probably the most important one, Google pays Apple a hefty sum to be the default search engine. It was estimated at $10 billion in 2020 and $15 billion in 2021.[1]
Defaults are effectively permanent settings. It does not matter how easy it is to change a default setting if practically no one ever does it. $15 billion is too much to pay for something that may or may not change. It does not change. It is money in the bank.
> If I am not mistaken, the current CEO of Google spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job.
I mean you could spend two seconds to search and realize you were in fact mistaken before bothering to write "If I am not mistaken..."
Sundar Pichai was responsible for the Chrome browser and Android operating system. [1]
While the comment might be a little oversimplified, I think it's reasonable to say that those deals would have fallen under his ambit. And there's no question that Chrome and Android are the two central planks of Google's search distribution monopoly with consumers, along with the Apple deal.
> While the comment might be a little oversimplified
let's see:
> spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job
even if we take your convenient assumption as correct ("it's reasonable to say that those deals would have fallen under his ambit"), it's still wouldn't be a true statement. But feel free to point out which part is true if we relax any more assumptions.
Based on the public record, I don't think the original commenter's statement was unreasonable or mistaken. And they have provided extensive additional documentation on a separate comment supporting the assertion.
Based on Pichai being the senior executive at Google responsible for Chrome browser and search defaults, as a matter of public record he held corporate responsibility for getting google search as the default search engine on as many devices as possible.
You stated that the original commenter was mistaken with no supporting evidence and a high level of acrimony in your phrasing. I'd be interested to see supporting evidence for why you think the commenter was mistaken, in the context of the other resources they provided.
Sure, if you're comfortable with your job being described as spending most of your time working on affiliate link deals, we can agree that's a good description of someone working on the Google toolbar plugin and then Chrome OS, Android, etc.
If anyone else was curious, Sundar Pichai had not worked on Search prior to becoming CEO, it seems:
> Pichai joined Google in 2004,[8] where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Google Chrome and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive. In addition, he went on to oversee the development of other applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. In 2010, Pichai also announced the open-sourcing of the new video codec VP8 by Google and introduced the new video format, WebM. The Chromebook was released in 2012. In 2013, Pichai added Android to the list of Google products that he oversaw.
Consumers don’t want to see the results of their search or find the answer to their question. They want the assurance of being told the answer by an authority. Google has tried to become that authority. It’s true, just Google it.
More about Pichai's role in making Google the default search on more computers and directing search traffic to Google, by any means necessary.
"Pichai started at Google leading product management for the Google toolbar, a critically strategic product that enabled default search queries on different web browsers to go through Google and allow them to track browsing behavior to power the AdWords targeting engine. At the time, Internet Explorer was the "installed by default" incumbent for many users, while Firefox was the alternative browser of choice."
"Pichai identified a weakness in Google's strategy, and Chrome began as a defensive play against the established browsers to protect and grow Google's search business (which still generates much of the company's revenue)."
"Sundar Pichai is the one who introduced the toolbar, which led to an increase in user searches. It was later merged with Chrome, which became the most used web browser in the world."
""Most people here didn't want us to do a browser, so it was a little bit stealthy. Once we had it up and running, I remember showing it to Larry and Sergey - and even then there was a lot of scepticism." But Pichai got his way: Chrome was released in 2008 and now accounts for nearly 60% of the market, according to NetMarketShare, while Internet Explorer languishes on less than 16%."
"Ten years ago, the Indian-born Pichai, 42, was a product manager at Google, and his domain consisted of the search bar in the upper right corner of Web browsers. He then persuaded his bosses to wade into the browser wars with Chrome, which in time became the most popular browser on the Internet and led to the Chrome operating system that runs on a line of cheap laptops called Chromebooks."
"Android runs on 1.2 billion devices around the world. It drives users to the company's hugely profitable search engine and the ads on its maps service. Google search and maps are available on phones made by Apple and Microsoft, too, but Google pays those companies referral fees. The more people use Android, the more Google can keep that revenue to itself."
"Google distributes the latest versions free under the agreement that device makers will highlight profitable Google services-especially search and maps-while their own brands and services take a back seat."
"Pichai joined the small team working on Google's search toolbar. It gave users of Internet Explorer and Firefox, the dominant browsers at the time, easy access to Google search. He proposed that Google build its own browser and won the support of the company's co-founders, though he faced an objection from then-CEO Eric Schmidt, who thought that joining the browser wars would be an expensive distraction."
"Rubin had introduced it, but Pichai created an interdisciplinary team with the search group, which had voice search technology and algorithms that could discern what information might be most important to users. "Sundar helped me to formalize a relationship," says Johanna Wright, the product manager who runs Google Now. "Because search and Android sit in two different buildings, we ended up doing a people swap.""
Thank you for putting that together. I knew there was some resistance to doing a browser internally, but it was a brilliant insight that long term Google would need control of distribution for its search results as it became more and more a mass consumer service, especially after becoming ads-focused and moving toward more mainstream users, and with the world moving to mobile after the iPhone launched.
Just tried https://andisearch.com/ and I like it. Felt like a fresh look on results instead of the same old SEO ones. For example, searched for a few Java queries and found very informative website/results that weren't dominated by Bealdung. Searched for "soccer scores", "chelsea FC", "prince andrew", "WP export" and found things that would never have been on Google's first page, but were excellent returns. Nice work.
Thank you. While I don't want to distract from the topic here, I do really appreciate your feedback and you trying it out, and would love to talk more if you'd like to reach out! Speaking generally, the world needs more people working on search, and I think there is a lot of room for completely new approaches.
I'm pleasantly surprised by the high quality of your top results. That shows the search algorithms (whatever your choice was) are good enough and Google can be eventually disrupted. As a fellow software engineer I'm curious about your stack and size of your operations. Are you blogging about this somewhere? You definitely should!
> That shows the search algorithms ... are good enough and Google can be eventually disrupted
I doubt this. I'm guessing that 90% of Google Search's development effort is concentrated on defeating SEO, and as soon as a new competitor succeeds well enough to attract SEO attention, their results will suddenly turn to custard.
The competitor then has to combat the extremely sophisticated SEO practises developed against Google over the years. This is likely to be an even bigger barrier to disruption than building market share against Google.
You're assuming here that Google's primary interest is consumers, but their paying customers are the advertisers. The reality is that the worse the organic results are, the more likely a user is to click on the ads instead, and that's how Google makes money.
At the least that's a perverse incentive, and at worst it's a corrupting influence.
Whether it is conscious or not, Google does better financially when there is more SEO spam in results.
That's why the better Google does financially, the worse the search results are getting.
I doubt this very much myself too! I little wishful thinking to be honest.
However you're arguing as if new competitors had to monetize the same way Google does and that's not the only game available. Imagine a competitor that doesn't monetize clicks but works on donations (like wikipedia does). If results are higher quality than Google's the users will follow. Or maybe a search engine that promotes a particular product like a CRM tool for example.
Disruption typically doesn't come in obvious ways or else someone else would have done it (including Google and its gazillion dollars).
Thank you. I appreciate that very much. We plan to share on HN how we've built it and how it works, and get as much feedback as we can. That really needs its own thread, and I'm conscious of not getting off-topic or promotional here because this is such an interesting thread already, and it wasn't my intention to distract from that because this is one of the big problems in the world right now. Plus, to be honest, we have a few things that are broken and that we're working to fix! So to answer your question, yes! We hear the feedback asking us to share more, and we're going to get a new release up and share with HN soon. And sincerely, thanks for the encouragement to do that. We think it will be interesting to the community here.
Hey thank you. Seriously I appreciate the feedback and encouragement to share Andi with HN. I know there have been a few comments and questions, even though I'm trying to not get off-topic because this is such an interesting thread. You're absolutely right that this needs it's own thread where we can answer questions properly.
So we're definitely planning to share what we're building with the community here soon. Andi's very much an alpha and a few things are broken, but we're working on a new release that fixes them, and then we're going to share it and learn as much as we can from the feedback and wisdom here.
use the "go" command (e.g. go reddit)
close the newly opened tab (e.g. reddit)
click "Learn more about me"
click the top left icon (Andi)
=> goes directly to reddit.com
Thank you! And ugh! I thought we fixed that bug. On it :)
One of the secrets with Google is search is that the top searches aren't searches at all. Number one search on google? "facebook" - it's people navigating. So the idea behind that is to let people navigate directly when they want to go somewhere specific, like "go youtube cute cats".
Without wanting to go off topic here, may I ask what sort of error did you get? All looks fine from here, although it is an alpha. If you were happy to reach out I can try to help figure it out with you.
Secure Connection Failed: An error occurred during a connection to andisearch.com. PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR. Also Firefox is flagging it as "Not Secure" in the address bar.
Interestingly, once I turned off my VPN, it works again, Firefox doesn't display the message either. Note that other web pages work fine on the VPN.
update: It work's with MozillaVPN, but not with my University's VPN. Perhaps UC Davis has flagged it from within their firewall.
Oh awesome, thank you! Yes just say "/bug" any time and tick the little box to attach details (we don't see what searches are so that let's us know) or just hop on our Discord from Contact Us. We really appreciate you trying it out. It is an alpha and we have lots of work to do, especially performance. I've been trying not to go off topic from the conversation here but wanted to answer your direct question, but we can chat more directly.
I love the HN view option...mostly because I find that form so easy to scan.
I've conducted a number of professional searches about neuroscience, obscure R packages, topics on D&D and Pathfinder, and it has done exceptionally well. The one thing my obscure demographic would love is a replacement for Google Scholar, which I use all the time.
I love the HN view too - it is compact, efficient and information dense. I think it works well for search results. And I love HN so it seemed like a neat homage :)
Thank you for trying it out and the great feedback too. There hasn't been too much discussion here about Google Scholar, but better research and academic results is something I hear a lot of people talk about as a growing problem.
Very cool effort but just the first thing I tried which is a mega common search for everyone. "Denver weather."
Took a while to load, and only gave me short text of current conditions.
When I did "denver weather forecast" it gave a bit more and showed results on the right from Wolfram and others but they don't tell me anything. Wolfram is current conditions and wind tomorrow. Next one just meta description for weather underground.
It's going to snow tomorrow. That's what people are searching for.
Google gets this stuff and makes that info super visually accessible.
I really don't get the hate on their search quality. If it has gone down I haven't experienced this outside of mega spam things like recipes.
But I still experience the black magic of typing in some vague thing you are trying to remember and somehow they know what it is.
I've been trying not to be off-topic or self-promotional on this thread because it has so much other great discussion, and it needs a separate thread, but I wanted to answer your question quickly. Thanks sincerely for the feedback and for trying it out. We'd really love to chat more with you about this if you're open to it. The project is still an alpha and we have lots of work to do. We outline some of the good and bad things on our About page, including that it's weak at local searches (like weather or businesses or localizing to region) and there is too much spam in product reviews and ecommerce especially.
My own feeling is that the spam and ad problem (and therefore actual result quality) on Google is at its worst for categories like finance, health and travel. Commercial promotion has really taken over there. For many people, ads are essentially spam when they take over the entire screen of results (try, say, "best home loans in the US").
There is huge variation though. Some searches are still pure. Thanks again and please feel welcome to reach out to chat more about this!
There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers.
I disagree. Two to three years ago I could get more what I wanted in a complex search once I tuned it properly. So Google had a twenty year run of good and useful searches. Google also worked to strong arm their monopoly, yes. But I claim they still served some quality after that. It's not that unusual for a monopoly built on quality to maintain their quality for a period of time after it achieves that monopoly status - institutional standards die but they can die over time.
> almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore...Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google
I don't disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a lot of things that work this way that aren't actually monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into grocery stores would be one of the major challenges of starting that business. Competition for shelf space is a core concern of a lot of consumables. This definitely creates a lot of stickiness and barriers, and that comes with its share of downsides, but there are also good reasons that distribution systems work the way they do. Transaction costs are important.
I don't think competition for shelf space is the right analogy here. Perhaps for Apps within the App Store you could argue that. But when there are only two mobile operating systems with meaningful market share, and when they make it impossible to change to a new search engine at all, and the results all come from only two sources (Google or Bing) that's a straight monopoly over distribution.
It's a similar situation with the App Stores also. They are monopolies. We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software.
> We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software.
That’s true but at the same time I think most people are pretty happy with it. HN readers aren’t typical in this regard.
I’ve been writing software as my job since the mid-80’s and it’s only been in the past 4 or 5 years where I realized that I’m finally pretty happy with the tech I use day-to-day.
If I had any complaint it would be that app stores have made software too inexpensive. When I look at something like Procreate which I think cost something like $10, I’m blown away. This can’t be sustainable.
You have a point but shelf space is physically limited. Online real estate is not so limited. In my country there is reasonably healthy competition between supermarkets. Supermarkets do have self-branded products but they don't cross-sell competitors self-branded products.
Here we have Apple with Google and Bing on their shelves. Microsoft have Bing and Google on their shelves. And Google have Goggle or Bing. Is that healthy or an oligopoly?
There's a reason web designers call specific pages "valuable real estate".
For example Google's search page, the one with the input, is probably the most valuable web real estate in the world, closely followed by the first page of results once you've typed your query and hit Enter.
I'm willing to bet $100 that the second page of results probably gets less than 1000th the hits the first one gets. Heck, make that 1 millionth of the hits the first results page gets.
That's silly. Everything is limited by the scarcity of human attention spans, not just websites.
Shelf space refers to the market with which someone competes, not whether people are thinking of a candy bar or finding a bathroom or a facebook post. Your argument commits survivor bias because it's ignoring the millions of other websites that exist and are being used. Being popular does not mean something is a monopoly, nor does it mean there's limited shelf space.
Following your example, if Google spammed Pixel ads on it's home page, the page would become less popular. One of the reasons it became so popular was it's strict adherence to focusing on utility.
Even if true, what does that have to do with shelf space? Search results do not constitute the internet, and there are many more search engines than just Google.
And then there's the problem of the difference between your cereal and the big ones aren't going to be big because cereal is a finished art. The same with search. My outcomes using bing or google are almost the same. The reality is a lot of good conversation is locked within social media discussions and reddit is the only one that allows it all to be public by default, hence google + reddit. We're moving to walled gardens and most of them will simply keep google out. Google is probably as good as it can be, but it just doesn't have access to discussions in places like private facebook groups, discord, etc.
Not to mention reddit is terrible outside of tech concerns. It leans conservative, young, male, and white. As a woman, contributing there is an invitation for harassment. Even when I don't contribute I do things like research cars to buy only to see forums dominated by "car guys" who mock safety standards, focus only on performance and the "get laid" aspect of cars, and are dismissive towards groups like "soccer moms." Well, I'm a soccer mom and felt wholly unwelcome in those communities and the advice there is actually terrible advice for parents wanting to buy cars.
Then there's a whole religion on gaming be it consoles vs consoles or vs pcs, or publishers or franchises and just endless tribalism. Politics is an absolute nightmare as you can imagine. The savvy reader will say "well you have to know how to sort the comments a special way and never visit the sub you want but the 'true' version of the sub you want, etc" which is a million times more hostile to non-technical people than scrolling past some google ads and finding an article about what they want from a reputable newpaper or consumer reports.
Reddit is just too wild west to be a google replacement. Worse, the good content is almost impossible to find. Google weighs popular discussions more than recent ones so it keeps giving me discussions from many years ago, even if I try to put the year in the search box. It has no idea how to crawl reddit and make it digestible for us and the reddit leadership want nothing to do with google it seems, for capitalistic reasons of keeping out a potential competitor and having their search be really good "any day now."
Posting to reddit is its own kind of nightmare, full of rules per sub, each different and with an algo that will decide if your question gets any visibility, often only getting mean spirited comments in return, if not harassment. For as far as facebook has fallen, I can still visit my town or neighborhood group and ask people what cars they like and get something of a normal discussion. At reddit, I'll be asked for nudes or just mocked/gatekept.
If anything if google is an old man at web 1.0 then reddit is an old man at web 2.0. I suspect google with outlast reddit as reddit looks primed to be overtaken, a bit like how myspace, slashdot and digg looked like unstoppable juggernauts during their time. Its "manboy" culture and its super hostile default subs and everyday misogyny, transphobia, and racism scare normal people away. Forums have always been the seedy underbelly of the internet but reddit is seemingly proud of being seedy, with spez coming out to say that he welcomes covid disinformation when reddit was recently called out about how its become the home of covid conspiracy theories.
If reddit was publicly traded and you asked me between google and reddit, I'd say buy google 100%. I think we'll be reading a lot more "what happened to reddit" articles in the near future, not "what happened to google" articles. Reddit becomes more toxic over time and that's just advertiser poison. Remember, it happily was the home of "jailbait" subs showing sexualized photos of children and "creepshots" showing non-consensual photos of random women until CNN called them out. If there was no call out, then spez would happily be selling those subs as points of pride and growth. "Reddit is the new google" narratives are very echo-chambery, shortsighted, and highly questionable. I think it forever remains this cesspool that chases away advertisers while Google continues to adapt to a new online world and continues to be vastly profitable. Meanwhile, Reddit has yet to make a profit.
Every time I hear this "Reddit is conservative-biased" I wonder if people are living in the same reality as I am. I just checked /r/all, the first political post is related to the Canadian trucker protest of which support is broadly split down the political divide. Top voted posts there slide as I expected, generally on the left-aligned component against the protests. The same, at least in my experience, applies to all political topics on reddit.
Hell, Bernie, and then Biden were both top of reddit during the elections. In what way is that indicative of a "conservative leaning" on reddit. I'll give you young and male, but conservative? You've got to be pulling my leg here.
/r/all is just a spam of new items, not a view of its culture.
It was the largest Donald Trump fan site in the world (/r/thedonald before it was shut down for being so big its brigading tactics were damaging the site) and now /r/conservative takes that role. Before it was the biggest Ron Paul fan site. Its deeply pro-guns in nearly every comment section and any mention of Hillary or AOC is an invitation for angry comments and downvotes. Random subs are full of transphobic content and misogyny is near everywhere. /r/conspiracy is a right-wing paradise catering to right wing views.
You cannot talk about money or finance without being yelled at about how bad fiat and the fed are, which are right-wing talking points. You can't have a covid discussion without an army of covid skeptics yelling at everyone. You can't discuss police brutality without dishonest "but both sides" types full of racist dog whistles.
Its absolutely right leaning and token "liberal" positions like legal pot or better healthcare doesn't really change that. I know GOP voters with those positions but they always vote GOP for culture-war related reasons. Not to mention, being able to do drugs in your home is really neither liberal or conservative, its just in the USA only the liberal party is making any effort to make that happen.
Covid skepticism, which spez defends, is extremely coded right-wing, so even leadership acknowledges who reddit users really are.
The few liberal and feminist spaces that exist on reddit have draconian mod rules because of the constant brigading and some of them just give up and lock discussions because mods are exhausted and tired of fighting it. Just running a liberal or feminist or queer sub is a lot of work because reddit conservatives are constantly bridaging. This is not the sign of a liberal community. I mod a few subs and its just a nightmare out there. Just keeping conservatives from trolling and fighting with everyone is a big job. If you see "liberalism" its because the mods are keeping the everyday redditors away and trying to keep up the values and themes of that specific sub and its relatively tiny audience compared to the conservative majority.
Cherry picking AI spammed Bernie posts doesn't change the culture in the comments or what visitors receive when they post. I'm in a lot of Democratic, liberal, feminist, queer, socialist, etc spaces and I can guarantee you reddit is absolutely nothing like those spaces.
Also you are taking my comment out of context, not only is reddit conservative, but as a hypothetic competitor to google its extremely conservative. I can google for things without being hit with Ron/Rand Paul narratives, Trump worship, pro-gun narratives, covid skepticism, transphobia, or racist dog whistles. So just the idea that Reddit is as welcoming as a Google search is very, very questionable. Google will transparently present you ads. Reddit will drown you in propaganda, culture war politics, and harassment. As the meme says, we are not the same.
/r/all sorted by hot is items roughly sorted by popularity. Only if you sort by new, would it be a flood of contents by time.
We can take a quick survey of /r/all sorted by "hot" as of this moment. The very first post I see with AoC is literally this:
"""AOC tells Joe Biden: Cancel more student loans to have "any chance" in 2022"""
The top posts? All in support. Where is the dominant conservative force that warps conversation around it.
HermanCainAward, literally a subreddit celebrating the deaths of the unvaccinated tops all regularly. How the hell is that "covid skeptic right dominant"?
Is your idea of "reddit is conservative" that reddit hosts conservative communities at all? Even if they're smaller than the left-aligned communities there?
EDIT:
Some other quick statistics:
Size of /r/conservative: 923k
Size of /r/lgbt: 864k
Size of /r/hermancainaward: 500k
The "lol antivaxxers died" community is literally half the size of the largest conservative subreddit. The LGBT subreddit is the same size as OP's bugbear /r/conservative. The very much Dem supporting /r/politics is an order of magnitude larger than either of those, at 8 MILLION subscribers.
Yeah, I was waiting for this comment. The OP you're responding to is way way WAY overexagerating the opinions of the body politic of reddit.
Reddit is so large that having a potent conservative force is an inevitability - and much as we don't want to admit, for all the nastyness that goes on there, it's still a space that forces conservatives to be relatively speaking on "good behavior" (imagine if gab/voat/parler successfully displaced reddit), and more recently also forces their ideology to be heavily moderated (as in, to become more moderate), and watered down.
Also LOL at criticism of the car community for being bad at recommending SUVs. Reddits car enthusiast community is made up of people whose favorite car by and large is the Miata. Is the Miata a good car for a soccer mom? No. Is the Miata the car of dudebro conservatives? Uh, HELL NO!
I hate to say it, but sorry Karen, Reddit is for your son, not you.
My suspicion is that any broadly successful community aggregator will have enough people holding belligerent, incompatible views, that one could never feel truly safe participating there.
Your loathing (for lack of a better term) of the discourse on Reddit has me wondering if the differences I perceive between our political and cultural tolerance stems from being on opposite sides of a few gnostic / agnostic boundaries, or if the difference between our demographic pigeon holes has spared me orders of magnitude of relative grief, allowing me the additional advantage of getting less overwhelmed by ambient asshattery.
I will readily admit that the latter could easily lead to the former; I guess I wonder if the 2 —> 1 causal order holds overwhelmingly in practice, and how to satisfactorily determine that in a way that manages to be honest, systematic, and compassionate.
>My suspicion is that any broadly successful community aggregator will have enough people holding belligerent, incompatible views, that one could never feel truly safe participating there.
I'm of the opinion that this is fine. Rather, the better approach here might be instead gatekeeping and exclusivity. Now, before you tear my head off for that, let me elaborate a bit.
Much of the issues of existing communities, seem to me to stem from an inability to deal with scale. A single heretic isn't a problem, but when the heretics outnumber the believers, they can then proceed to dominate the community. One potential solution I've wondered about is entry-restrictions and finer grained restrictions on permissions for a community. For instance, a community might be public view but member-only for posts/comments, with invite-only membership. Or perhaps memberships have to be approved by N randomly selected members.
The catch of course, is that what I propose is also yet another contributor to the death of the open internet, much like discord is doing.
Reddit as a whole is absolutely a community and the default subs and the comments in them reflect that. Its also one that brigades a lot into other subs, so there's a "real reddit" you see and its absolutely right-leaning.
I've changed my default search engine to Bing for a while. Before I did that, I did compare the results with Google search and found that the clickbait websites that keep pissing me off are shown only by Google search. Those content farm sites have been on Google search as the top results for years to the extent I think it literally cancels any advantage Google search provides.
“…almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore”? 6-8 quality leads in the last 14 days (ave. sale at $3,200) on less than $220 spent on ads begs to differ with you. We’ve only started advertising the last two weeks. We’ve had calls and form submissions _all_ from Google and we only launched our site roughly 45 days ago. I’m not a Google fanboy and I think Search does need an overhaul but people are mostly definitely using Google Search. Another client of mine gets 8-12 new customers per month all from Google searches and she doesn’t spend a dime on Google.
In many ways I think that supports my comment. People use Google search because it's the default and a monopoly, and it has a total monopoly on search ads as a result. But that is not a choice that consumers consciously make to go and use it. It's pre-installed as the only easily accessible default on their phones and computers, and no one ever thinks about what search engine they use or has chosen to use it. If you buy an Apple or Android phone, your search engine is Google, and you just assume it is the only search engine. It's great that it gets good results for your ad spend for you. That's why Google continues to set new records for revenue. Advertisers like you are their true customers. And the people searching are the product being sold.
They were not saying "nobody uses Google search" but rather that people were not consciously choosing to use it over other services, but using it because it is the default on virtually every device and browser, despite the fact that the majority of the results were ads. The fact that people are clicking on your ads doesn't exactly disprove that hypothesis.
Is there a reason why you've chosen the chat style interface vs the standard search box at the top and results at the bottom layout?
This is not a comment on the search results itself - always appreciate the efforts to break out of the standard google results and surface other sources, but I found the interface confusing and the previews were also taking up a lot of space. A compact view would be better - or giving the option to turn the previews on / off.
Thanks for trying it out. I don't want to take to discussion too off topic, but if I can try to answer in general terms, I think that it is not just that the search results on Google have been getting worse, the user experience has been too. There has been very little real innovation in how search works in the last 20 years, so it is good to try new approaches.
With different views like compact vs visual, our feeling is that it's good to give people choices. If you get chance on desktop with Andi, try a search and then under Search Results, click "Change View", and try some of the other views. List view gives straight compact text results, and there is a Hacker view that presents results in the same information dense view as HN. That's my favorite. There is even a view Goggles that has a similar format to Google circa 2000 :)
I'd love to chat more with you about this, and it is a great topic for when we share what we're building in its own thread here. Just based on feedback, we have two fairly passionate groups of early users on this topic - some love the conversational interface and others just want it to look like Google. So the approach we're taking is to give people choice.
"almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore"
May I ask how you arrived at this observation? This is the first time I am hearing this. I know of NO ONE who uses any other search engine. The term "Googled" is not yet a proxy for other search sites.
People use Google because it's what comes installed on their phones and computers when they first turn them on, and they never actively choose it. So while everyone uses it, few consumers make an active choice to use it. From talking to users a lot, many just assume it's the only option - as you say, Google has become synonymous with search in the same way Xerox became a word for photocopying.
Consumers use Google because it's the default and the only visible option when they turn their phones on. Unfortunately, that's what a monopoly on distribution looks like. People no longer make a choice and don't even realize they have one.
I would think that there'd be an online opportunity for a search engine that only searches humanly curated sites. Those sites would be ones that have quality information rather than spam. Some obvious examples - wikipedia, reddit, hackernews, public domain books, etc.
It's easy to game an algorithm, but hard to game a human - humans know garbage when they see it.
As an aside, whenever I get a prescription, included with it is a dense two page sheet of detailed information about the drug. I see nothing like that online with a search. Why is this sort of thing not online?
Maybe Yahoo's time has come again! Maybe Google's decline started when they no longer had competition from Yahoo?
The interesting thing would be coming up with a sustainable business model for it. One way might be the users pay for it, either per-search or per-month. This way the incentives to provide good search results align with the interests of the people doing the searching, not the people being searched.
The people who want to be searched would have an incentive to make a quality site that the search service would believe would please their customers.
I can think of people willing to pay for quality searches - professionals looking for things they need, like programmers, lawyers, researchers, etc.
>The interesting thing would be coming up with a sustainable business model for it.
Even though I loathe ads, I wouldn't mind one simple, clearly designated ad spawned from keywords in the search. No tracking and no cross site linking. No result promoting, etc...
And yes, I believe that the current iteration of the web requires human moderation to be usefully searched.
At least France and Belgium have public websites with the information sheets of all authorized drugs. I think at least the French one generally comes up in the first results on Google (when searching from a French connection).
pretty much what we're building at breezethat.com -- currently launching about one topic / week, and opening door soon so others can curate / moderate a topic
Humans can also game systems to promote their garbage if they care to. Spammers can hire a click farm to privilege garbage results. Spammers and scammers seem to see enough returns to invest in ways to game the internet’s openness. There would need to be some kind of trust system to make the curation trustworthy.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about wrt prescriptions. I just googled “diazepam” and got all the information on my pharmacy insert, and more. And often, more clearly presented.
Just tried andisearch and am extremely impressed. It has so far handled all queries I have thrown at it better than brave search and DDG. Will continue to experiment, best of luck and awesome work!
Thank you! I really do sincerely appreciate that. If you'd like to, please reach out to us there because we'd love to chat more. It wasn't my intention to take the discussion off-topic here because this thread is so incredibly interesting, but at the same time it's super encouraging to see the unprompted feedback and questions, and we'll share what we're doing properly on HN soon so we can address questions properly.
Firefox on Linux Mint was pointing at something else for a while (DDG I think? Bing? I don't recall).
I gave up after a few weeks and had to switch it back to Google. Google's not perfect - it's never been perfect, it was just better than the alternatives - but it's still less bad than others.
Distribution will come if the product is better, but it is a hard problem. I try every new search engine I can and they are always worse/slower than google.
I have tried using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but Firefox changed it back to Google with every update, so eventually I just gave up on that endeavor.
That's really strange, I've got it set as the default in Firefox on 3 different computers (2 mac 1 windows) and it's stayed the default over several updates. I think something might be wrong with your computer?
With the current Mozilla leadership it never even occurred to me that it could be a bug. I just assumed that it was something they do on purpose to get more money from Google.
>Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore
Do you have anything substantive to support this? I highly doubt it is true given the fact that the verb "to google" literally means "to search the internet".
I think you missed the point here -- people synonymize googling with searching and therefore aren't choosing to google -- they're choosing to search but ending up using google despite having made no conscious effort to do so (it's just there).
Google is the default search on the vast majority of phones and desktop browsers by default.
People don't change their search engine from something else to Google, because it is already the default search engine on the devices they buy and the web browsers they use.
So people do not make a conscious choice to use Google. The vast majority make no choice at all. Google is synonymous with search because it is already the search engine on their phones and computers. They are simply never asked which search engine they want to use.
Most consumers have no idea that you can even change your search engine. After talking with hundreds of users, they find it's either impossible to change (iPhone/MacOS) or too hard (Chrome).
If you're Duck Duck Go or Bing, at least you're in a very limited dropdown list if someone does want to try something else. If you're a new search engine startup, you're not an option at all.
Your argument supports the original poster. It is no longer a conscious choice, "Do I search for this via Google? Maybe I should use Bing? What about DuckDuckGo?", it is, "Oh, lemme Google that".
the other day, on HN i mentioned i was trying to find some relevant meme on DDG, and someone said "try googling 'foo bar baz'" and i thought it was funny.
I don't use google search if i can avoid it. I'll try 3 others first, and generally just give up. Google doesn't deserve any money.
> It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level.
There are five (very simply accessible) different choices for Safari on iOS.
But if you switch to iCabMobile on iOS there are TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.
I think it's reasonable to point out that is not something most consumers are going to be able to do. The only meaningful search engine choice is that available within Safari. And you did install another App, they still aren't used from the system search on iOS, or from Safari itself.
I think you might as well be asking regular consumers to root their device so they can use whatever Apps from outside the App Store, or whatever search engine they want.
Also, even for a technical user, there is simply no way on an iPhone to change to a new search engine not already on a tiny list, and from talking with hundreds of consumers, I have not talked with a single non-technical person who could work out themselves how to change their Safari search engine to even one of the 5 limited choices, let alone a new option.
Unfortunately, installing an App doesn't let you change the system-wide search on iOS (or Safari browser), so rooting the device would be the only real way. My intended point is that if you're a consumer trying to change your search engine to a new option on an iPhone, there is no way to do it.
Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has a distribution monopoly through Android, its deal with Apple on iOS and MacOS, and on desktop through Chrome.
I'm working on a search engine startup. It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level. And despite being technically possible on desktop with Chrome, it is for all practical purposes beyond what any typical consumer can easily do.
Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google and clicking ads.