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Is Google fearing pg's call on reinventing search startups?

13 points by RuggeroAltair ↗ HN
I thought this deserved some attention.

In response to pg's essay on ambitious ideas for startups, Matt Cutts said: "Paul's #1 suggestion is reinventing search. I happily welcome competition in search because it keeps us on our toes, but his #2 suggestion resonated with me more: reinventing email."

Today, they said that, for first time, they are releasing a video about what they do on a search meeting. http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-uncut.html?m=1

I wonder what pushed them to post this video. It's not even very informative, it talks about searches of N-grams and spell corrections, it seems more like something to show how advanced the changes they make are.

I'm sure watchers must have thought that search is so advanced and hard seeing that video that they might give up. It must be so hard to catch up with them ;-)

Maybe google is afraid of a plethora of YC (or not) startups trying to reinvent search. One may succeed.

7 comments

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wavephorm
I'd say no. Like with Facebook, what replaces Google won't look like a search engine, or a social media portal, it will be... ?
dgunn
I'm not sure why people keep saying this. I'm not reinventing either of these things but I suspect, like the services they each replaced, they too will be replaced with things that look strikingly similar to themselves.

For an oversimplified example, FB replaced myspace with a service that looked a lot like myspace did originally. One of the biggest things they had going was the simplicity of use and the cookie-cutter look of everyone's profile. Myspace, at the time, was full of 'pimped' profiles that made their experience suck.

Facebook will continue to add more and more fluff (games, etc..) until it doesn't work well as a tool to stay connected with people. Once this happens someone will show up with something that looks a lot like facebook did when it started. But because they're so dissimilar at the time, people will continue this adage of, "what ever replaces X won't look much like X". But it probably just will if you correct for time.

ariabov
I think you are right in that if there is something that replaces Google for search, it will probably be like Google in its early days. Since the roll out of the Social Search feature, I have been finding myself wanting "classic" Google more and more (I am sure I am not alone here)
AznHisoka
people are already beginning to use other methods to discover, and find what they need. for instance, the app store. instead of googling, people are searching the app store instead. another instance is siri, or stackoverflow, or yelp. in a sense, it won't be 1 thing that will eat into google's market share but a bunch of other ways to find things.
RuggeroAltair
I agree. Probably in the future we'll start more and more to have specific search engines for different things.

I think that will be somewhat wiki, somewhat social, and somewhat search engine will eventually take off.

But not necessarily in a unique aggregator. I don't go to any scientist to ask a question about science. I go to the ones who are proficient at what I'm asking.

Same with search, I'm sure in the future it'll become more and more common to have completely different search engines based on what I'm trying to find. They are already out there, maybe just a few steps away since their inception, or maybe already around for a while, it's just that not too many people are using them. When it'll become unbearable to use google for everything people will switch.

Look at Youtube, lately there is so much advertisement that I can't believe they aren't afraid of losing users massively. I almost don't want to go on it anymore for how much time I usually have to waste.

And yes, I understand google is a free service paid by the ads. But I don't care. I'm ok with the ads on a side, on top, at the bottom. But I'm not ok with wasting time waiting for an ad to play.

mapster
Google is less about search than it is about adwords and the network of apps - but yes, there is much frustration over the search results these days so that is an opportunity for innovation.