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by karolisd 5570 days ago
What's keeping someone from making a search engine that doesn't have these flaws?
2 comments

Most of these flaws are trade-offs, where if you fixed it, you'd create a worse problem.

This is most obvious in the ones where Danny's judgment itself may not match many of the readers of the article. For example, I love cached pages (as a user. As a Google dev, I kinda hate them). They've been so useful in cases where a website has unexpectedly gone off-line or becomes overloaded. But Danny's a publisher, and as such, each cache hit is one less pageview that his website gets. His interests are opposed to those of users, and Google, as the party in the middle, has to arbitrate between them. There's no right choice that will avoid pissing off one or the other.

Or take one of his LOVEs: "An end to overwhelmed product launches." A direct result of that has been that it's become much harder to launch things, and there is correspondingly less innovation coming out of the Googleplex. Every service needs to build for scale from day one, and that means that you have to pay that tax and iterate more slowly even if your service won't get any users. If a startup tried that, they'd never get off the ground.

Assumptions. Engineers are confident that building a search engine requires thousands of servers, indexing the entire web, coming up with some super complex algorithm etc...

Maybe we need a couple of guys who do not know their limitations and are ready to approach search from a different angle.

Perhaps the author of DuckDuckGo[1] did not know about those limitations...

As far as I know, this search engine uses both own crawlers and some external sources of data. One person team did it.

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[1] http://duckduckgo.com/

By "some external sources of data", you mean "Bing". DDG's primary data source is Bing, via the Yahoo search APIs.