[dcminter]

Betteridge's law tells us the answer is no. But there is a real phenomenon - Google is becoming less useful.

It used to be that a challenger would get no traction because why would one bother when Google always popped out good answers to searches. Now... I'd at least try something new to skip all the makeuseof, wikihow, and similar dross without having to explicitly constrain it to reddit.

So no, it's not dying. But this is how it could die.

[lumost]

This is going into technical documentation as well. Even for tensorflow/keras related questions on specific methods the tensorflow documentation is at position ~5-10. Sites that literally just copy a random version of the docs are ranked higher...

[Mediterraneo10]

> Sites that literally just copy a random version of the docs are ranked higher...

Recently I put something together in Common Lisp, a language I’m a novice at, so I often had to search. The first result returned in all my Google searches was a copycat website. Someone had clearly taken some previous high-quality Lisp reference and extensively rewritten it to avoid copyright violation, then loaded it with SEO. However, their English was rather poor and so this rewrite was a pain to read.

I would love a search engine that would allow me to zap certain domains and hide them permanently from results, but at the same time without retaining information about me for advertising purposes.

[freediver]

I am building one. We are in private beta. Details in my profile.

[dcminter]

Yeah, I'm learning Rust at the moment. Searching on that is ... pretty good. Searching on Java stuff turns up soooo much crap. Presumably because the search volume is vast enough to make infospamming worthwhile :'(

[RhysU]

It would be interesting to study how the uniqueness of new programming language names and the superior technical search results they bring about causes programmers to adopt new languages as time wears on.

[kingsuper20]

>Google is becoming less useful.

Exactly. I wonder how a person could construct a highly curated google search. Not just blocking of sites but also a bit of parsing on the site for disposal purposes. Could it all be done on a local machine?

On a related note, as eBay became more of an all-purpose webstore I'll tend to use it rather than Amazon search to find products. The actual purchase, if it happens, is wherever.

[dcminter]

I honestly wonder if there might be room in the market for a paid-membership search engine that included only a curated set of sites.

You'd lose all the long-tail quality stuff (e.g. my own write-only blog :P ), but also all the garbage. It might be worth it.

I don't think you could kill Google with that, but it might make a viable lifestyle business.

Edit: and I meant to add - I was looking for info on a specific Synology device the other day. Google turned up Synology's own website (good) and a zillion crappy affiliate-link-spam sites. eBay and Reddit were the best sources of info when I sighed and started constraining the search with site: prefixes.

[kingsuper20]

>I honestly wonder if there might be room in the market for a paid-membership search engine that included only a curated set of sites.

I know basically nothing of the mechanics of search, although I expect that a boutique search engine would have trouble accessing the guts of third party sites as they don't want to get hammered by the world.

I did just think of an interesting specialty engine. If you had fast access to the full library on libgen or sci-hub, a person could produce a pretty interesting set of abilities.

[dcminter]

I know enough to know I don't know much :) But there's plenty of documentation out there.

My impression is that if you're not dealing with people trying to game the algorithm then it's all a lot simpler.

As to data sources - with a constrained set of sites the creation of custom adapters should be do-able I'd have thought.

Not that I have any plans. Maybe I should though :)

Edit: come to think of it, it's practically an internet law that stuff you think of already exists. So maybe I should just post an Ask HN for the link to the search engine in question...

[kingsuper20]

An interesting meta-problem comes with success of a curated search engine. The sites it actually supports would themselves have to be curated as otherwise the camel's nose gets back into the tent.

[dcminter]

Yeah, exactly. Either not successful enough to game or... Nice problem to have? Maybe?

(I have similar thoughts about diacussion fora fwiw)

[tmaly]

Google search might be becoming less useful, but YouTube search is becoming more useful in my opinion.

[mohanmcgeek]

Betteridge's law is for news headlines.

Ask HN posts are supposed to end with a question mark