[_jal]

Also important for anyone actually thinking of taking Google on, very few of the features listed are things Google can't easily do, too. Attacking their strengths is crazy. You better have something both crazy good and hard to replicate by someone with more money than god.

Whatever replaces Google will be doing something that Google can't without causing them other problems. The first thing that comes to mind is make them choose traffic vs. advertisers (I don't know, if I had an idea of how to, I would not be writing this), but they're big enough that other wedges could start chipping away at their margins.

[darinf]

Actually, you are spot on. One simple feature of the Neeva app is that it shows inline search results as you type into the URL bar. This is because we aren't trying to show you ads, so we don't need you to visit the search results page (where Google and others show you those ads). We just show you the results straight away in the suggest experience. Now, this isn't going to show you everything you care about and you can still click to see the search results page. It is just handy to be able to quickly get to where you are trying to go and especially if it is likely to match what you are looking for (e.g., a wikipedia link). This is something Google cannot bring itself to do because it would be cost way too much in terms of lost ads revenue. There are other examples like this where Google and other ad-supported search engines just can't innovate, can't change the search experience. The current way of searching is too lucrative and there is too much business inertia around it. That's why Neeva is interesting and why I left Google to join and help :)

[jsnell]

But that is exactly how Google searches worked on desktop platforms for more than half a decade (Instant Search), not some kind of a new idea. Given how long they kept that feature on, it seems pretty obvious that it can't have been the kind of revenue killer you suggest. If you can serve and display search results for a given possibly partial query, you can obviously serve ads too.

[darinf]

I was talking about mobile. As for desktop, Instant Search was serving up full page results instantly, which included ads. That's a different thing altogether, and of course, in the case of Instant Search there was plenty of room for both sponsored results as well as real results. On mobile there isn't.

[mkmk3]

I think this comment is a bit strange in the present, considering search engines like duckduckgo, which is basically Bing promoted with a "we don't track" advertising campaign (also hashbangs are pretty cool). DDG is not at google numbers, I know, but you don't need google numbers to make money. I don't think privacy is a very special angle to advertise from either, promising to remove amazon-affiliate blog-spam from results for example, would be a major feature in this space as far as I'm concerned. Being able to edit searches, and potentially gain some intuition for how the search space is set up, might be a much more significant feature, depending on how people take to it. It might flop but atm I'm excited to check it out

[_jal]

> but you don't need google numbers to make money

The article is titled "The Next Google." I was responding to that, not "A Profitable Also-Ran".

[sanxiyn]

While "The Next Google for Wall Street" is one interpretation of "The Next Google", I am more interested in "The Next Google for me".

[prawn]

I've long wondered about a search engine that doesn't index a page that has AdSense or similar code. There'd be a lot of collateral damage, but it would knock out a lot of annoying made-for-adsense sites at least. Basic thinking, but along the lines of what you suggested.