What is preventing Bing or Google to copy the techniques marginalia or kagi uses

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39499308

by arromatic • 2 years ago

42 62 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Both google and bing seems to be having a hard time to serve good results especially bing so what are they doing ?

dotcoma5• 2 years ago

They are interested in serving ads, not good search results.

Sometimes things are really simple.

arromatic14• 2 years ago

Isn't there news about google struggling from ai generated content causing them to make a 60 million dollar deal with reddit. Reddit results won't help them with ad revenue because reddit has it's own ad platform.

dotcoma5• 2 years ago

its, not it’s, in any case.

dotcoma5• 2 years ago

Anyway, I don’t see how this deal, of which I know nothing, contradicts the fact that they are more interested in the ads they serve than in the search results they serve.

TylerE• 2 years ago

No. Just a normal licensing deal to get direct access to the API firehose and permission to consume it and use it.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by short term profits.

globular-toast• 2 years ago

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But in reality they kept their useds using techniques like marketing, vendor lock in and monopolistic practices. They aren't competing based on quality of search results.

ysofunny• 2 years ago

They aren't competing based on quality of search results.

not anymore, but when they first started out they certainly were much better than everything else available at the time

hiddencost• 2 years ago

Organizational bloat. The larger an organization gets, the harder delivering becomes.

arromatic14• 2 years ago

1. Search is googles sole purpose . How can they mess up their main product even being a large org ? 2. Also another question , how can large org deliver effectively among bloat ?

cqqxo4zV46cp• 2 years ago

What? Advertising is Google’s sole purpose.

And if you think that some random HN user has the answer to “how do you get a large org to continue innovating”, and is going to share it instead of make literal trillions of dollars with it, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

smokel• 2 years ago

It is probably not that Kagi or Marginalia have more advanced technology. The problem is that SEO scum is only targeting the relevant players.

kristofferR• 2 years ago

Not really. Kagi has tech that groups "listicles", for example, something Google could easily do to improve the results:

https://imgur.com/a/18ZYjUa

lozenge2• 2 years ago

Yes really.

Those listicles exist because Google became stricter about a different type of content- product reviews. https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

The business model of the listicles is: clicks from Google + commission from Amazon/similar = revenue for the website

"In 2022, e-commerce accounted for nearly 19 percent of retail sales worldwide." So imagine if 19% of all retail decided they needed to rank highly on Kagi to get a slice of that huge revenue. Kagi's team wouldn't stand a chance against what they thought up.

dazc2• 2 years ago

'Best [insert random product]' will often be the most popular key phrase, Google users get what they want. Could those lists be better, no because they have reached their optimum balance of effort/reward. Nobody is going to go out and buy 100 bikes just so they can tell you which 10 were best.

jorams• 2 years ago

There is no technical reason, it's all about incentives. What Kagi and Marginalia do is fundamentally incompatible with Google's business model.

The reason Google shows you search results is to serve you ads, but the presence and volume of ads is an inherently negative quality of those search results. So Google is incentivized to show you lower quality search results, as long as those results don't become so bad that you stop using the service.

Endless terribly formatted clones of Stack Overflow or GitHub issues don't provide any value to the world, but they do show Google's ads, so they weren't banned from all results after the first person at Google noticed them.

Empty results pages don't lead you to ads, but ad spam that doesn't answer your query does, so over the years the "no results" page has more and more been replaced with useless results. Some of us spend some mental energy looking at the SRP to determine they're useless, many more probably click the first result and are served ads.

Google's founders knew this, wrote it into their paper, then ignored it and made it their business model anyway.

is_true2• 2 years ago

Is it possible google added "revenue earned" as a ranking factor? I guess so.

If market share starts to decrease we should see an improvement in results, the problem is that's gonna be too late.

avidiax• 2 years ago

There could be a technical reason. At this point, Google's search ranking algorithm is probably a pile of interrelated heuristics designed to maximize revenue without sacrificing quality too much.

It would not be simple to integrate another algorithm in a revenue neutral way. The signals may be missing, and the new algorithm may overlap or interfere with several other rules, either negating or over promoting their effects.

acdha• 2 years ago

There’s some truth to this but Google has highly-ranked sites which stay above the sources they’re scraping for years. It’s hard to believe that the experience wouldn’t be better at almost no cost if they were quicker to ban those spam domains or let users do so.

sanitycheck• 2 years ago

Marissa Mayer has claimed that Google's ads actually increase search result quality, based on an accidentally long A/B test..

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/ & Ctrl-F for "3 percent more" in the transcript.

...Although I think those results are open to some interpretation. Perhaps people who got ads did 3% more searches not because Google was so good, but because they got tricked into clicking an ad instead of a real result 3% of the time so had to come back and search again.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

"Google's founders knew this, wrote it into their paper, then ignored it and made it their business model anyway."

https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Ferret7446• 2 years ago

The reason Google shows you search results is to serve you ads

You could also say that the reason Google serves you ads is so it can show you search results.

vbezhenar2• 2 years ago

Do you have any statistics to claim that Google does not serve good results? That’s not my experience.

is_true2• 2 years ago

I do. I regularly find myself visiting page two or adding more search terms to improve results.

lozenge2• 2 years ago

It depends massively what you're searching for. If there's a whiff of money attached then the results are crap. However if you want to know why the sky is blue then Google delivers.

WirelessGigabit• 2 years ago

Here's a test. Google something like 'flat tow jeep'.

Now read the first 10 'articles' which are all articles written solely for SEO purposes to sell you a service. You need to read through a lot of useless text before you find a line that says 'check your manual for how to enable flat towing in your transfer case and transmission'.

So it's like a long tease and at the end you're still not getting a satisfactory answer.

And overall the more your search terms are related something the average American searches for, the more junk there is.

vbezhenar2• 2 years ago

Here's my first Google result: https://www.quadratec.com/c/reference/flat-towing-jeep-wrang...

Seems good enough? Short instruction and some helpful comments.

ThePhysicist• 2 years ago

They optimize for overall revenue and do not cater to (revenue-wise) largely irrelevant niche audiences like HN users or tech-savvy and privacy-obsessed hackers. Perceived quality is an aspect of user retention but I'd wager that 99 % of their users don't think that Google or Bing results are getting worse for them. Google is on track to make $1BN in revenue per day, Kagi and Marginalia are literally at one millionth of that, so while Google might have them on their radar I have a hard time believing they actually care about what they do. If any incumbent manages to capture more than 1 % of the search market they might start to adapt their strategy.

Kagi and Marginalia are growing within their respective niches so they can care about these "weird" users as they are at a scale where it makes a difference for them. At some point they would need to start catering to mainstream users as well though in order to keep growing.

ergonaught• 2 years ago

Bing's results are so awful I assumed it was intentional, ie: Google funding it for the purpose of avoiding monopoly-related penalties/etc, but MS mostly seems to be suffering from the same thing as Apple (no Steve or Bill forcing alignment). Quality tanking because people who don't care or understand are making the decisions.

arromatic14• 2 years ago

question :1. How did they hit 3 trillion with incorrect people making decisions ? 2. and is satya worse than steve or bill ? there seems to be a lot of praise about how satya saved microsoft.

imperialdrive• 2 years ago

I'm very curious about number one as someone that grew up using Microsoft solutions and made a nice career from it as well. Their products have gotten so bad though that I am close to living in denial for continuing to recommend their offerings to clients. Win11 and Edge and Teams are the most terrible trio. Their 365 ecosystem has almost become a joke of a mess too. I not familiar with better complete alternative just yet, so it may simply be a poor time for the industry and I have to deal with it for now.

cainxinth• 2 years ago

They didn’t hit $3b because of their search products. It’s because of their entrenched base of enterprise customers.

ipaddr• 2 years ago

Kagi limits the results to sites without ads or affiliate links. Copying that would work against their core values.

Most people don't want a more limited set of results. Most google users want more results not less.

dazc2• 2 years ago

'Most google users want more results not less.'

Most google users are looking for the results that are often complained about, cheap holiday deals, voucher codes, ten best of, etc.

Google are doing their job.

arromatic14• 2 years ago

I am pretty sure when i search "lord of the rings review" or "the hobbit" there are least a 500 different blog post reviewing and i would like to have option to choose to read as many review as i want and not be limited to to 10 or 50 search results.

onionisafruit• 2 years ago

Kagi limits the results to sites without ads or affiliate links

I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been using kagi for a few months now, and I get plenty of results with ads and affiliate links. I’m not complaining about that because sometimes those are the best results for my query.

SushiHippie• 2 years ago

They don't "limit"/filter the results but downrank them.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Ask HN:

altairprime• 2 years ago

Email the mods and they’ll fix it.

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Google has only made 2 successful products. Search and gmail. Having worked intimately with a bunch of people from Google, there are brilliant engineers but nobody knows how to design or build products. And now the search index is so big that they don't know how to fix that either. All in all it's basically Google's end days. Like any company. Nothing to feel sad about. Companies like Nintendo are very rare which can last over centuries.

arromatic14• 2 years ago

I don't understand how can you be a being brilliant engineer but not know how to design/build product especially at google which attracts best talents ? If engineers can't then who is supposed to build/design product ?

What is preventing Bing or Google to copy the techniques marginalia or kagi uses

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