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Comment by harry8

2 days ago

google search took over becuse all search engines sucked and theirs didn't in a few important ways. AND by default, ads over to the side, clean interface.

Now all search engines suck and google's sucks just as bad or worse than the rest.

If someone were to follow the original google playbook and make a search engine that helped people find things (eg by respecting the query syntax rather than making 'helpful' suggestions and dropping words the user included in their query) and kept the ads separate and out of the way of results. They might well make a monster. But this is old tech so nobody cares and everyone thinks google is unassailble even while nobody likes them anymore. Is there /any/ money in search? I thought so but I must be wrong for it to get this bad.

Google search still has at least one competitive advantage: their crawlers are least likely to be blocked so they have the biggest index. AFAIK reddit is indexed by google but blocks all other search crawlers.