Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived decline of Google & its dominance

  • Many say Google results have become polluted by ads, SEO spam, and unwanted “interpretation” of queries, especially compared to ~2004–2012.
  • Others note that despite quality decline, Google still vastly dominates traffic and impressions; inertia, defaults, and integrations (Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube) keep it dominant.

Why building a new search index is hard

  • Maintaining a large, fresh index is technically and financially heavy: crawling cadence, spam/SEO resistance, ranking, low latency at billions-of-pages scale.
  • Cloud costs, lack of clickstream data, and user acquisition (needing distribution deals or platforms) are major obstacles.
  • Competing full‑stack with Google is seen by some as nearly impossible; focusing on niches or “the good part of Google circa 2010” might be more realistic.

Silos, access barriers, and Common Crawl

  • Key content lives in silos (Reddit, Facebook, Stack Overflow, news paywalls, CDNs like Cloudflare) that often whitelist only Google/Bing or block scrapers.
  • Workarounds via proxies/scraping are possible but likely unsustainable as a long‑term business.
  • Common Crawl is useful but incomplete, text‑biased, and updated monthly; some argue that’s far too slow for many queries.

Existing alternatives and user experiences

  • Mentioned engines with (at least partially) own indexes: Brave Search, Marginalia, Mojeek, Yacy, Kagi (hybrid), plus specialized/news engines.
  • Some users happily replaced Google with DDG, Brave, Kagi, etc.; others find these also degraded or still dependent on Bing/Google.
  • Kagi and Brave get praise for relevance, fewer results, strong filters, support for operators, and features like “goggles” or site blocking, but Kagi’s price turns some away.

LLMs, “answer engines,” and fragmented search

  • Perplexity, ChatGPT+web, and similar tools work well for direct Q&A, coding help, and summaries, with lower spam; others find them slow, wordy, or unreliable for concrete data (business hours, exact errors).
  • Many now use two tools: LLMs for questions, traditional search for navigating to specific sites.
  • Debate over whether LLM search can be financially sustainable given high compute costs and whether it will erode the web’s economic incentives.

Ecosia/Qwant collaboration and ethical ranking

  • Some welcome their attempt to build a European index and reduce dependence on Google/Bing; DMA‑style EU regulation is seen as enabling this.
  • Others are skeptical, citing past European “sovereign search” projects that burned public money without success.
  • Ecosia’s idea of downranking “unsustainable” or “unethical” companies splits opinion: some see it as mission‑aligned, others as moralistic bias or censorship.

Ads, SEO, and desired ranking controls

  • Strong resentment of affiliate‑driven and ad‑saturated content; proposals include:
    • A “commercial activity” slider to hide pages with ads, affiliate links, carts, or heavy tracking.
    • User‑managed domain blacklists/whitelists.
  • General sense that ad‑funded search inherently drifts toward enshittification; paid models or non‑ad monetization are viewed as more promising but hard to scale.