I don’t really remember Google of that era; I got on the Internet pretty late. But I do have high hopes for the recent rise we’ve seen in smaller, targeted search engines; a lot of the Google-scale problems of “making a search engine” go away when you focus on a small corner of the Web:
- benefits of diversification: if one search engine isn’t helpful, you can try another instead of just being out of luck; and spammers now have to game a bunch of different algorithms rather than being able to target just one.
- having just one person, or a small group, focuses the results, and can hopefully produce a higher level of polish in a targeted area.
- the tech has reached a point where it’s actually pretty reasonable for someone to index a fairly large chunk of it themselves: https://search.feep.dev/blog/post/2022-07-23-write-your-own
- benefits of diversification: if one search engine isn’t helpful, you can try another instead of just being out of luck; and spammers now have to game a bunch of different algorithms rather than being able to target just one.
- having just one person, or a small group, focuses the results, and can hopefully produce a higher level of polish in a targeted area.