Ask HN: What would it take to unseat Google?

19 points

2 years ago

There have been a ton of articles about the decline of Google's search quality. Just the other day Planet Money released an episode that talked about a longitudinal study of Google search quality: https://www.npr.org/2024/06/13/1197965227/google-search-quality-algorithm-documents-leak

Here are some other examples:

https://future.a16z.com/the-future-of-search-is-boutique/

https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying

https://nypost.com/2022/05/01/google-critics-say-ads-spam-sites-are-killing-search/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

This is certainly a popular topic in the media, and maybe we can even say the reports of Google's death are greatly exaggerated. An important consideration is the fact that SEO has also gotten a lot more sophisticated, so the number of high quality articles on any particular topic might not be that high.

But my question is, if we accept the premise that 1) Google search is getting worse and 2) Google is responsible for this, what would it take to unseat them?

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