Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43324387

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

would you be open sourcing soon? totally understand if you want to keep it private but if you are open sourcing there’s a few other podcasts i’m interested in running this on for myself, like some parenting ones.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag...

It's 100% open source and client-side https://github.com/abhinavsharma/hypersearch

I wrote a post explaining why we think this is a more pragramtic approach here https://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives

https://github.com/abhinavsharma/hypersearch

It shows reddit (also HN, and others when relevant) filtered results in a sidebar for Google queries. It's auto expanded when there's a non-navigational query with no onebox (this is a increasingly becoming a good indicator of when Google is lacking decisiveness in a query).

Example: https://share.getcloudapp.com/QwuLL0NW For Chrome or Edge: http://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojage... For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hypersearch-d... Source: https://github.com/abhinavsharma/hypersearch

Feedback or change requests are appreciated via Github!

Too many products equate frictionless == featureless these days and there should be more power when the user needs it.

That's why we built a search extension that improves upon Google specifically in ways that it's weak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933 http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives

It's hard to do (1) well given Google's data moat and how good that makes them at head queries. It's rare that people stick with one of these alternatives because they struggle to be as good in the majority of simple queries.

We built a few such search engines before choosing a different route — we made something that augments Google (or Amazon, or whatever other search engine you use) and improves it in areas that it's weak in.

I posted our thoughts on this a few weeks ago on HN that generated some discussion as well — http://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933

The apps we built are a mobile browser extension for iOS and a desktop browser extension

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperweb/id1581824571 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag...

It's one approach, but we're trying to be more non zero-sum about it, and consider that the search engine doesn't have to be replaced 1:1 with a better search engine.

A short excerpt from our documentation to explain what we're building...

We believe that finding high quality information on the open internet has become increasingly hard. Many have noticed this trend but a superior alternative remains elusive.

Search engines are mostly used for head queries, (simple that many people often look up) but make most of their revenue on tail queries (complex research queries with high financial or life decision stakes).

People build the habit of their default search engine based mostly on the head, and to be good at the head, you need lots of data on what people like clicking through to, thus making the market leader's position even stronger.

But tail queries, often the most important queries users make, are declining in quality because

1. The organic results cannot be much better than the ads, otherwise too much revenue is lost.

2. Publisher revenue is getting smaller relative to search engines', so larger publishers often make more money by affiliate selling to expensive products (e.g. review sites) or by paywall-blocking content.

3. Large publishers win out in search results over authentic user generated content because people click on familiar brands and because they can spend more on SEO budgets.

We don't think it's easy to make an alternative search engine that's much better, but we do think that there are clever ways to use existing search engines to get to the best content.

Hence we built this as an extension, and also made sure to open source it to keep our incentives as honest as possible.

I also published an accompanying blog post 2 weeks ago https://abhinavsharma.com/blog/google-alternatives . Hopefully this is just the first step and with feedback from the community we can make it more useful in the future.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30909261

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933

Points: 285

# Comments: 457

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30681363

Points: 1

# Comments: 0