I think Google search is using the wrong approach. When I'm looking for e.g. a new camera, I want to use my network which I trust. E.g. I want to ask "what camera would HN recommend?" We should think more about how we can use trust as a basis for how we explore the internet.
Given that enough people use this heuristic, there will be companies focusing on earning karma on HN, writing comments and voting for products they are getting paid for.
While true, it is also not a given that you'd need to trust _all_ of HN. I visit sufficiently regularly that I see some people post and recognize their username. I often think -- I wish I could _follow_ them. Not so much of a stretch to think of rings of trust built around particular users. Bringing people in and kicking them out of these trust circles could play a role. PageRank -> TrustRank? Of course it would also be only one metric, among many possible trust rankings and many possible other signals and settings.
I bet the (niche) product as such wouldn't be as hard to build as it would be to scale. Imagine every user constantly tweaking (directly or indirectly) their search result settings, and having that impact millions (or more) indexed items, for every user.
Wouldn't the world become a little bit better if they did? Earning karma on HN is not the easiest thing. I would hate to speak for all of us but collectively, don't you think we have a pretty good marketspeak alert system here?
I think you are kind of ignoring the issue that parent brought up.
The hn machine is not all that smart and can easily be gamed, and would, if the stakes were to become high enough. Farming hn karma by making pointed statements on crowd favorites (parent named two, oss licensing or privacy also spring to mind) gets you your 10k, no originality or honesty required, in no time.
What's protecting hn is a lot of moderation + relative irrelevance. If those 10k were to systematically bring you enough eyes (by driving search results), you are in effect printing money. There is no reason to assume the number of people doing it would not scale with the return attached to doing it.
Anything (points/karma/coins) which is free & unlimited will find it's way to get exploited. "What if" there's a barter system for karma/points, you do a +1 and get a -1.
Though I do not know how the initial allotment of karma/points could be distributed for the pioneers and for the new growing community, maybe allot 'n' points for new user after a year...
Trust can work both ways. They'd have to be really careful to not lose the earned trust. On the way, they would have to write a lot of high quality HN posts. I'd say this model is a win over current spamming and fake reviewing practices.
The other side of them having to write a lot of high quality HN posts is me having to read and evaluate more HN posts trying to game me. That is work, and if I sense a lot of it (like I did on Reddit), I will leave, and I suspect others would too.
Playing defense is exhausting when playing offense is extremely cheap.
Personally I don't ask my network or friends for options on such things because people tend to have a positive bias towards things we have invested money in.
Some approach like this could still work, but it’s incredibly hard to maintain/define the right “network”, and across different domains. (E.g. HN probably not so good a community for latest fashions or sports trivia)
I put your search into SearX with a lot of the major engines enabled (Google, Bing, Qwant, Brave, DDG, etc.). Arguably, Google did a better job giving me HN results (but it's a very small sample set).
Edit: if you're not familiar with SearX, everyone who visits will get a slightly different result based on dynamic results. Even if the same person refreshes a few times the exact results and ordering will vary; I've learned to try the same search a few times to get better results, it's just a quirk of how it works and how each remote engine reacts at that given instant.
Google's end goal is Answer Machine but we are decades away from that. Answer Machine would be something like God-like software which gives you the ultimate answer to your query and that answer would be 100% accurate, true and personalized/suited for you. Again blackbox solution but it will be so advance with the help of AI that it would be trustworthy by default/design. Hard to achieve but looking at the Moore's Law and the advance of AI it will eventually be achieved.
