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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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We need a Google successor.
Something non-profit.
The horrible reality is that Bing has actually become a competitor to Google, simply by Google getting worse and worse. Microsoft used to be the main bad guy, but these days they practically seem benign compared to the others. Not open source like you're saying, of course.
The ai generated top reply on Bing pisses me off 90% of the time. Word salad with citations.
Often citations for fake books or rare print material the AI couldn't possibly have had access to. ~Cherri
The infrastructure to crawl, store, and serve search results to billions of users is phenomenally expensive. A government might fund it (which comes with its own concerns), but a non-profit will struggle to compete.
I would pay a subscription if it were truly non profit and had no ads.
Did you sign up for Neeva? Because unfortunately it's shutting down.
Federated search is possible but has not gotten a lot of attention yet.
If you're talking about YaCY, apparently that's pretty much useless right now from what I've heard. ~Cherri
There's actually a lot of theory and early work out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different.
When you factor out all the garbage content it's suddebly affordable lol
Wikipedia probably has the resources to do it, wikisearch. Somebody talk them into it. But yeah, modern search engines, pretty amazing the ones from two decades ago actually worked better.
This could be interesting. The infrastructure required to scrape the internet though is going to be so daunting. Google got to build it up slowly as the internet got bigger. Bing is backed by a huge corporation that already has data centers. A new non profit player is going to take a huge coordinated effort.
I know P2P had become a dead buzzword, but what if people dedicated a portion of their computers to assisting an open search engine.
I would wait 30s for accurate results. It could also piggyback on a search aggregator.
There used to be an open source search aggregator, don't remember what it was called
I think it was YaCY, but apparently it's basically useless for everyday use. ~Cherri
Yeah that looks like it! Why do you say it is useless? I have cloud credits that I could theoretically burn hosting one of these
IIRC its results just aren't that good? I haven't tried it, this is just what I've heard. Maybe it's gotten better? ~Cherri
Hmm.. Interesting.. That would be great.. If only something like that exists now!
Yacy exists but it's bad enough that it's one of the few options I don't self host.