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The world needs a non-profit search engine

daoudclarke.net

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Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#121
The internet, somewhat ironically, really needs a search engine that works in the current day. You can't find anything anymore. It's like Google has been un-invented.

Hopefully some day soon the internet will be searchable again.

Thanks to everyone involved in attempting to make this happen (preferably in a non-profit-maximized way).

(Said before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32034390)

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#122

The biggest challenge with making a search engine is to combat adversarial SEO. It's an issue that's very easy to be overlooked when you are small, but at Google scale, your enemies have billions of dollars to make from your visitors. I bet Google spends at least as much to combat that, and it's extremely hard to deal with while being open-source. It's useless to call for a non-profit search engine without tackling t…

Are your sure they're combating it? It seems like they've given up.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#124
post #90

Perhaps a better approach would be building an open source www index or even a full current cache - as an enabler for people to build their own search engines? Right now it is extremely difficult to build your own web crawler that would compete with Google. And that is not because of the technology, but because multiple sites will prevent your bot from accessing them if you're not Google or Bing - either through robo…

Why is https://commoncrawl.org/ not enough?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#125

The biggest challenge with making a search engine is to combat adversarial SEO. It's an issue that's very easy to be overlooked when you are small, but at Google scale, your enemies have billions of dollars to make from your visitors. I bet Google spends at least as much to combat that, and it's extremely hard to deal with while being open-source. It's useless to call for a non-profit search engine without tackling t…

Are your sure they're combating it? It seems like they've given up.

Yeah... but if Google is giving up, who would ever be able to do it?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#127

It's unfortunate that with all the immense value that search engines provide the idea of paying a small monthly or annual fee to use a search engine is incomprehensible for most people.

A small monthly fee could mean a lot of money in the developing countries, plus there are countries where most people don't have access to international banking system. Such a system only makes access to information for a lot of people almost impossible.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#128

Quite a neat way to crawl websites using a browser extension. That by itself is a form of donation to the search engine. Maybe in the future you can have dedicated software for self-hosted clients that users can run to crawl and index websites for mwmbl? Kinda like folding@home. How are the batches of URLs to be crawled generated/discovered and posted at your API? How do you deal with duplicate crawls?

Roughly this https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl/wiki/Crawler-Phase-2-Design

It changed a bit in the implementation.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#129
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a great idea. How does this work with copyright? Search engines seem to be able to download a reproduce content from scraped pages (and wrap it in ads, and derive content from it) this is called “indexing” when they do it but scraping when everyone else does it.

> and wrap it in ads, and derive content from it i am probably missing something but can you give an example where this happens?

E.g. on Google if you search for "how to tie a tie", a little info box may pop up with step by step instructions. This content is taken from some website, but that website gets no page hits or ad revenue. Instead, Google gets to serve ads on the search engine results page.

(I don't know if this happens for this specific example, but Google does this for some searches)

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