Live data from Hacker News

The world needs a non-profit search engine

daoudclarke.net

141–150 of 396 posts

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#142

I use duck duck go. Recently someone showed me their screen where they were using google to do a search. I was absolutely aghast. The last time I used google when you searched for something you saw a simple text list of sites (which is how DDG still works). Instead the google results were… a disaster. You had to scroll through some much garbage before finding actual search results - a list of sites. It was like googl…

> I use duck duck go. You use a proxied Bing. If you want a proxied Google (what I prefer), you can use https://startpage.com

Startpage results are so bad I just thought it was a home-made search engine rather than a Google proxy. How is this possible?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#144
post #9

I totally like the idea but I dare to doubt that this would solve the SEO problem. Website owners who are participating in those notorious affiliate programs or earn money with ads will still use the search engine to drag people onto their generic websites, using methodolgies to fit the search engines ranking mechanisms, no matter if they are public or not. SEO and all it's results seem to be immanent to the system.

> SEO and all it's results seem to be immanent to the system. I believe you mean 'inherent'.

Google define immanent:

immanent:

adjective

existing or operating within; inherent.

"the protection of liberties is immanent in constitutional arrangements"

synonyms: inherent, intrinsic, innate, built-in, latent, essential, fundamental, basic, ingrained, natural

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use duck duck go. You use a proxied Bing. If you want a proxied Google (what I prefer), you can use https://startpage.com

Is DDG proxied bing? I found DDG search results to be much better than bing.

I believe DDG uses Bing's index but has their own ranking algorithm.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#146
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?

I think they're referring to how Google "extracts" answers from your website and shows it on the search results page. Effectively meaning that the user doesn't even need to go to your site to get the answer, because Google extracted it and gave it to them directly.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#147
That the world needs a non-profit search engine is near trivially true at this point. So good luck Daud.

I think the pertinent question though, is what's the best way to demonopolize search. Maybe the answer to that is non profit, maybe something else.

Google has a most search users. They have an even higher (much higher) portion of search revenue and essentially all of the sector's profits. One advantage a non profit might have is going after the low profit parts of search. Use cases where Google is likely to be under-serving users.

Also, search isn't just websearch anymore. It's a way of calling a calculator, translating, etc. It's a text box that does stuff. The newest gen of language models may be the technical catalyst for some rapid evolution in the "clever text box" space. Google is obviously super active in this space, but shifts are a good time to get in.

Where would you skate, if you were skating towards where the search puck is going?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#149

> Instead of looking at how long people spend on a site, we would encourage users to give explicit feedback on rankings and use this to improve our ranking system. While they're not wrong about how the way Google determines ranking has its issues, this way has its own set of problems. If you explicitly use user ratings as part of your rankings in some way, people can punish sites they don't like, ala review bombing o…

Also let's not forget Reddit. There's a lot of bullshit on top.

I went back to Reddit a week back after a 1 or so year, and what I saw was just disgusting on the main feed. One click, a bit of scroll and I was watching people calling republicans terrorists and being praised/upvoted/gifted. It's not just about bullshit at the top, it's also about echo chambers and the online equivalent of mob-behavior.
Post reply on HN