> Just 1% of 1% of this would be more money than I’d know what to do with ($4m). Not knowing what to do with $4m means the failure of the education systems.
Taking everything literally, this comment included, is the failure of the education systems.
The world needs a non-profit search engine
151–160 of 396 posts
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#152Earlier 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.
They use Bing API on the background. Likely mixing in their own content.
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#153> Fast ... Instant Search
Great idea, and "instant search the web" would probably a better pitch then "non-profit search engine". Interesting argument that google doesn't do this because it isn't compatible with their ad model, but that doesn't mean a new ad-funded search engine can't do this. For google it might be billions of dollars in lost revenue while they adjust their ad model, a new ad-funded search engine wouldn't have this problem.
> Frictionless ... For example if you are typing “facebook” or “hmrc login” you could go straight there from the address bar.
No thanks. I sometimes do search for "company name" looking for the wikipedia article for the company, or news about the company, or information about the company in general. If you used facebook before, then it's going to autocomplete as soon as you type "face" in your addressbar, and you won't need the search engine. So if someone searches for facebook, they're either using the browser for the first time, or they're looking for information about facebook. Latter seems more likely.
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is https://commoncrawl.org/ not enough?
Isn't that one more data sets for ML other research purposes instead of a highly up to date search index (For example with news from a few minutes ago).
Roughly speaking, yep - Common Crawl provides a sizable chunk of web data (420 TiB uncompressed, over 3 billion unique URLs, as of May 2022; historic statistics here[1]), and is updated on monthly basis. Not near-real-time, true, albeit relatively fresh.
A question to ask could be: how often do users care about information from a few minutes ago, compared to information that has been available for a longer duration of time?
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#155Disclaimer: I work for Google, though far away from Search.
Regardless of search engine design, there's HUGE money in SEO. Any successful search engine will be gamed. Do you have the developer power to go red-queen against all the large companies in the world?
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#156The "funding options" part has the unsurprising blind spot that, maybe, a search engine is the kind of basic infrastructure that ought to be paid (at least in part) by... The taxpayers ?
I have a long standing bet that, at some point, some company will be "globalized" (operated under some common funding by many different countries, like many research projects or defense organization or aid funds, etc...), and the "search engine" part of google is the prime candidate.
That being said, I'm from Europe, so "sharing the cost of something useful" is not culturally untolerable.
Far fetched and controversial opinion, I know. We'll see.
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#157I'd quite like a browser extension that records all my searches and where I end up, just for my own review. I feel like many of my searches aren't actually searches, but I can't quantify that at the moment.
Feels like that would be good info to share, once it's depersonalised.
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bombing is one thing, but you also have a whole SEO industry now that will exploit any way possible to get to the top of the rankings. The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.
What if you limit accounts to real people and then keep track of their credibility? It's some initial effort but how could the ranking be manipulated when all dishonest people have burned their credibility?
You can’t limit to real people. If you managed to, I would make a service where people can sign up and I’ll pay to use their account. No cost to them and they make some money from it, seems totally reasonable.
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#159This is the kind of idiocy that makes me despise the developer community every time i see something like this. It is one of my pet peeves, so if you're going to have an opinion on this comment, please, read the whole thing.
The ad supported free internet is one of the most important business models the world has arguably ever seen. Very few can argue with the fact that poor kids in developing countries over the past two decades and longer have had their lives changed beyond anyones wildest dreams thanks to the free resources at the tip of their fingertips.
On the same note, much of the wealth accumulation in the developer community has been on the backs of this very business model. The immense demand for dev talent and the astronomical salaries paid out is a consequence of the difficult financial choices made by so many before us.
When i read absolutely low-effort activism such as the text in the link about how(paraphrasing) 'sEaRcH eNgEnEs mAkE mOnEyY" and thus they are bad. I'm astounded at how intelligent people who can write code can simultaneously be so fucking moronic in their grasp of economics.
The web is an ecosystem. There are always going to be incentives that don't fit your moral compass that are getting optimized for and against. The answer isn't to burn it all down and shit all over a business model because it apparently doesn't fit your childish understanding of the ideal. By all means, compete, but atleast try to understand the various actors and participants in this complex web of entities and what role they're playing in the flow of investment, content, data and economic activity that is far more nuanced than "wEb rEsUlTs wIll B beTtTeR iF nOT oPtImiZeD fUr $$$ "
Face fucking palm
Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bombing is one thing, but you also have a whole SEO industry now that will exploit any way possible to get to the top of the rankings. The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.
What if you limit accounts to real people and then keep track of their credibility? It's some initial effort but how could the ranking be manipulated when all dishonest people have burned their credibility?
The internet-should-be-anonymous crowd wouldn't like that. But it's no worse than Google tracking everything A-Z.