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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

#301

Post by WJW »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #296
amelius wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is surprisingly hard to extract monetary value from an intrinsically valuable solution. This is like saying that our entire economic system is backward ...

I have no idea what gp means by this. It can be surprisingly hard, but it's not always. Go buy a cooler of water bottles and sell them for 50c in the summer on the side of the street

It seems pretty obvious in an internet context. It's very difficult to make money with a product if the competition is giving their products away for free because it gets paid in a different way.

Even your "sell water on a hot day" idea probably won't sell a lot if you set up shop right next to an enormous promo stand from a global bottled water company that gives away bottled water for free. (And due to the magic of the internet, every spot you pick is right next to a global competitor with deep pockets)

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#302

Post by Liquix »

vineyardmike wrote: post #176
unicornporn wrote: post #43

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

You can also use Whoogle if you’d rather self host. https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

Whoogle is best in class, but doesn't provide much benefit unless combined with a rotating VPN. It also doesn't solve the "GBY" problem, where the majority of search engines rely on Google/Bing/Yandex's indices instead of using their own.

This is especially dangerous because it propagates an illusion that there's dozens of engines to choose from. The reality is these three companies control more and more of humanity's ingress to information, censoring what they see fit for political/financial gain.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#303

Post by throwamon »

kevincox wrote: post #186
closedloop129 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've always wondered if you could combat via referal-only sites. To get in you need to achir your humanness on someone else's account. If an account is found to invite too many spammers, robots, or otherwise it is banned or disallowed to invite more accounts. I'm sure you could still manage to make "fake" accounts but it would be much more difficult, and linking them together would be much easier. Of course starting…

Afaik that's how https://lobste.rs works.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#304

Post by nemothekid »

irrational wrote: post #297
jstummbillig wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? Offering ad space (and placing affiliate links) is how they make money. Difference to Google is how they position themselves in regards to privacy, and that Google actually built a search engine. Both make their money by providing ad space.

Where are the ads?

Maybe search with DDG with your ad blocker off? The first 75% of the page was ads for me.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#306

Post by freediver »

rntksi wrote: post #293
Gareth321 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To your last point, I don’t quite agree. Google’s incentives are misaligned such that keeping you on Google.com just a little longer is better than not because you are more likely to click on an ad. I agree, which leads me to the conclusion that subscription is the best way to avoid this conflict of interest. Unfortunately, most of the world won't subscribe to a search engine, and doesn't seem to mind ads - to a deg…

Here's a search engine that I'm subscribed to: https://kagi.com In the 20-30 searches that I do in a day, I still have to google about half of them. Either because it's stuff Google does well (currency conversion, for example), or Kagi just doesn't get what I'm trying to search. I remember starting out with the Internet searching on Altavista and Yahoo and Lycos. The information that was present was nowhere near as n…

> In the 20-30 searches that I do in a day, I still have to google about half of them. Either because it's stuff Google does well (currency conversion, for example), or Kagi just doesn't get what I'm trying to search.

Currency conversion is not technically a search. It is question answering and Kagi capabilities are still being built. Google only has a 20 year headstart. Can you report all such cases to kagifeedback.org so they are on our radar?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#307

Post by skeeter2020 »

christophilus wrote: post #239
slazaro wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99%+ of people wouldn't use this, they would just try the search engine, see that the results suck, then stop using it. It could be useful for power users, though.

Add a thumbs up / down icon, and your average Facebook user would likely use it without knowing what it was.

why would a search engine use this for a different purpose than FB does?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#308

Post by jacooper »

irrational wrote: post #6

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 think brave search is really the best alternative search engine, its actually independent.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#309

Post by jacooper »

albertopv wrote: post #285
marginalia_nu wrote: post #280

Honestly, the easy part is building a search engine, like just document retrieval stuff and domain ranking, SEO-mitigation etc. Anyone can build a Google '98 and get it to work well, not that hard, doesn't require all too much hardware. I have done that and got one running out of my living room. The tricky part, if you want people to use your search engine for more than the novelty factor, and what most Google compet…

I agree, the whole package is the difference. I'm trying to use DDG as much as possible, but I live in Italy and for local stuff Google services are still unbeatable. E.g. Apple Maps used by DDG are a no go where a live for all but plain directions. OSM data used by many map apps is good, non commercial data sometimes even better than GMaps, but businesses data is only on GMaps, there's no way around that.

Try brave search, form my experience its really much better than DDG. And its independent.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#310

Post by kevincox »

throwamon wrote: post #303
kevincox wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered if you could combat via referal-only sites. To get in you need to achir your humanness on someone else's account. If an account is found to invite too many spammers, robots, or otherwise it is banned or disallowed to invite more accounts. I'm sure you could still manage to make "fake" accounts but it would be much more difficult, and linking them together would be much easier. Of course starting…

Afaik that's how https://lobste.rs works.

Of course it is a much smaller site so it isn't clear how effective this strategy would be at a large scale. Even a referral-based site approaching HN levels would be very interesting to see.
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