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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

#331

Post by happymellon »

daoudc wrote: post #199
happymellon wrote: post #56

First thing I try is: Star trek imdb First result is startrek.com, second result is Star Trek into Darkness IMDb but 3rd is xkcd. It then goes off into Q and William Shatner Wikipedia links and Muppet Movie IMDB in Russian. I tried putting a plus in front of IMDB and quoting Star Trek. It doesn't seem to be able to find Star Trek on IMDB. I admire the concept, and it is extremely fast.

Our index is still very small. Help make it bigger!

Sorry, I can see that sounded bad. I just meant that it sounds like we have a ways to go.

I will help!

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#332

Post by beej71 »

unicornporn wrote: post #171
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, it is. Bing has gotten a lot better recently. This is a good write up on indexes: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Bing still refuses to index one of my pages, telling me to follow their rules. They won't tell me what rule I'm in violation of, though, and I can't tell that I'm in violation of any of them.

And this is educational content, text only, no ads or popups, no SEO hacking. Bing's analysis tool told me only that I was missing the "lang" attribute from my HTML tag. So I added it, but of course that wasn't the issue.

I reached out to them, and they replied saying that the page didn't meet the requirements for listing, but didn't elaborate.

It certainly makes me wonder what content their broken algorithm is missing.

And it sucks because it means DDG is missing that content, too.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#333

Post by groffee »

larsrc wrote: post #155

Disclaimer: 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?

> Any successful search engine will be gamed.

Only because it's profitable for them to allow it to be gamed, like all the spam sites now when you search for SO, Google allows them to be ranked because they're filled with Google ads. But it'd be trivial to just delist them all, that'd be beneficial for the user but not the search engine.

It's not a matter of 'developer power' just flip a boolean somewhere and delist the site.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#335

Post by formerkrogemp »

I mean the IRS makes 990 forms publically available. They may be a year or two behind, but it's valuable financial and personnel data from nonprofits.

EDIT: Ok, I see that this is about a search engine structured as a not-for-profit, not as a search engine for nonprofits.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#336

Post by [deleted] »

spencerchubb wrote: post #330
javajosh wrote: post #249

>Google makes $40bn...If I can create something that just a tiny fraction of people find useful, then I can create a huge amount of value. You conflate two meanings of value: monetary value, and intrinsic value. Search engines are intrinsically but not monetarily valuable to users. Search engines are monetarily, but not intrinsically, valuable to advertisers. You can get into trouble when you conflate these two meani…

I would also add that human attention is inherently scarce. Advertising businesses like google and facebook leverage this fact. Google provides unlimited searches to users without charge. On the other side, google provides human attention to advertisers, and charges for it due to the scarce nature of attention. Sort of like a marketplace business.

[deleted]

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#337

Post by salawat »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #225
allendoerfer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the thought of adding a "yellowlist" funny, as some people are starting to find the use of "whitelist" and "blacklist" racist.

It would be more consistent to call it greenlist, yellowlist, redlist then.

How dare you. Some of my best friends are color blind! You insensitive clod!

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#338

Post by freediver »

javajosh wrote: post #249

>Google makes $40bn...If I can create something that just a tiny fraction of people find useful, then I can create a huge amount of value. You conflate two meanings of value: monetary value, and intrinsic value. Search engines are intrinsically but not monetarily valuable to users. Search engines are monetarily, but not intrinsically, valuable to advertisers. You can get into trouble when you conflate these two meani…

> Search engines are intrinsically but not monetarily valuable to users. Search engines are monetarily, but not intrinsically, valuable to advertisers.

I”d like to offer a different view, one that thousands of subscribers at Kagi search can hopefully stand behind too. (Kagi founder here)

Searching has a monetary value and a cost, the only question is whether the user is paying for it or a third party is paying for the user (a cringy thought when you think about it).

This question is answered by the very business model of the search engine, which determines who its customer is. It can either be its users (like in the case of Kagi and mwmbl) or advertisers (like most other search engine).

Although it is really hard to break through the habit of getting search for "free", we are at least happy to be able to offer this choice to the consumer today. I am expecting to see many more paid search engines in the future.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#339

Post by ItsMonkk »

javajosh wrote: post #327
ItsMonkk wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the…

There exist grant programs at most institutions designed to support such work and precisely for that reason. Sadly, writing grant applications are a job in-and-of-themselves. Consider the case of Justine Tunney, the creator of redbean. If anyone deserves a grant or three, it's her. But she's too busy making cool shit to a) research which grants are available, and b) satisfy their onerous application requirements. Obv…

Yep, you have outlined the problems with grants. As they look forward, and due so in a one-time lump sum, they hold considerable risk, and thus the providers of the grant money need to ensure they pick correctly, but this just leaves us with a centrally controlled economy and bureaucratic nightmare.

Instead, you should seek to discover the intrinsic value as it is occurring, and therefore no risk to the granters. I believe it is possible to do so through a modified Vickrey auction. A Vickrey auction is one in which the winners pays the price the second place bidder placed. In this modified system, the top 90%(or some other optimizing number we can work out) of bidders win, and they all pay the price of the highest non-winner. A certain subset users of the Open Source software are asked to give their true value for some sub-set of open source products as they use it and using statistics we could extrapolate that to the rest of the population.

We would then use these weights to give away all grant money. This might mean that Firefox can be funded exclusively through this pot, and they would no longer be beholden to Google for default Search. It would mean the grant writing process would go away. It would mean, as ads make products less valuable, that ads go away.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#340

Post by elcomet »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #323
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 ...

It is. Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the…

This assumes an infinite number or clients. I don't agree with this. If the marginal cost is zero, the proper price is definitely not zero.
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