171–180 of 299 posts
I was hoping this will be about Kagi. A lot of companies that make bold promises of taking on Google end up in the drain 2 years later.
I'm a paying customer of Kagi. Kagi itself runs on top of Google. It's certainly worth paying for (IMO), but let's not kid ourselves -- it is *not* a competitor (as in, can replace Google). Without Google, there is no Kagi.
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I’m my second year into Kagi and loving it. I actually just upgraded to get Kagi Assistant (basically, cloud access to every LLM out there). But the search alone is worth every penny, and it’s built/operated fully in-house as far as I know. https://kagi.com
I loved kagi, but their cost is prohibitive for me. The only way there is a chance for me to afford Kagi might be to buy "search credit" without a subscription and without minimum consumption. And then it would only be good if they allowed more than 1000 domain rules and showed more results (when available)
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Is it somehow related to the Quaero search engine project that burnt 400 million € of taxpayer money in the early 2000s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://www.heise.de/news/400-Millionen-Euro-fuer-europaeisc...
It is not directly related except by the fact that the dynamic is the same and that it is a repeat of the previous attempt. There are 2 clear things that is so common in Europe: Politics injecting a shit load of public money thinking that if you give the money you will be able to reproduce American company success and co. In the end, the money is wasted for their own interest by big groups, intermediaries, and opport…
Because that's the desired feature, not a bug. The system works just as intended. None of the people at the helm actually believe they can create competitors to US giants, the scope is to funnel public tax money into the right politically connected private industry pockets.
It's just wealth redistribution with a veneer of "sovereignty", similar to large infrastructure projects, except a lot more profitable since more people understand physical infrastructure so it can more easily be scrutinized for corruption, but almost nobody understands IT infrastructure, so it can easily gamed as a bottomless pit for your tax euros that constantly fails in a loop while you socialize the losses and privatize the winnings.
Every new search engine I've seen was a Bing wrapper with sometimes light reranking. I understand that competing with Google was borderline impossible a decade ago. But in 2024, we have cheap compute, great OSS distributed DBs, powerful new vector search tech. Amateur search engines like Marginalia even run on consumer hardware. CommonCrawl text-only is ~100TB, and can fit on my home server. Why is no company buildin…
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To properly compete with Google search you have to: 1. Create your own index/crawl and true search engine on top of it, rather than delegating that back to bing or Google. In doing so, solve or address all the related problems like SEO/spam, and cover the “long tail” (expensive part) 2. Monetize it somehow to afford all of the personnel/hardware/software costs. Probably with your own version of Google’s ad products.…
I'd like to add to your #5. If Google deems you a legitimate threat, then they can just de-crapify their own search for a bit by going back to their old algo. It's extremely easy for them to fight back.
Every new search engine I've seen was a Bing wrapper with sometimes light reranking. I understand that competing with Google was borderline impossible a decade ago. But in 2024, we have cheap compute, great OSS distributed DBs, powerful new vector search tech. Amateur search engines like Marginalia even run on consumer hardware. CommonCrawl text-only is ~100TB, and can fit on my home server. Why is no company buildin…
The only viable option when starting small is to grow in the cracks of Google with features that users really love that Google won’t provide.
Shoutout for Mojeek. Highlights: - Has its own index - Had a pro-privacy privacy policy well before DDG existed - No conflated marketing (DDG wrt it passing on 3 octets of an IP to Bing for local searches, Ecosia for not including Bing's carbon footprint as a meta search engine) - Has an API It's a smaller index and has more limited resources, but pretty much the best genuine alternative, and great for finding older…
Since I don't want to pay for searching, I think that an alternative is to allow search engines to use my computer (one per cent of computer power). The problem is how can I be sure that the use of my computer is not reading my private information? Another idea is to provide rating for some local products in exchange for searching.
I'm still wishing that one day we might get real microtransactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it somehow related to the Quaero search engine project that burnt 400 million € of taxpayer money in the early 2000s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://www.heise.de/news/400-Millionen-Euro-fuer-europaeisc...
It is not directly related except by the fact that the dynamic is the same and that it is a repeat of the previous attempt. There are 2 clear things that is so common in Europe: Politics injecting a shit load of public money thinking that if you give the money you will be able to reproduce American company success and co. In the end, the money is wasted for their own interest by big groups, intermediaries, and opport…
The problem with public funding is not the what but the to whom?
It works fine if you put the right person in charge.
However, there are very few signals to prevent the wrong person being put in charge, as it removes most considerations / incentivizes private industry uses. Which themselves are already tenuous!