Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

We are building one [1] as well as a few other people that I am aware of with different approaches and business models.

We also need to be aware that when we remember past times it usually carries a romantic, nostalgic note. Web is very different than it was 15 years ago and the problem of search has evolved.

What you are looking for is basically 'grep for the web' but it is just one facet of search that we use today. 15 years ago you would not get an instant answer to a question like you do today and many users would not be able to live without that today. There are also maps and location based answers, all sorts of widgets like translation etc. Also world became more polarized so an objective best search result became more difficult to produce, specially for events covered in news, which means bias inevitably starts to creep in.

This is not to say that Google is good or bad today, it is what it is and they are doing best they can. Startups like ours see an opportunity on the market, in large part to help savvy users find what they want.

[1] https://kagi.com

Take a random part number off your car, or a portion of a error message and try finding that. It's annoying to have to scroll down over a page or two of autogenerated SEO answers to get to something useful. The first result to appear on the internet is less likely to be SEO and more likely to be the manufacturers documentation or the git commit that spawned your error. It isn't always, but that's why you have more then one search engine.

Secondarily I think a search engine that is very simple in it's model and operation is useful for more general free speech purposes. If the major search engines decide they don't like a site like the pirate bay a search for '"Pirate Bay" And "Torrents"' on a search engine that does not curate could still get you there. I guess the point is without curation you have to work harder to find what you want, but nobody is actively preventing you from finding anything. It would help keep everybody honest.

there's some stuff here : https://github.com/gigablast/open-source-search-engine

Thank you.

You might call this a search engine based on the principle of Information Neutrality.

“Information Neutrality is the principle to treat all information provided (by a service) equally. The information provided, after being processed by an information-neutral service, is the same for every user requesting it, independent of the user’s attributes, including, e.g., origin, history or personal preferences and independent of the financial or influential interest of the service provider, as well as independent of the timeliness of information."

I wrote about this in relation to search [0]. We need to be allowed more freedom to choose search engines and services. One (default or selected) choice for search is unhealthy. We shouldn't have to choose between Google or Bing; DuckDuckGo or Startpage; Brave or Ecosia; Mojeek or Gigablast ..... Personally I use all 8 of these and more, as also explained [0].

[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/09/multiple-choice-in-search.ht...