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Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

fastcompany.com

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Re: Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

#31

Post by jrm4 »

the_real_cher wrote: post #13

I always wondered why someone couldn't do this. Google was invented many years ago by two guys in a dorm room and since then there's been so many white papers and advancements in the public sphere and the actual underlying problem has not changed that much, that it seems like it could be done by a small group or independent person.

More to the point, it's a shame that we can't collectively grok (dammit, they took that from us too) concepts like "personal" and/or "curated" directories, e.g. individual and group wikis and so forth on perhaps more directed topics with lists of good links.

Re: Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

#32

Post by ape4 »

authnopuz wrote: post #5
cheema33 wrote: post #4

I tried the search site at https://searcha.page/ by searching for something random and got the following message: "An error has occurred building the search results."

hug of death? I fear the temperature will get very high in his laundry room

Change it to a sauna?

Re: Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

#36

Post by OutOfHere »

iamacyborg wrote: post #25
OutOfHere wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual underlying problem has changed altogether. Pagerank is easily gamed by SEO. Search candidates and rankings now require assessment by LLM. Moreover, as a default, users want the results intelligently synthesized into a text response with references rather than as raw results. Crawling too requires innovative approaches to bypass server filters. I doubt any independent person can afford to run a vector datab…

> Moreover, as a default, users want the results intelligently synthesized into a text response with references rather than as raw results. Citation needed

You mean all the users of chat services aren't evidence? Chat services increasingly incorporate web links for references in their responses, and this is as the users seek. The tide continues to shift from traditional search to LLM synthesis.

Re: Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

#38

Post by hamdingers »

the_third_wave wrote: post #34
ourguile wrote: post #22

I greatly prefer Kagi https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/ but it's very nice to see more competition in this space in general.

[flagged]

Have you considered it's a good product that causes its users to become advocates?

Re: Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

#39

Post by luizfelberti »

I was trying to do this in 2023! The hardest part about building a search engine is not the actual searching though, it is (like others here have pointed out), building your index and crawling the (extremely adversarial) internet, especially when you're running the thing from a single server in your own home without fancy rotating IPs.

I hope this guy succeeds and becomes another reference in the community like the marginalia dude. This makes me want to give my project another go...

Re: Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room

#40

Post by iamacyborg »

OutOfHere wrote: post #36
iamacyborg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moreover, as a default, users want the results intelligently synthesized into a text response with references rather than as raw results. Citation needed

You mean all the users of chat services aren't evidence? Chat services increasingly incorporate web links for references in their responses, and this is as the users seek. The tide continues to shift from traditional search to LLM synthesis.

I suspect there are more users of traditional search than there are of llm chat apps.
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