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This is sad. I used them for some time on one of my computers. Their own index results were quite impressive, for an independent index -- sufficient in maybe 30
by stereolambda 6y ago
This is sad. I used them for some time on one of my computers. Their own index results were quite impressive, for an independent index -- sufficient in maybe 30%-50% cases (my guess and not an actual statistic). But this highlighted how hard it is to build an index that is useful.
My take is if there is to be a political will to break mono- and oligopolies by building alternatives, the EU (or whoever) should do it top-down, at least the indexing infrastructure. It will bureaucratic, likely not financially efficient, but probably some things need to be built this way. I would prefer aggressive market fragmentation, but this is not very politically likely, given how European states like to operate.
From the maker's perspective, I don't see building things with mainly political appeal as a desirable path. (And I'm using the term politics broadly, and not pejoratively -- this includes far more important stuff than tech gadgets, like you know, liberty.) Political decisions of states and individuals are too finicky for business. I think aspiring people should do something fundamentally different than incumbents in terms of functionality. Probably things that don't scale or appeal to megacorps.
Anyway, congrats on what you've done. Without Covid you would surely have a better shot.
- wpietri 6y agoI would love to see more investment in that sort of infrastructure commons. Especially if it were not directly under the control of a single government, but spun off into a relatively independent entity, akin to the Red Cross, the USPS, or the FNMA.
- hinkley 6y agoOne of the problems I have to deal with is bot traffic, and more search engines is going to mean more bot traffic. Probably every SaaS company is thinking about that on some level. Maybe if we want to break the oligopoly we need an alternative to polling and scanning to report changes to our websites. I knew a company that was thinking along those lines but they flamed out even before Google became dominant, and I don't know if anyone has asked that question since.
- darkwater 6y ago"Oh, no, I didn't think about sending my updates to Cliqz because Google is the dominant player anyway"
- hinkley 6y agoYeah I don't think a straight hub and spoke structured pub-sub approach is the right answer, either. The thing is, though, if you don't send the data out, you're going to get crawled. So sending identical data to 5 crawlers instead of 3 is probably still cheaper. Only of course the incumbents will add extra features on that don't work for everyone else...