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Why Google cannot avoid Doom (but Open Source can)

4 points by fxtentacle 5y ago

fxtentacle 5y ago
Here's again the questions that I hope we can discuss together :) - If you could create your own search index (which you can redistribute, resell as you please) for let’s say up to 200 domains, updated weekly, would you pay $100 monthly for that? - Do you think someone could run a 10000 subscribers x $1 monthly Patreon to maintain a search index of mainstream news websites? - Would you rent and set up a $20 monthly VPS to host your own ad-free private federated search engine for yourself and your friends and family? - Would you consider hosting a public search engine with ethical ads if you had free access to the necessary software and an affordable way to subscribe to the data? - Do you think it is possbile to set up a company which will be financially self-sufficient (i.e. no dependence on ads) and produce the necessary data? - If the opportunity was there, would you set up such a company to populate an emerging market of ethically uncompromised search data providers? - This seems like it would benefit the greater good. Are there any government subsidies for this kind of stuff?
- 6510 5y ago
  Much to expensive. Bittorrent is still burning bandwidth like crazy. All that is needed is a desktop client with a (mobile) web gui. Your own crawler that indexes stuff however aggressively you like. A list of good nodes/friends. And a discoverable html tag embedded in web pages so that you can subscribe to the site search engine API. (using a slightly different protocol) Giving the favicon.ico a fixed path was a good idea. Sometimes looking for /feed.rss or /rss.xml works but it offers no guarantees. Lets do /site-search.xml or /search.json or /search-project-name-here/index.bla?q=%s The only challenge is ranking results. If you can figure that out the rest is easy. (after a few days a yacy instance already becomes amazingly useful with very little data - try it)
raxxorrax 5y ago
I think the doom of Google is highly exaggerated. But true that the quality of their primary service has degraded. But I don't even think it is SEO, far more annoying are "trusted news source". Perhaps they have the best SEO, but I think it is more about being buddies with the press for access. Some effects are outside their influence like Discord becoming prominent for content, which severely limits discoverability. IRC had the same problem, but it was often flanked by forums for specific topics. I get that Discord is convenient, but you have some side effects not many people think about. Especially developers for games would really profit from another platform. Reddit for example has many benefits just because it is discoverable by search engines.

4 points by fxtentacle 5y ago

Here's again the questions that I hope we can discuss together :) - If you could create your own search index (which you can redistribute, resell as you please) for let’s say up to 200 domains, updated weekly, would you pay $100 monthly for that? - Do you think someone could run a 10000 subscribers x $1 monthly Patreon to maintain a search index of mainstream news websites? - Would you rent and set up a $20 monthly VPS to host your own ad-free private federated search engine for yourself and your friends and family? - Would you consider hosting a public search engine with ethical ads if you had free access to the necessary software and an affordable way to subscribe to the data? - Do you think it is possbile to set up a company which will be financially self-sufficient (i.e. no dependence on ads) and produce the necessary data? - If the opportunity was there, would you set up such a company to populate an emerging market of ethically uncompromised search data providers? - This seems like it would benefit the greater good. Are there any government subsidies for this kind of stuff?

6510 5y ago
Much to expensive. Bittorrent is still burning bandwidth like crazy. All that is needed is a desktop client with a (mobile) web gui. Your own crawler that indexes stuff however aggressively you like. A list of good nodes/friends. And a discoverable html tag embedded in web pages so that you can subscribe to the site search engine API. (using a slightly different protocol) Giving the favicon.ico a fixed path was a good idea. Sometimes looking for /feed.rss or /rss.xml works but it offers no guarantees. Lets do /site-search.xml or /search.json or /search-project-name-here/index.bla?q=%s The only challenge is ranking results. If you can figure that out the rest is easy. (after a few days a yacy instance already becomes amazingly useful with very little data - try it)

raxxorrax 5y ago

I think the doom of Google is highly exaggerated. But true that the quality of their primary service has degraded. But I don't even think it is SEO, far more annoying are "trusted news source". Perhaps they have the best SEO, but I think it is more about being buddies with the press for access. Some effects are outside their influence like Discord becoming prominent for content, which severely limits discoverability. IRC had the same problem, but it was often flanked by forums for specific topics. I get that Discord is convenient, but you have some side effects not many people think about. Especially developers for games would really profit from another platform. Reddit for example has many benefits just because it is discoverable by search engines.