• dx1@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The horrible reality is that Bing has actually become a competitor to Google, simply by Google getting worse and worse. Microsoft used to be the main bad guy, but these days they practically seem benign compared to the others. Not open source like you’re saying, of course.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The infrastructure to crawl, store, and serve search results to billions of users is phenomenally expensive. A government might fund it (which comes with its own concerns), but a non-profit will struggle to compete.

      • 33KK
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        1 year ago

        When you factor out all the garbage content it’s suddebly affordable lol

      • spaduf
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        1 year ago

        Federated search is possible but has not gotten a lot of attention yet.

          • spaduf
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            1 year ago

            There’s actually a lot of theory and early work out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different.

    • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Wikipedia probably has the resources to do it, wikisearch. Somebody talk them into it. But yeah, modern search engines, pretty amazing the ones from two decades ago actually worked better.

      • SJ0@lemmy.fbxl.net
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        1 year ago

        Yacy exists but it’s bad enough that it’s one of the few options I don’t self host.

    • Chocrates@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This could be interesting. The infrastructure required to scrape the internet though is going to be so daunting. Google got to build it up slowly as the internet got bigger. Bing is backed by a huge corporation that already has data centers. A new non profit player is going to take a huge coordinated effort.

      • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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        1 year ago

        I know P2P had become a dead buzzword, but what if people dedicated a portion of their computers to assisting an open search engine.

        I would wait 30s for accurate results. It could also piggyback on a search aggregator.