Comment by ghm2199
19 hours ago
Well sure yes, I don't contend with the fact that its hard, but if the top tech companies joined their heads I am sure if for example, Meta, Apple, MS have enough talent between to make an open source index if only to reap gains from the de-monopolization of it all.
All these companies have the exact same business model as Google (advertising) and have the same mismatched incentives: good search results are not something they want.
Google Search sucks not because Google is incapable of filtering out spam and SEO slop (though they very much love that people believe they can't), but that spam/slop makes the ads on the SERP page more enticing, and some of the spam itself includes Google Ads/analytics and benefits them there too.
There is no incentive for these companies to build a good search engine by themselves to begin with, let alone provide data to allow others to build one.
I was on the Goog forums for years (before they even fucking ruined the FORMAT of the forums, possibly to 'be more mobile friendly') and it was people absolutely (justifiably) screaming at the product people
No, the customer isn't 'always' right, but these guys like to get big and once big, fuck you, we don't have to listen to you, we're big; what are you going to do, leave?
I mean, doesn't microsoft have bing?
Yeah but no one uses it. I am not even sure people that are forced to use it like using it because it was productized it pretty poorly. After all who wants another google? They invested 100 Billion dollars, which is a lot of wasted money TBH.
Search indexes are hard, surely, but if you were to strip it to just a good index on the browser, made it free, kept it fresh, it cannot be 100 billion dollars to build. Then you use this DoJ decision and fight against google to not deny a free index to have equal rights on chrome you can have a massive shot at a win for a LOT less money.
> Yeah but no one uses it. I am not even sure people like using it because it was productized it pretty poorly. They invested 100 Billion dollars, which is a lot of wasted money TBH.
I mean... Duckduckgo uses bing api iirc and I use duckduckgo and many people use duckduckgo.
I also used bing once because bing used to cache websites which weren't available in wayback archive, I don't know how but It was pretty cool solution for a problem.
I hate bing too and I am kind of interested in ecosia/qwant's future as well (yes there's kagi too and good luck to kagi as well! but I am currently still staying on duckduckgo)
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