Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by takyon on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the found-and-lost dept.

The privacy-oriented search engine Findx has shut down: https://privacore.github.io/

The reasons cited are:

  • While people are starting to understand the importance of privacy it is a major hurdle to get them to select a different search engine.
  • Search engines eat resources like crazy, so operating costs are non-negligible.
  • Some sites (including e.g. github) use a whitelist in robots.txt, blocking new crawlers.
  • The amount of spam, link-farms, referrer-linking, etc. is beyond your worst nightmare.
  • Returning good results takes a long time to fine-tune.
  • Monetizing is nearly impossible because advertising networks want to know everything about the users, going against privacy concerns.
  • Buying search results from other search engines is impossible until you have least x million searches/month. Getting x million searches/month is impossible unless you buy search results from other search engines (or sink a lot of cash into making it yourself).

So what do you soylentils think can be done to increase privacy for ordinary users, search-engine-wise ?

Dislaimer: I worked at Findx.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Wednesday November 21 2018, @09:30PM

    by istartedi (123) on Wednesday November 21 2018, @09:30PM (#764959) Journal

    It's easy to downplay the difficulty of getting search right

    Fair enough. Matching Google step-for-step would be daunting so why try? Right now I can go to Google and type "How high is the Burj Khalifa" and it comes back with "2,717′, 2,722′ to tip" in a heartbeat.

    That's pretty smart. A lot's happening under the hood to make that happen because it's capable of answering very generic queries like that. You don't even have to think.

    OTOH, if we had a hierarchy of something like /lists/buildings/tall, or /architecture/tall buildings we could find some pages devoted to this kind of thing and probably get the height easily--it would just take a bit more thought and time on the part of the end user.

    It would definitely be the kind of trade-off that people make all the time when they go "off the grid" to some degree. Growing a garden vs. fresh veggies from the store.

    --
    Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4