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 ?
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.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Wednesday November 21 2018, @09:30PM
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.