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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.
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(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @11:23PM (1 child)
Google makes its own optimized hardware for its search engine. Like it or not, that is an advantage that a startup is going to have a hard time competing with. They are really fucking smart. If you are going to compete you're going to need to do something that is totally different from the ground up. That is something that can be done IMHO, but it is a hard nut to crack. And you sure as shit aren't going to crack it by taking an off the shelf SQL server and thinking you're going to make a search engine. Not gonna happen.
You have to completely rethink not just search, but the underlying systems that make the Internet function. Googles competitors in the hardware/OS/application marketspace are already doing that, and they've all seemed to have decided that fracturing the network to kick Google off of it is the only way of competing with them. That is probably true for a big company, but not for a small one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @12:07AM
The only way to do it is to grow a true AI, such as a brain in a box, and train it to be smarter and more useful than any search engine or voice assistant ever conceived of.
Of course, Google could do it first.