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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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innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:24PM
Your idea is interesting but could be used to manipulate results very easily. Client controlled is very tricky to get just right. Even things like SETI had cheaters. There is nothing to gain there but 'internet points'.
You would have to be very careful to make it so your results would be verified in some way (double the crawling of each site and a verification). Using a cloud service is a decent idea. But you need to be careful early as the thing could spider quite quickly (meaning your costs are large as you point out). You also need to look out for SEO tricks. Such as having a 2 servers look like 100 servers serving 10 million pages that point to 1 site to make it look important. You need to watch out for malicious actors. They have honeypots that like to morass spiders. Because they have had issues with them in the past. Also that they lead off with censorship would not sit well with privacy conscious people either. It is a form of manipulation most people in that crowd will violently react to. Basically they missed their audience. It would be like having a store that sells the most amazing drinks in the world. But you refuse to make them. Everything else on your menu is pretty much the same as everyone else. You have nothing new to offer and people will shop with what they know. Poof you are out of business all because you for some reason decided you know what your customers want. Even though they came in every day saying 'hey make me this drink'. Now that is not always a good plan. But when your audience is saying "I want X" and you tell them "nope only have Y too bad" they *will* go elsewhere.
But like I said they needed to 'hit the streets' as they call it in the advertising world. They needed to tell others that they even existed. Dropping a note on SD and hacker news once 2 years ago does not count. It means posting a lot about it. Blogging about it. What sort of challenges are you having? What sort of tech stack are you using and why? Are you building your own or just gluing something together? Getting your blogs picked up by the typical news aggregators. Tell the world why you are special. Tossing up a web page does not mean people know about you. You know about you, but no one else does. When you work for a largish company you usually do not have to worry about such things. But if you are a small company, you personally do or you hire someone to do just that.
it's just laughable
Their business plan was not great. But hopefully they 'fail upwards'. Meaning they learned what not to do and maybe some things to do. Most businesses fail. Use that for your next venture. Good luck!