Lol

lol

...

Is there any search engine that isn't completely fucked right now?

If there were good open source search algorithms, there wouldn't be any point of using the internet as a way to make money unless as a service.

searx is better and is free as in freedom.

I'm okay with this. Libre would be better, but it's not a requirement for web services, since you don't control the software either way. Free software is about control of the software I use on my computer, but no good license would give me control over the software on other people's computers.

And you'd have to be pretty misinformed to think it's hard to keep datamining code out of the public repositories, honestly. They'd already be breaking their privacy policy, so it's illegal anyway, but breaking their privacy policy means their users can sue them, while breaking, say, the AGPL means that the copyright holder can sue them - that is, that they can sue themselves. It really doesn't add any justified trust.

hi shill

I can't understand why anybody would use Startpage when searx is more powerful, flexible and fully Open Source.

Good to know Ixquick/Startpage is staffed by street shitters

searx is shite doe

the bigger problem is they're both just proxies for the only 2 actual search engines in existence, google and bing.

It isn't doe.

I use Searx, actually. I just said that it's fine for Startpage not to be FOSS.

yandex can search for image formats

Isn't the basic algorithms and technology Google used 15 years ago common knowledge by now? Since computers are much more powerful now, couldn't you have your own pseudo-Google running on your machine and indexing the net with legacy Google algos? Or is the internet just too big now?

In a free market economy, one would hire a couple of the google engineers with good familiarity of the pagerank (or whatever they're using now), and launch a competitor.

To win market share, the search engine could actually share the advertising proceeds with users (or simply charge advertisers less than shroogle does).

Alas, very few live in a free market economy, making the target market quite small.

The free market is not a panacea.

Free market only works when there is a viable competition, aka not a monopoly.

Google is too influential, too big and too ubiquitous to scrape off it's marketshare. People that never configure browsers or anything go out of their way to make Google the default search engine if the browser provides a different default, or actively try to download Chrome even if a sane browser is offered, that's how powerful they are!

If you truly did take over Google in users or revenue or whatever, you would likely be forced into similar shittery that they have done for a variety of reasons. If we set aside the simplistic "google is evil" narrative for a second, a major search engine is a valuable strategic assets and many people want to control it. I don't just mean states, but smaller fry such as SEOs, clickbait and other parasites.

But if you keep your search engine small and uninteresting to the bulk of normies, your strategic value becomes very small. Then you don't have to contend with as many attackers. I wonder if there even are any sites left nowadays that are still optimized to the original PageRank. I bet they all stopped doing that once Google it stopped working.

the internet is fucking huge, it takes a rediculous amount of bandwidth and computer power to scrape / even lookup/manage the database.

Until you can do that, there's no difference between making it proprietary or open source.


in a free market, dominant players set up insurmountable barriers to entry and use their positions to leverage the market.
Also see and

wow this is proof that google doesn't even provide anything of value anymore (the only good thing it ever had was that it wasn't utter shit plastered with shitty ads and small font like MSN search or whatever back in the day). you can't even name what it does better than other search engines. i use other big search engines and there's pretty much no difference - and they all do some bullshit where they bring up results that they think i care about because normalfags care about them