Anil DashThere has absolutely not been a better opportunity in this century to build a successful new search engine for the internet. The dominant players are running full speed to make their offerings worse, and that’s after *years* of complaints that Google’s results are decaying.
Scott Jenson@anildash I agree, but it's also important to discuss how the web has become so much harder to search properly. Content mills, click farms, and soon LLM generated content, create an extremely hard 'wheat from chaff' problem.
kira :3@scottjenson @anildash the way i see it is that it isn't as hard of a problem if you consider how much of the internet just doesn't need to be indexed anymore. tank or even refuse to index anything with an excess of trackers or just too much javascript and you've weeded out more than half the trash. this would be easy to circumvent, but then it would undo the capitalist machinations of those sites to begin with, so they won't. I think anything that gets users will be like the fediverse; a more boutique solution that will work for the users it works for
LisPi@chrisisgr8 @scottjenson @anildash I think that still represents a considerable amount of the #web to crawl, even once the chaff is removed.
But that would certainly be interesting. The #SearchEngine would /need/ to be offered non-commercially, because anything else guarantees eventual #enshittification.