Serious question, why do we give so much power to these tech firms such as Google, when really the solution is decentralization. We have some solutions for money with bitcoin, but there still doesn’t seem to be a viable alternative with a search engine that is decentralized?
Because Google, Bing (less prominently Yandex and Baidu) have an oligopoly on how most of the world searches things.
Search engine indexing takes years, and open source engines lack the infrastructure to speed up web crawling. SearX is just an instance hoster, a proxy. We have Yacy, Wiby, Mojeek, Metager and some other niche search engines. Then we have Qwant, that indexes its own and supplies results using Bing that it has not indexed yet. Then there is DuckDuckGo with its own indexing but is USA based. Then there is System1’s StartPage, essentially a Google proxy with no self indexing that is hostile to Tor users.
Then there are others.
I settled on using Qwant for searching and Yandex via VPN for reverse image searching. Startpage is used extremely rarely and with VPN.
I don’t see why we can’t just have something like a blockchain based search engine where crypto is given based on how much indexing (crawling) is done. Of course this is just an idea right now. But have an incentive to people to do crawling of it through something like blockchain. This ensures that there won’t be any centralization and search result manipulation with things such as psyops (brain washing the population through search results)
Blockchain is a meme. It is the same buzzword lalaland meme that is AI in phone software these days.
LokiNet and Adamant are probably the only serious attempts I have seen in a while, and even they did not get me interested to check them out. If something does not get me tingly in the sack, it is not worth.
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The kind of BS sold to people is hilarious. Every phone has some AI thing, but the only phones with AI NPU chips initially were from Huawei and Apple. Qualcomm followed through years later, and the OEMs that used Qualcomm never really utilised the NPU while calling their features AI.
People fell hard for the AI meme without knowing what it is. But then, what do people even know?
I disagree blockchain technology shouldn’t be underestimated
Considering a technology good means society does not make a joke out of it. Currently, this is not the case.
Blockchain is not a good fit for a distributed search engine, since each node needs to store the entire chain. It’s possible that some sort of system for using a blockchain based token to incentivize participation in an IPFS like network would help provide a funding model for publishing the index, but that would just be one small component in a decentralized search engine, and not even the most interesting one.