Open Web Search

[Jubal]

https://openwebsearch.eu/news/

I hadn't come across this project recently but it looks interesting: an attempt in the coming years to compile an open nonprofit web search index, the thing that is needed to run under Google etc etc. There's very few players in this field - most search engines don't AFAIK actually have their own index, there's about 3-4 big ones and the rest just license someone else's (so Ecosia search uses Bing's search index for example). So having a proper open index seems a pretty good idea: of course, the continual web crawling needed to get it good will need to be funded from somewhere, but the idea of an open, public competitor to the tech giants in this area feels pretty welcome and starts addressing one key problem of the modern web, which is that a ton of key necessary online infrastructure is just run by whichever company made it first.

[dubsartur]

Here is an overview of the big three publicly-available indices and everyone else (obviously the NSA, Chinese government, etc. have secret indices of the web) https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

[Jubal]

Ooh, that's really interesting and helpful, thanks - I should probably actually check that Exilian is submitted to all the random tiny search engines (not many people use them, but I think our particular demographic probably overlaps heavily with the "chooses to use a tiny unknown search engine" category of people...)