There 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.
@anildash at the same time - in our ghoulish world of race-to-the-bottom capitalism, is there truly a market for such a thing?
like the obvious answer is YES but keep in mind, the search engines are shit because the EXPECTATION is that the relentless march of SEO will squeeze more profit out of end users but the REALITY is that the content is being generated by algorithms TO SATISFY OTHER ALGORITHMS
we are not the market for search engines; marketing is the market for search engines
@anildash and there's a final thing to consider:
how exactly will Google and Microsoft respond to the existence of a competitor who threatens to upend their self-devouring search engine ecosystem with a product that, you know, actually WORKS?
it wouldn't even need to be a THREAT (god knows Google and Microsoft would win by default in any competition of brand recognition, even if Bing is a distant second); they have the wherewithal to annihilate any POTENTIAL competition without issue
@anildash like i'm sorry to be doomer and defeatist on this but we're seeing, on this front, the inevitable end result of capitalism in this space
tech designed not for people, but for shareholders
@anildash like who's going to pick up on the sales pitch "we're going to make a search engine that makes it easier to actually find the answers people want, without all the SEO garbage, and we're going to compete with Google"? every piece of that pitch is infinitely appealing to US, the people who have to suffer through our broken search engine ecosystem, but not to the money people who want "eyeballs" and "exposure," for whom the actual UTILITY of search engines is a non-consideration