FWIW, I work for Google (not on google.com), and would definitely fit into the "geek" category, and I still assumed you were talking about an OSS search engine.
I dared the Google comparison thinking about it's productivity suit, and because they have an app for all the need of our life. At an extraordinary price, even if it cost noting.
Productivity is the current foundation, but you can think having a Bloom open source tractor in some years :)
You probably mean from SearX to YaCy.
Both don't cover average use cases.
Open source agriculture has so much potential for good. I’m surprised it isn’t more of a thing already
I think one of the reasons, is that people interested in agriculture are not the startup-geek who think scalability first but rather people more interested in collaboration and little community projects.
Perhaps you might consider something like free and open source 'Google Suite' or 'Google Apps' instead?
that said, we desperately need what bloom provides too. i just would not have recognized it from that title.
FWIW I suspect that would be the opposite, because if it was free software then you would end up with many forks of the code that decides how to prioritize results, which would multiply the effort required by SEO spammers to target you. Meanwhile you would start with far fewer users and be that much less of a worthwhile target for that reason. And by the time you're big enough to be worth targeting, you have the resources to spend addressing it.
I want to move my radio station away from google so badly, and if you can add email hosting, even just a pop server I can start pointing my new address to you. As it is, I want to sign up without having to use another service (which is going to be google, let's face it) and it would be great to have this all stored in one place.
Email is currently not planned, because it's not easy (IMAP, POP...) to do it correctly and securely.
But as many users seems interested, I may add it to the roadmap :)