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Comment by z0mbie42 | Hacker News Reader

Hi, currently we absolutely do not plan to create a search engine: it requires too much resources for self hosting, I think we currently have great option for all the spectrum (From Google search to DuckDuckGo), and because an open source search engine will be tricked by all kind of nasty SEO Experts and it will be very hard to promote actually good Content.

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 :)

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I think it's clear after reading your exchange with OC that you're not planning to take on Google search with Bloom. However what I think the commenter you're replying to is suggesting is that by calling yourself an open source 'Google' you're giving people the false impression that you are focused on search because when people think of Google the first thing they think of is search.

Perhaps you might consider something like free and open source 'Google Suite' or 'Google Apps' instead?

Right; is "a free and open source 'Google'" a company? Because that's what Google is.

>great option for all the spectrum (From Google search to DuckDuckGo)

You probably mean from SearX to YaCy.

SearX is a meta-search engine, which means it isn't truly its own search engine. Still useful and open-source. I'd actually recommend the Bloom people to host their own SearX instance to cover search needs.

You say this like DDG isn't a meta-search engine... everything (for the English language) except for Google and Bing is a meta-search engine.

YaCy is not a meta-search engine.

Neither is wiby.me

Both don't cover average use cases.

Hi, are you planning to implement email?

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.

Hi,

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 :)

Email hosting would be a good idea. That's how Zoho gets people in.

Honestly, even without the search function, I think this is one of the most base level functions of Google's toolkit. Everything else is just convenient

Agreed. This seems like a neat project but mail and search are the only things I'd be really looking for in a free and open source Google.

My E-Mail is hosted by Zoho, but I use none of their other services. Oops.

https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ is/was working on designs for things like tractors.

> and because an open source search engine will be tricked by all kind of nasty SEO Experts and it will be very hard to promote actually good Content.

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.

“Productivity is the current foundation, but you can think having a Bloom open source tractor in some years”

Open source agriculture has so much potential for good. I’m surprised it isn’t more of a thing already

Hi, I totally agree.

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.

if i'd think that we have enough alternative search options, i'd have ignored this topic completely. i clicked because i disagree, because we do need more search options.

that said, we desperately need what bloom provides too. i just would not have recognized it from that title.

Then perhaps be more ambitious even and brand yourself a Alphabet competitor ;)

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