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Comment by xivzgrev | Hacker News Reader

I miss Google of 2003

What would it take for someone to make it today? No AI, only 1 on mobile, and sites with heavy ad loads are punished

You're mostly describing Kagi. They do have AI results but you have to explicitly ask for them. They have an "No AI" image search option as well.

I also like my "Before AI" lens I can click on to search the internet pre-2021. And you can downrank or fully block those garbage spam sites. They even have a "leaderboard" for most blocked/pinned sites you can use to get started.

I think it would be easy to make, with two decades of hardware improvements.

The problem is that the web of 2003 doesn't exist any longer.

Google existence changed the websites for better or worse. The Google of 2003 is no longer capable of dealing with today's web SEO dirty tricks.

Install a spam filter for search engines, like uBlackList.

Use bunch of different search engines. In Firefox, enable search entry, then visit search engines and click green + in the entry, to add search engine.

Kagi and Phind are both impressing me. They both use AI but in ways I like.

It would take a benefactor who wants to pay for running it for its own sake and not for profit. As soon as there's a profit motive, enshittification sets in since you're serving whoever pays rather than your users.

or maybe a government utility

Governments have been in recent decades completely hands off from anything tech related. For the longest time they followed the usual neoliberal economist trope that markets solve everything optimally. As a result they have created in the so-called "big tech" conglomerates a monster fit for the history books, the most broken and cornered market there ever was.

But a wholly government run search engine is not a solution. There are inherent biases in both constructing and presenting indices. You dont want to further stoke the anti-commons mistrust of polarized societies.

What the public sector could do is fund all the background techonologies to make it easy to have much larger numbers of search engines. Some of those assembled services could be completely open source, others could be value adding with various added services and customizations.

In any case the status quo is a disaster that has no future. Its effectively a forced dumbification of society as it artificially suppresses the flow of high-quality public information. Incidentally it also doesnt solve the problem that much of the world's information is private. Desktop search should become a thing again, in line with local AI etc.

Just traffic.

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