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Comment by vaylian | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in Europe: Qwant and Ecosia team up to build their own search index: https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/

It's a noble effort, but they're so late to the game that it's hard to see them making a significant dent. I hope I'm wrong.

They were:

> aiming to serve 30% of French search queries [by end of 2025]

https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/

Better late than never.

> The French index is at an advanced stage of completion, we have started creating the German language index, and the English one should start shortly. All progress is quickly integrated into the Qwant STAAN API.

https://noc.social/@327ppm/115934198650900394

They can build whatever they want with lots of #hashtags and public money, but that doesn't mean they'll get 30% of French people to use it.

But of course they managed to cut themselves a nice salary with EU funds, paid in part by me and you, so that's all that matters.

The French government managed to rein in Amazon so traditional French stores, both online and brick and mortar ones, don't go bankrupt due to Amazon's unending pockets.

If they deem it necessary to rein in Google, they will rein in Google. There's no lack of tools for this, ranging from obliging phones sold in French territory to offer the French search engine as the default, to forcing every Google search result to promote the local search engine prominently, to campaigns about how it's important for national security not to rely on an adversary/enemy country's services, to everything in between and beyond.

Oh no, someone is making money outside of the big American monopolists. Quick, the vapors!

The landscape has completely shifted now; now more than ever, there's a real need for Europe to pivot from relying too much on an adversary.

> with lots of #hashtags

I missed this one. What was it about?

Click the link.

Which honestly no user cares about. They only care about whether it is good enough that they can use it. Marketshare only matters if you fear the vendor might shut it down, or if you are running ads.

I feel like soon there won’t even be a point having a search engine since almost the entire internet will be useless AI slop.

It's as though full-text search of websites you've never heard of was a mistake :)

PageRank wouldn't exist without webrings, directories, and forums you could only search individually, and we thrived on that Internet.

Welcome back, ye olde Internet.

A search engine doesn't have to search the entire internet. Most of them are extremely opinionated about what they index.

Seriously though. Five years ago Google already became unusable without "site:reddit.com" which is actually hilarious for a search engine that's supposed to search the entire internet. Nowadays reddit is also shit, which means that the only use case for me to use Google or any search engine is to find products that for some reason I don't want to buy on Amazon.

Internet isn't a global village, it's a global ghetto, and it's becoming increasingly true that the only way not to lose is not to play.

The old internet is still there. It hasn‘t gone away; it‘s just undiscoverable with ad-based search. The more slop there is, the more necessary it is to have good search engines.

If you haven't tried Marginalia Search yet, do so. It's a small web search.

Recently, I set up a fresh system on a laptop. Ahahahaaa, how utterly crap Google search results now are! It fills me with some stress and disgust to use that. Now one of the first things I do, right after emergency using duckduckgo to search for uBlock Origin and NoScript, is to get Kagi search installed as default search. Then I can continue setting things up more calmly.

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