alt Hacker NewsYup, it is pretty much just a better frontend for existing search. I want to build my own index and ranking algorithm in the future, but sadly it's quite resource intensive so it will depend on financial viability a bit in terms of timeframe.
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openwebsearch.eu wants to build an open index. But despite the funding it is still quite sparse.
There's tons of these frontends, including SearXNG and proprietary (but very good) Kagi. Kagi are working on their own index; this will be their meat.
I am convinced LLMs are the way forward for searching, with a caveat: what they summarize isn't very relevant (it is overrated). It just gives a (hopefully accurate) semantic context. What matters is the sources it directs to. These are your links normally on top of ypur search query.
So it's not a search engine, it's a frontend for a search engine.