alt Hacker NewsKind of Google to create a market opening for its competitors like this. I hope Kagi, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are taking notes.
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The problem is that the web as we know it (useful, human-curated information that's put out there to help people) is also over. It's been totally overrun with AI slop. Even before AI could be used to create propaganda on a scale that we could only dream about 5 years ago, it's been declining under the weight of SEO sweatshops for a good 10 years. Meanwhile the actually decent content, the individual hobbyists who are just sharing their knowledge, have largely left under the weight of comment spam and DDoS attacks and doxxing.
So if another search engine does arise, it won't find anything useful, because the useful content on the web has been buried under slop, and largely removed. Your best bet today is a curated directory, sorta like the original Yahoo, where you allowlist the web to only real sites, download them, and make them searchable. I think this is actually Kagi's approach. But the open web as we knew and loved it is dead.
My literal first thought was "do I seriously need to use bing now?".
I'm sure there's a niche for a product for search nerds. Something that leans into inverted indexes like the classic Lexis/Nexis search. But it's got to have Google-like coverage.
I've been using Startpage as my default search engine for a while now for any search where I actually need information and not sales or marketing bullshit.
When I use google, usually from my phone, I am reminded of why I don't use google on desktop.
With the announcement of this move by them, I just manually removed google as an address bar search engine option in all my browsers on desktop and mobile.
Cloudflare seems like they have the capability to take this on.
Human produced content should be separated from sites primarily hosting slop. That seems solvable?
reCaptcha is a pretty strong wall to allow only Google to index websites, especially now that you need device verification. Throw in Cloudflare too.
There’s not much room to squeeze in when your competitors hold the keys to 15 million top websites.