this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2021
53 points (92.1% liked)
Privacy
33499 readers
288 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because Google, Bing (less prominently Yandex and Baidu) have an oligopoly on how most of the world searches things.
Search engine indexing takes years, and open source engines lack the infrastructure to speed up web crawling. SearX is just an instance hoster, a proxy. We have Yacy, Wiby, Mojeek, Metager and some other niche search engines. Then we have Qwant, that indexes its own and supplies results using Bing that it has not indexed yet. Then there is DuckDuckGo with its own indexing but is USA based. Then there is System1's StartPage, essentially a Google proxy with no self indexing that is hostile to Tor users.
Then there are others.
I settled on using Qwant for searching and Yandex via VPN for reverse image searching. Startpage is used extremely rarely and with VPN.
I don't see why we can't just have something like a blockchain based search engine where crypto is given based on how much indexing (crawling) is done. Of course this is just an idea right now. But have an incentive to people to do crawling of it through something like blockchain. This ensures that there won't be any centralization and search result manipulation with things such as psyops (brain washing the population through search results)
Blockchain is a meme. It is the same buzzword lalaland meme that is AI in phone software these days.
LokiNet and Adamant are probably the only serious attempts I have seen in a while, and even they did not get me interested to check them out. If something does not get me tingly in the sack, it is not worth.
I disagree blockchain technology shouldn't be underestimated
Considering a technology good means society does not make a joke out of it. Currently, this is not the case.
Wait until you see what TV makers mean with AI. I recently found a setting 'AI Brightness' on my LG TV, which just sets the brightness relative to the environment, measured by a light sensor.
The kind of BS sold to people is hilarious. Every phone has some AI thing, but the only phones with AI NPU chips initially were from Huawei and Apple. Qualcomm followed through years later, and the OEMs that used Qualcomm never really utilised the NPU while calling their features AI.
People fell hard for the AI meme without knowing what it is. But then, what do people even know?
I doubt blockchain is suited for distributed search but the idea that blockchain is a meme can only be held by someone who isn't paying attention.
Blockchain is not a good fit for a distributed search engine, since each node needs to store the entire chain. It's possible that some sort of system for using a blockchain based token to incentivize participation in an IPFS like network would help provide a funding model for publishing the index, but that would just be one small component in a decentralized search engine, and not even the most interesting one.