this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
47 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2087 readers
101 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I guess the question here really boils down to: Can (less-than-perfect) capitalism solve this problem somehow (by allowing better solutions to prevail), or is it bound to fail due to the now-insurmountable market power of existing players?
I think the hardest part is the sheer volume of content to sift through and index on today's Internet. It is a completely different, and MUCH larger, beast than when Google was made in a garage in 1998 and quickly took the world by storm.
I have confidence that an open source/crowd sourced effort could beat Googles results, but the computational power and backend are I think the biggest gating factor. It would also need to be completely distributed with a lot of duplicate data for fault tolerance, but also a way to have a "source of truth" so that malicious users couldn't rewrite/poison data.
Yeah and for all its faults, google still works well at times, I try to use more ddgo, but at times it is easier to find what I want using google. (Or at all), doesnt always work however and google has a massive 'we are pointing to our own stuff/people who pay or might pay first'. Searched for 'lets play' recently and it was very obvious. (You can do that yourself, search for that and see how long it takes you to get to the something awful lets play page, and note the urls of all the results before that (also note not just how many publicates there are but how many are yr)), of course I could have searched for 'lets play something awful' but I wanted to see how long it took for it to show up. (And if SA appears that late, what chance do smaller new non-slop projects have, if only google has less sloppers).
It's also very difficult to get search results in English when this isn't set as your first language in Google, even if your entire search term is in English. Even "Advanced Search" doesn't seem to work reliably here, and of course, it always brings up the AI overview first, even if you clicked advanced search from the "Web" tab.
At least you can fix AI overview shit for yourself and others you know using the https://udm14.com/ method (click the how it works thing to see how it actually works so you can edit your search urls to include that).