Honestly, I hope it’s around long enough. Right now it’s very good and rapidly improving. Enshittification by definition only happens when a service is large enough and successful enough. Until that happens, I’m going to keep using what for me is the best search option.
Let’s face it. Search is a fundamental necessity of the internet. How many models can functionally work?
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It could be free for the user, but supported by ads. We’ve seen how that works. Maybe it’s run its course.
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It could be ad-free and paid for by users. The competitive incentive at least is to give users the best possible experience.
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It could be entirely free and provided as a utility. Literally no one is asking for a government run Internet.
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Maybe there’s some futuristic solution like an Open Source distributed network in which users run the search themselves. As far as I know nobody has come up with a search that doesn’t require a massive database with enormous costs.
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What is the alternative if we need a searchable index of the internet? Self host? Participate in a community driven swarm? Is that possible or even feasible for us to do? I’d love to see such a thing. It would be quite interesting to learn about the architecture of it, especially ways that the tech prevents gaming the search results, but I have yet to see something like that.
Or are you suggesting that internet search should be done by a non-profit or government agency that we fund with tax dollars?
pirat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If you figure out how to search “correctly” on SearXNG instances, some of them are pretty good (though they source part of their results from google). That’s how I search most of the time nowadays. I’ve found a favourite instance and a few backups. My most important advice is: to change the default language from “auto” to “en”, and only change it to some other locale for results specifically in that language/country.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If I understand correctly, isn’t that just a meta search that is using corporate results as the back end?
pirat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It is indeed, but in my experience it’s somehow better than the corporate backends at presenting the “correct” results to me.