this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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There's a lot of startups trying to make better search engines. Brave for example is one of them. There's even one Lemmy user, but I forget what the name of theirs is.
But it's borderline impossible. In the old days, Google used webscrapers and key word search. When people started uploading the whole dictionary in white text on their pages, Google added some antispam and context logic. When that got beat, they handled web credibility by the number of "inlinks" from other websites. Then SEO came out to beat link farmers, and you know the rest from there.
An indexable version of Archive.org is feasible, borderline trivial with ElasticSearch, but the problem is who wants that? Sure you want I may, but no one else cares. Also, let's say you want to search up something specific - each page could be indexed, with slight differences, thousands of times. Which one will you pick? Maybe you'll want to set your "search date" to a specific year? Well guess what, Google has that feature as well.
Cached versions can sometimes get around a paywall when a site gives Google access but charges users.
Archive.is them
Brave is not a business that should be supported. Also, I'm pretty sure they just use Bing for a back end.
There are also a few paid search engines that people say are good.
What's the issues with brave??
They've had a history of controversy over their life, ranging from replacing ads with their own affiliate links to bundling an opt-out crypto miner. Every time something like this happened, the CEO went on a marketing campaign across social media, effectively drowning out the controversial story with an influx of new users. The CEO meanwhile has got in trouble for his comments on same-sex marriage and covid-19.
In general, it's always seemed like it would take a very small sack of money for Brave to sell out its users. Also, their browser is Chromium based, so it's still contributing to Google's market dominance and dictatorial position over web technologies.