Possibly a completely dumb idea, but I’ve wondered for a while if there would be value in building an open data web index, something which would allow competing providers to offer different search algorithms on top of.
I don’t know enough about the technical details about building a search engine, so perhaps this isn’t feasible because the algorithm and the index need to be tightly coupled to each other, but my hunch is that it would be beneficial for the web if there were an open street map of search indexes.
I am a user of brave search actually, I’m glad you guys released the product!
Really more than anything else, I think about how important search is to the open web/maintaining a healthy internet. And by that, I mean that I don’t think having one dominant search provider is a good thing.
There are a lot of small upstarts that I’m happy to use such as brave/ddg/etc, but given the fact that many of those use bing as a backend I am left wondering how viable they’ll be in unseating google/bing (I know brave maintains its own index, which is a big plus).
I don’t know enough about the technical details about building a search engine, so perhaps this isn’t feasible because the algorithm and the index need to be tightly coupled to each other, but my hunch is that it would be beneficial for the web if there were an open street map of search indexes.