Europe plots escape hatch from the enshittification of search
“If you ever get the impression that search engines are getting worse, or that alternatives are not all they seem, it's not just you. It's what journalist Cory Doctorow calls “It has 14 partners funding it so firstly enshitiffication." Many alternatives use Microsoft's Bing for search, so when Bing goes down so does DuckDuckGo, for instance. It's important to note what this isn't, though. It's not a new search engine. Rather, the project is building a web index, the idea being to make it easier for others to build search engines that can use the OpenWebSearch database as their index.”
Nevertheless, this does look very interesting. It has 14 partners funding it, so hopefully that means it won't just run out of steam in a few months, and also means there should not be any single corporation just calling all the shots.
It also says it aims not to provide a search API, but rather it is shared as open data so that others use it in building a search engine.
But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as the web is changing daily, so this all has to come together and bring meaningful search results to end users. So, I guess we'll only be able to tell when such search engines are established and many people have actually tested and evaluated the results.
See
OpenWebSearch – a European index for European search engines
: Plus: How to make Google less unhelpful
#
technology #
opendata #
search
Like Us
Support Hubzilla
