The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.

  • eddythompson@beehaw.org
    14·
    2 years ago

    The search engine market isn’t quite as diverse as it may appear https://www.searchenginemap.com/

    There are maybe 4 or so ‘crawlers’, and the rest buys access to the part of their data they are willing to sell to others.

    Running a crawler with the current size and complexity of the internet is expensive, and complicated. Then there is sifting and sorting the data in a reasonable searchable format, and then there is the quality problem, etc.

    Much easier to license data access from a provider (Usually Bing or Google or both) and just offer some added features on top, like no tracking, different result UI, custom filtering values per Bing or Google’s APIs that make your own “secret sauce”, etc.