Re:Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer
by jackvezkovic on Sunday August 12, 2018 @09:52AM
(#17744341)
The state spending money to provide you a search engine to select the information they want to show you?
Just sounds like a terrible idea.
Re:Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer
by prepend on Sunday August 12, 2018 @12:01PM
(#17744919)
Your friend is right in theory, but in practice no State is capable of providing such a service.
The US isn’t even capable of providing a search interface to its own web sites that competes with commercial offering (eg, using google is better than the sites built in search).
The EU attempt was called Qaero [0] and wasn’t an exact google didyougogo competitor as I think it’s focus was on video and audio. But they spent at least $99M from 2005-2013 and had absolutely trash results.
It’s kind of weird how hard it is for some organizations to do some things. You would think with a hundred million bucks you would get something. DDG [1] was self funded initially and then with $3M and they are pretty useful despite 30x less funding.
There was a (failed) attempt by the EU I know about. And I don’t see that happening in the near future.