Digital subscription rates have been rising, but not fast enough to subsist most publications without additional ad revenue.
My concern is that such a search engine would allow private interests to create "news/media/info" sites directly that qualify while long-respected publications are ostracized.
Great idea if the primary intent is to index other types of content outside of that sphere, but based on the history of the modern web I think we could expect that to be gamed pretty quickly in a detrimental way.
Even just writing this comment I keep coming into thoughts and it's making me realize what an interesting subject of discussion it could be. There's a lot of questions in there!
The best balance of privacy and user experience seems to be display ads related to search term context that don't do any tracking (like billboards in the real world). But even that isn't an easy proposition and will need a custom network built to generate those type of ads.
A lot of people say they will pay for a search engine, but it is such a small niche that I believe the cost would be prohibitively expensive, and the search engine would probably still be subpar to Google in many respect. Would you pay $10/month, what about $29? Those are most likely where the monthly fees would have to be for this type of product.
Excerpt from an old comment of mine [1]:
Mozilla Research put the entire web's advertising revenue at $12.70/month per user. In other words, if they are right we are living with the consequences of advertising for a mere $13/month, $13 dollar they still get from us anyway because it's baked into the prices of the advertised products.
---
Anyhow, I'd love to see something like this. I've switched to DDG but often have to reach for Google if I can't find relevant results.
Two links came back:
"Facts on Farts" "NiceJewishMom.com"
Not a good first impression.
The simplest is "search for doc that contaons" . But we're used to "search for document about concept" by now. ISTRC Bing called themselves a "decision engine".
I don't know what Google is/trying to be now, but it often thinks it knows my business better than myself, excluding critical words.
I don't think there can be a universal answer. The corpus gathering is a huge barrier to entry, but having a common corpus would still allow room for competition on diversity of querying methods.
Atleast the title in firefox says:
> Wiby - Search Engine for the Classic Web
That's also probably why you didn't find any information on the svelte framework.
2. the purple for the links makes me think i've already clicked and seen everything
Huxley "The Doors of Perception" (1954):
>each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everwhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.
We've all heard the comparisons between the brain and the internet. And we've all been overloaded at one point by the vast amounts of useless crap on the internet. So what about a site that allows users to customize their filters of reduction? You could have popular profiles premade and ready for tweaking, or you could go raw and witness an endless stream of information raked from all over.
What happens if you're a top result on the add free segment and you start incurring some level of costs? Do you drop off if you add an ad?
Granted I really like the idea, I'd love to see it tried, but I wonder what all the unintended consequences would be / skeptical of the value of segregating "ad-free" vs. "has an ad of any sort" vs. the sites that really are a mess.
I believe fastmail is like that.
Donations/patreon for one, then subscriptions. It should be possible to offer a contentless index for download (I estimate it could be around 50-200GB) and that could be a paid option.
I think that such sites would be in ballpark of a few ‰. That would enable me to offer the contentless index for download. With delta updates and torrent for distribution it could be not that expensive, but that's a thing that I could charge for.
My intention is to use AdBlock rules like easylist to check whether or not indeed the page.
My initial code is fine in Go, but I lost enthusiasm for Go lately and careerwise it's not a good fit for me (I don't have much time to learn something not as useful for me professionally). So I started to rewrite it in Rust, while learning it, you can laugh now (Rust Evangelism Strike Force el oh el). It has an advantage with ready to use rules parser from Brave [2] and presumably high quality tokenizer from html5ever [3].
I want to use a tokenizer instead of a full parser to be able to do stream processing bringing costs down.
Common Crawl data lays on S3 so the processing must be done initially on EC2 to keep it low cost.
[0] Current Go code: https://github.com/hadrianw/abracabra
[2] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
[3] https://docs.rs/html5ever/0.25.1/html5ever/tokenizer/index.h...
EDIT:
Also for the search part I want to use something more stand alone than Elasticsearch to offer desktop search with downloaded index. When I started with Go I wanted to use Bleve [4], now I'm not sure, but I think that Bleve is getting mature enough. I will worry when I will have some data to search through.
One of the challenges with this whole enterprise is a small need of JavaScript parsing. There is a common pattern, that for example Google Analytics uses, that uses a snippet of JavaScript to insert a proper script tag. But those snippets are very short so I think they may not need a full JS VM, maybe even a tokenizer would be good enough. Browser AdBlockers base on the site executing JavaScript already.
Imagine you have a big vision to build something that betters the internet and you have only your life savings. Or you've been working on something for a while but haven't been able to put full effort into it.
This $75k is to kickstart teams & projects in "fixing the internet".
^ Probably a more succinct way to ask my question. I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to negatively paint the program, it's clearly more than most companies are doing to fix the internet. 75k is just the lowest amount of money I've seen with respect to incubators/funding (but again, I am not an expert).
We have some really good projects from this much smaller program, including https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkg... (Firefox extension releasing this week), https://ameelio.org/, and more!
So we're not entirely sure whether $75k is the right amount or not, BUT we do know that with $10k, we've had some really impressive projects.
Sorry about the broken site! We're currently fixing it up along with the release of our tool on Firefox!
This should be months, up to a year for 1-2 founder team.
3 people / 75k = 25k per person. At a reasonable 100k/year earning potential, that means that 75k a year is 3 months of time?
You can't walk away from your day job at $BIGCO, start your own company and expect to get paid like you used to, it doesn't work like that (at least at the beginning).
Your pay is having a large % ownership in (what you think will be) a valuable company down the line.
My issue, I guess, is not with salary, but moreso the value add. 75k does not seem like enough to A.) Live on, really, B.) Extend runway, really, C.) "Fix the internet", really. I can understand trading in cash for agency, I would absolutely do it. But this doesn't really seem like that either, given that presumably lots of founders would need to either seek further funding or work second jobs.
It's also not just the money. It's credibility by being invested in mozilla (and an investor who is invested in you having more successful funding rounds), it's the marketing and hype that come with it, it's the opportunities to employ people, it's the connections that come from being acquainted with investors and a tech giant, etc.
Two people living on 38k a year sounds like a great way to not have legitimate talent apply.
The better the ideas to fix the internet, the less they will generate revenue. So that's kind of a catch-22. It often takes years to build an idea, and tens of millions $.
This is certainly not limiting and we know that there are more categories and just this, but it's a start.
not just adding protocol support to gemini:// but have FF check first if the content can be fetched via gemini:// and if yes then default to using it instead.
reader-view is great but you can't switch to it until all the crap has been already loaded. supporting gemini would increase privacy, and let the users decide if they prefer content with ads and bloat and malware or rather just read without distraction.
It's at https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2
Is this the sort of thing Mozilla would be interested in?
This may be a stupid question but ... what are you looking for in the "affiliation" field in the Application?
Just a bit of background. This was practically made for us. We've built a "Social Operating System for the Web", an open source platform that lets any organizations have their own Facebook-level online community as easily as they can have a blog with Wordpress. We have poured years into this, attracted 8 million users in over 95+ countries, and are definitely in it for the long haul. (https://qbix.com/platform)
Put the school you went to or the last company you worked at, if it still exists when you apply!
This is exciting, I honestly feel our company was made for this, or perhaps vice versa. Either way, Mozilla's accelerator is the best fit for what we are doing :)
best thing to do is join our slack (https://join.slack.com/t/mozillabuilders/shared_invite/zt-el...), and join for open office hours and see if you can get feedback from one of the mentors.
regardless, you can def apply! no downsides.
We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C.
1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the hard work it takes to do so.
2. $16k funding in a much earlier stage project (idea stage / MVP stage). MUST be serious about commitment it takes to get to launch.
3. OPEN LABS: these are open to the entire community and you have access to the mentors. 10 min checkins each week & peer sessions. We've had TONS of amazing projects for our Open Labs in the Spring and we hope to see TONS more for the Summer.
In terms of MISSION and what we're looking for:
We started this new incubator out of Mozilla in order to work with & invest in developers, startups, and technology enthusiasts who are building things that will shape the internet and have a positive impact without needing to hyper focus on the bottom line. We call this our ”fix-the-internet” incubator.