Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off
by denton-scratch on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @09:15AM
(#32924712)
> And then everyone can build search engines on top of that.
That bit troubles me. If the index is maintained by a government agency, and every search engine is using the same index, then that's a massive censorship avenue. I wonder how "open" Open Web Index is going to be.
Re:EU Open Web Search project kicked off
by zaarn on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @09:20AM
(#32924770)
If the index is censored, nothing stops you from adding to the index yourself.
The vast majority of the net is, after all, now indexed, so you can run your own indexer to cover whatever they didn't cover.
But at the end of the day the resulting dataset would be sold to third parties so they can rank the results appropriately. Which to me seems to be the only sane way forward. Only a government could run something the scale of the Google crawler and succeed at doing so. And then everyone can build search engines on top of that.