We need more indexes

tripplyons 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

More competition in the space would be great for me as a consumer, but the problem is that the high fixed costs make starting an index difficult.

	▲	andai 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've been wondering can't this be done p2p? Didn't we solve most of the technical problems in the late 90s / early 2000s? And then just abandoned that entire way of thinking for some reason? If many thousands of people care about having a free / private / distributed search engine, wouldn't it make sense for them to donate 1% of their CPU/storage/network to an indexer / db that they they then all benefit from?

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JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We need more indexes

Not particularly. Indexes are sort of like railroads. They're costly to build and maintain. They have significant external costs. (For railroads, in land use. For indexes, in crawler pressure on hosting costs.)

If you build an index, you should be entitled to a return on your investment. But you should also be required to share that investment with others (at a cost to them, of course).

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ineedasername 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do we know what OpenAI uses? Have they built their own, or piggy back on moneybags $MS and Bing?

	▲	tripplyons 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They use Bing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/23/ch...

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pzo 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

perplexity added API today, got the following email:

> Dear API user, We’re excited to launch the Perplexity Search API — giving developers direct access to the same real-time, high-quality web index that powers Perplexity’s answers.