[divineg]

It's incredible. I can't believe it but it actually works quite nicely.

If 10K $5 subscriptions can cover its cost, maybe a community run search engine funded through donations isn't that insane?

[noosphr]

It's been clear to anyone familiar with encoder only LLMs that Google is effectively dead. The only reason why it still lives is that it takes a while to crawl the whole web and keep the index up to date.

If someone like common crawl, or even a paid service, solves the crawling of the web in real time then the moat Google had for the last 25 years is dead and search is commoditized.

[ccgreg]

The team that runs the Common Crawl Foundation is well aware of how to crawl and index the web in real time. It's expensive, and it's not our mission. There are multiple companies that are using our crawl data and our web graph metadata to build up-to-date indexes of the web.

[nickpsecurity]

It's not dead but will take a huge hit. I still use DuckDuckGo since I get good answers, good discovery, taken right to the sources (whom I can cite), and the search indexes are legal vs all the copyright infringement in AI training.

If AI training becomes totally legal, I will definitely start using them more in place of or to supplement search. Right now, I don't even use the AI answers.

[kiririn]

You can see their panic - in my country they are running TV ads for Google search, showing it answering LLM-prompt-like queries. They are desperately trying to win back that mind share, and if they lose traditional keyword search too they’re cooked

[gunalx]

Kagi seems to partially be that. Yes really corpo but way Better wibes than Google. Searxng is a bit diffrent but also a thing.

[echelon]

I think even more spectacularly, we may be witnessing the feature to feature obsolescence of big tech.

Models make it cheap to replicate and perform what tech companies do. Their insurmountable moats are lowering as we speak.

[johnthescott]

yep, seems the big guys running out of ideas, to some degree.