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?
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.
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).
tripplyons|5 months ago
andai|5 months ago
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?
ineedasername|5 months ago
tripplyons|5 months ago
pzo|5 months ago
> 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.
tripplyons|5 months ago
JumpCrisscross|5 months ago
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).