Sep 8, 2026, 12:44 PM@miramarmike @eliasulrich I think "to fight google" is maybe not the ideal framing here tbh, it's not really trying to be a google alternative as far as I know
in that rather than trying to index everything in existence, its goal is to make *information* searchable, and so the important thing is how much information it covers rather than how many sites
and from that perspective, I would expect it to find an information subject, but not a specific name or person
@joepie91 @miramarmike @eliasulrich
Yeah I'd really like to see an ecosystem of independent search and discovery systems working together to formulate an alternative to Google, much more so than being a one stop shop Google replacement. That seems like a healthier future for the web if nothing else.
Sep 8, 2026, 1:06 PM@marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich I just so happen to be working on that as well with seekseek, which is to be a specialized search engine (well, more like a collection of them) on one hand, but also a sort of 'construction kit' to make it easy for other people to build their own such search engines on the other 🙂
Sep 8, 2026, 1:08 PM@marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich (it started as *just* a collection of search engines but I eventually came to the conclusion that the 'construction kit' bit is probably the more important part)
@marginalia @joepie91 @miramarmike @eliasulrich Actually there's an EU initiative for exactly this. It has multiple crawlers (Quant is one of them) who aggregate it as one.
Sep 8, 2026, 1:35 PM@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich which initiative is this? I've generally been pretty unhappy with how a lot of EU funding goes to for-profit startup-y things with all the same bad incentives, so I'm curious to see if there's something different about this one
@joepie91 @Kyebr @miramarmike @eliasulrich
EU funding is kinda all over the map, but I've gotten some of it at least. There's generally a problem with a lot of big talkers and not a lot of actual doers in this space. Actually having something to show has made finding funding surprisingly easy.
@marginalia words to pay the bills by 🤌💪
Sep 8, 2026, 2:40 PM@Kyebr @marginalia @miramarmike @eliasulrich thanks. unfortunately it seems to lean heavily into the "AI" thing and still follow a strongly centralized structure (just a government instead of a corp this time), so it seems of marginal value to me, personally...
@joepie91 @miramarmike @eliasulrich This for just about everything...everything is supposed to beat Twitter or beat Facebbk or beat Google. It's the ridiculous framing of everything to conform to media hype. Just be an alternative. Nothing has to win the hearts and minds of the whole population...well, unless it intends to make the launcher rich