I wish a project doesn't try to moonshot a thing that we already had.. I want the good old Google search where you type something, and all relevant web result pop out (without creepy ads, trackers, personalisation, shopping links to get you to spend). I understand it is very expensive to crawl the web, that's where an org like the EU can come in. I wish they bootstrapped a simple, open index that any startup can use to provide clean search fronts. Crawling the web, and indexing content can be quite expensive, if EU bootstrapped that infrastructure, and then say augmented it with federated crawling and indexing (sort of like the distributed computing MIT condor project), where people, Universities etc in the EU could contribute their spare computer time to crawling the web and indexing it for the EU index, making search better for everyone. Heck, I'd even put solar panels in my bike shed and hook it up to a PC to crawl the web while the sun is shining.
But the web is different; google much less so. There is no "old google search", because almost everything to search through is noise and spam.
PageRank made user preferences as signalled by hyperlinks the key signal of quality. Who really hyperlinks any more? And how many, by percentage, are non-automated etc.?
The web this works for is one of forums & personal websites. It's hard to say that today there are any properties of websites that are a reliable signal of quality.
Hence the proliferation of voting sites (such as HN, etc.) which are little more than search engines augmented with reliable signals of user preferences.
>But the web is different; google much less so. There is no "old google search", because almost everything to search through is noise and spam
the commenter is not referring to the search results, they're referring to the interface not having all the wank that google packs in to optimise for profit
I'm dreaming too much, I need coffee..