Ask HN: Can Ladybird's open-source success be replicated in search engines?

[Vertebrae2162]

With the rise of open-source browsers like Ladybird, which has gained significant attention for its transparent and community-driven approach, I'm wondering if there's a similar opportunity for an open-source search engine. Ladybird's success suggests that users are hungry for alternatives to proprietary browsers, and I'm curious if the same appetite exists for search engines. Would you use an open-source search engine that prioritizes transparency, community involvement, and user control? What features or values would be most important to you in such a search engine?

[bruce511]

-writing- software and -hosting- software are two very different beasts.

Ladybird consumes next to no resources beyond donated programmer time. It might take 1 year to complete, or 50. It might pause for periods of time if there is no programming happening.

A search engine is fundamentally simple software. But the costs to make it work are enormous. Scrape the whole web, continuously. Build servers big enough to cope with request traffic, store the index, etc. You're talking huge amounts of money in hardware, massive networking bills, an army of devops to keep it running.

Then you'll need engineers to continually fight SEO, deal with spam overload and so on.

The fact that the source code is open source or not is irrelevant. It's the least important and least expensive part of the puzzle.

[tomcam → bruce511]

> Then you'll need engineers to continually fight SEO, deal with spam overload and so on.

Hey, Google should consider that approach!

[not_your_vase]

The thing is, both Chromium (the base of Chrome) and Firefox are open source (also Webkit, the heart of Safari), so I wouldn't really single out Ladybird. (I wonder if there are still any completely closed source browsers since IE threw in the towel)

But to be a bit ontopic also: I want a search engine to be unbiased, without any opinion.

Currently there are no such engines: Google and Bing are too political, and they favor very heavily a small set of results. Other search providers are usually too niche, either intentionally (e.g. IIRC Marginalia is intentionally indexing only small sites, and they are filtered too), or not intentionally (e.g. small team with not enough hw). These engines might give less opinionated (or give a different opinion) results for a small subset of queries, but they are rarely usable as general engines.

[dotcoma]

I wish them well, but isn’t it too early to speak of Ladybird’s success ?

[rurban]

xapian can do it. You don't need the SW but the HW, in most Interxion's.