[arturventura]

I faced the problem. I think one of the main issues with google is the modality of the results. Google is forced to create a list of links because that's the main vehicle where they drive profit. If you were to send a question like "Who is Barack Obama?" you still will get a list of links although google knows there is a canonical answer.

The problem is that if you were to build a new search engine from the ground up it will take millions in infrastructure, and a lot of time for you to test one idea. And there are multiple attack vectors to Google's business model (privacy, subscription model, modality, etc.) however you might get the change of testing one of them, and if that fails, starting again is super expensive so you might not be able to get funds to do it.

My approach then became to build something that others can build on top of.

I'm currently using common crawl but my main problem is that I need to build a small toy to test it and even processing common crawl is crazy expensive. Just a single snap are 150 Tb, so this needs to be process on metal, or you're gonna pay a hefty AWS bill.

[johannes1234321]

> If you were to send a question like "Who is Barack Obama?" you still will get a list of links although google knows there is a canonical answer.

For that specific search I would start at Wikipedia, but for more general "data search" I lean towards Wolfram Alpha, which has some usability issues, but interesting maths engine for queries. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Barack+Obama+vs+Donald+...