aaronbieber

I’m going to date myself here, but when I was in high school in the late '90s, a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and helped me get it set up. He gave me the distro he used at the time: Debian. He explained to me how Debian, unlike other distros, compiles everything it installs, which is why it takes so long. I recall him explaining that this would make things run better in some way (but I was a teenager and don’t remember too clearly). The install took hours. Many hours. I don’t remember what kind of computer I had, it was a Pentium something.

There was such a sort of romance and intrigue to Linux back then. It was so challenging to get working, the desktop environments were janky AF, getting some drivers working was like a day’s work. I miss it, though.

There’s a fair bit of skepticism about DDG in here, and I’ve heard it before, but I feel like a lot of people are being pretty unfair to them. Are there search engines that don’t ultimately use Google or Bing? Yes, there are. Are they good? It depends on what you mean by that.

It takes enormous resources to index even “most” of the internet on a rapid, ongoing basis. This is the main reason why Google and Bing overall provide the most thorough results. The only independent search engine I would trust is perhaps Neeva, because it’s subscription-based. An engine claiming to be as thorough as Bing or Google that doesn’t take money directly from you is up to something.

A lot of what DDG is trying to do with its browser and search-ancillary features is find some way of making money because they have to pay Microsoft for Bing results.

It’s worth thinking about what our expectations are for search engines. If they must be free, but also not ad-supported and data-gathering… How can they afford to exist?

The example I give again, and again, and again is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Craigslist remains private (which shields it from being gutted by Wall Street vultures, for sure) so we don’t know for sure, but Craig is believed to retain a controlling stake alongside current CEO Jim Buckmaster and eBay (which purchased a large stake from an exiting employee).

Craigslist makes about $600 million annually, and I’m sure provides a nice living for the executives and employees there, but has remained true to its core function of providing transparent and easy classifieds posting to everyone (mostly for free, even!)

Notice what happens when an organization becomes a vehicle for profit, beyond simply “self-sustaining profit.” Notice how taking on investors practically guarantees that outcome.

I thought Reddit was dead the day Conde Nast bought it. They’ve survived quite a bit longer! This day had to come. Let’s move on.

We can build something that primarily exists to create a community.