To all those who develop/contribute to the Linux “project”.
I admire all your obvious talents; however I never quite saw the necessity to invest all that intellectual energy into an OS.
Why not invest all those talents in a search engine that is completely free of commercial strings? No sponsored links or anything else that smells of “I paid to have you see my site”.
Whatever buy-in you get in the Linux project now; I would expect a bigger buy-in for this idea. I can’t be the only person who hates being routed to “preferred” links.
If you dislike the idea, then maybe share your views on why an open source OS is more important to you.
Linux has been around a lot longer than the Internet has been popular, and certainly much longer than the first search engine. I’m not a member of the development group (hell, I just recently started playing with it again after a many-year absence) but what you’re asking for requires a large initial capital investment in hardware and bandwidth; not practical for the open source community. In addition, there’s no real challenge to doing what you ask; the technology is not exactly leading edge (once you know how Google does what they do, all you need is a lot of CPU horsepower and tons of fast disk space), so probably wouldn’t interest most hobbyist programmers.
BwanaBob,
If I understand what you’re saying in your OP, you seem to have the impression that by eliminating the costs of software development you can eliminate the costs of running a search engine website. Software development is only one part of the cost of running a search engine. You also have to pay for hosting, bandwidth, etc. If the site becomes popular, these costs can be very high and may dwarf the development costs.
If you’re willing to pay a subsciption fee then there’s no need to solicit the help of the Linux community because, as ultrafilter said, existing search engines could switch to that model easily. I doubt that many Linux people would freely donate their time and skills to a pay site since their philosophy seems to be that software should be free. I also doubt that a general purpose search engine would be able to find many paying subscribers when engines like Google are available for free.
In any case, Google clearly indicates which of its links are sponsored, so I don’t see what the problem is. Am I missing something? Does Google also charge for result ranking?
Google is very sophisticated. For example, they designed their own file system to handle the load. This should be of great interest to most programmers, but it may also be beyond their capabilities.
To answer the OP, Linux is basically a product. The contributors to the project can create this product and make it available to others for basically zero cost (aside from their time). A search engine is a service. You could have an open-source project develop the software, but there’s going to be a substantial cost for hardware, bandwidth, and full-time support if you want to run it as a competitor to Yahoo or Google. Just look at the hardware and bandwidth in use at Google - where is an open-source project going to get the funds for that?
Additionally, the amount of development time needed to put together a search engine isn’t even really comparable to that needed to put together an operating system. I can write a simple search engine for files on my own PC in about an hour or so. Moving that to a web search engine wouldn’t be all that difficult, at least not from a programming standpoint.
Another contributing factor stopping this is that Google isn’t evil enough. Most on the net consider them a good citizen, so why try to screw them over.
I don’t see any connection between Linux and a web search engine. The skill sets are pretty different; someone who spends hours tweaking the scheduler or porting video card drivers might not be interested in a web application that’s essentially a fancy front end for a database.
Besides, Teoma is already ad-free (as far as I can tell).
The idea expressed in the OP is very simple and straightforward. I don’t for a minute doubt that it has occurred to the people at the search engines. And if they know about it, the only reason I can think of why they don’t do it is because it’s not as profitable as the current method.
Search engines are technologically simple at this point (save Google), so most of the issues relating to them are business issues. It’s been brought up before in this thread, but I want to make it explicit.
I searched for Brumel, and none of the hits on the first page look like ads to me. Which are you referring to, and what were you hoping to get instead?
Also, the OP sorta implies that Linux is the only open source thing out there, that this is the sole product (or main product) put together by open-source people. In fact, many many many products have been built by open-source people. Go look around sourceforge.net or freshmeat.net to see a few.
Well, DMOZ is an index, not a search engine. It is maintained by volunteers, but that maintenance just includes keeping the index up-to-date, not any actual programming.
Linux is a project contributed to by a myriad of different people, organizations, and corporations, all of whom have a vested interest in having a high-quality OS that’s free of restrictive licensing terms. Linux qua project is a serious matter in the computer industry, and it has attracted a mix that would not be amenable to a shift to search engines.
Now, to clear up some misunderstandings on the word `free’:
Linux isn’t always free of charge. IBM, for instance, sells Linux at a profit to its clients, customers, and business partners. They want a good OS for their servers and IBM provides it to them, along with certain guarantees on how IBM will support it and maintain the code base. They could pull the source off the Internet, but then they wouldn’t have the beef of IBM’s divisions backing it up. IBM sells, along with everything else, a sense of security. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Linux is, however, free of restrictions. IBM cannot decide it owns the core Linux sources and tell everyone else to go fuck themselves. The GPL, or the General Public License, mandates a certain level of privileges for everyone who uses the code, not just the Major Players and not just the developers. That is how Linux is free.
Proxomitron is dead. I just recently started using Privoxy and it works like hell. It’s 100% free, open-source software and is available for Windoze and UNIX/Linux.
Fun is generally the primary motivation for open-source programmers. They work on whatever they think is cool, and give it away because they like to share their work with others. Linux is the result of a combined effort of thousands of individual developers all working on whatever little piece happens to interest them at the time.
My guess is that building something on the scale of a useful search engine is just not a terribly interesting problem to many people when Google already has that pretty well covered. Sure, it’s got its drawbacks, but for the most part it’s fast and effective, and the advertising is far less intrusive than most web-based ads. Add to this the fact that the centralized resources (bandwidth, CPU and storage) necessary to create a truly effective search engine are pretty much unavoidable and you can start to see why the open-source community hasn’t exactly jumped at the chance to build such a thing.