What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like
What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like
Google is moving to quickly kill internet search and replace it with a closed ecosystem of LLM-generated answers. This will change the entire economics of how the internet works.
Welcome to the future, where asking a question costs $4.99 and you'll never be able to find out if the answer is right or not.
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Without Google's grubby paws across most the web, it'd be much more like the initial intent of what the internet was supposed to be, a welcoming place with open and accessible info!
If you don't want to pay to access a web search service, just use docker and run your own SearXNG instance! This will also allow you to host our own AI model that searches the web through SearXNG. While it may sound like a lot of work, it truly takes an afternoon and some unused RAM on your PC to make happen, then you're set up!
the initial intent of what the internet was supposed to be
A communication network for scientists and the military?
Good call, I should have worded that better. While the government and scientists were instrumental in creating the foundation for the internet, I was thinking more along the lines of the early PC era. When the internet was more or less a tool for openly sharing and discussing information as well as ideas.
But a lot of tech stems from governmental need and/or government funding. I mean, the modern refrigerator was a result of NASA problem solving for the environmental conditions found in space! GPS, LASIK, MRI's, LED's, barcodes, closed captioning, and the human genome project were all also thanks to government research too!
Thanks for taking my trolling in good stride. I actually loved the internet of 20 years ago. It was totally different from today, it's actually a shame a lot of the way it was is gone forever. I vividly remember frequenting a few blogs, just slow chatting in the comments, making your own response images, hosting your own stuff like these images, sound clips and whatever else. Most ISP's would give you some server space to host your own static html pages, and lot's of people used this. The blogs would host photoshop contests, link to stuff they liked, reported on news or music or whatever their niche. The blogs I visited are mostly still around today, but they just don't draw the engagement anymore.
I'm just sad I'm too young to have ever seen that old internet, and what it was like...
Makes me more determined to try and steer the current internet back in that direction though.
While it may sound like a lot of work, it truly takes an afternoon and some unused RAM on your PC to make happen, then you're set up!
This shit is why open source software has a bad reputation.
Im going to look into this. What's the benefit of hosting your own searxng instance?
It's yours, no issues trusting a public instance with your searches. Pages full of settings to tweak as you like. Less problems with an algorithm 'helping' you. It averages searches over multiple search engines that you choose, you can set up your own (or a curated) block list of crappy AI slop sites, don't like fandom.com or something, gone. Manage your own bangs, e.g. !aa for annas-archive. Pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for better isolation. If you have your head around docker already it's more like half an hour to set up, so why not?
Can hook it up to perplexica and a local LLM for a fully local AI search that you define, use it as a MCP server, do deep research with it...
That is awesome. A little beyond me but I've played in docker a bit. Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?
Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?
Is a VPN needed to keep your ip from being exposed ?
No more so than using any search engine directly, it's a nice to have. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
Is just using an existing searxng instance just less secure then?
By the time you've investigated it, you could have stood up your own instance...
Docker enshitification coming in 3... 2... 1...
Meh there's a ton of other services like opentofu, podman, vms, ect...
If you don’t want to pay to access a web search service, just use docker
IMO: My personal problem with Docker is that it creates its own kind of vendor lock-in. Docker does not run on the server operating systems I use. The tendency is towards a Linux monoculture and that is never a good idea. Docker is a symptom, not a solution.
Is it really vendor lock-in if you can fork it at your whim?
forking doesn't really help with the underlying problem that docker is a layer to run on top of Linux's KVM. at a certain point though, it's become standard enough though that BSD not having a good way to support docker, or any other CRI containerization service for that matter, is a BSD failure, not a containerization failure
docker is a layer to run on top of Linux's KVM
My understanding is that this is only true for docker desktop, which there's not really any reason to use on a server.
Sure, since containers use the host's kernel, any Linux containers do need to either have Linux as the host or run a VM (as docker desktop does by default), but that's not particularly unique to docker
podman exists and doesn't force root...
That's true, but all of their problem with docker are that it's Linux
Sounds like a them problem then.