academc

Hey David! I lived in Philly for 6 years during grad school and I saw you and the Philadelphia Orchestra play dozens of times - it was so wonderful. However, I sometimes got annoyed at the audience, who would not infrequently cause a lot of noise during concerts, whether by unwrapping candy or whispering to each other.

Do you have any interesting or funny stories of crowd noise? Or any interesting stories of interacting with specifically Philly audiences?

I definitely agree with your basic motivations behind this. Too many people in this thread are asking you why you're bothering when search engines already exist, but they fail to see that monopolies are bad precisely for the reason that they seem like and then become the only option available. The funneling effect means that even the best algorithms are just that: a single choice that occludes alternative ways of looking at things.

I wonder about the long-term for you. If you achieve success, what's to keep you from either being bought out by the bigger players or else running into the same issues they did re: privacy?

That's another possibility, you know, to try to not even compete with Google or DDG on the same turf but try to only index search results that aren't so prominent in their rankings, or perhaps only index sites that meet certain privacy standards themselves... Or maybe options to sort sites by these filters.

Also one thing I hate about Google is the lack of searching with Caps sensitivity. Is there a reason for this?

Thanks for the AMA.