HN user
I'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant.
The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.
This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.
I wonder if Kagi's using it.
Edit : thanks, corrected the URL
You mean funding the war to repel the clear, unambiguous aggressor ? Yes.
Yes of course, "independant" investors that would jump by the broken window by themselves if they did criticize the Kremlin.
Yes, I know, didn't you read the "Well there are millions of European trying to avoid US tech. It's hard. A lot harder than Russian tech." sentence above ?
You're comparing a war currently being played by Russia, destroying their own country by the way, to past wars.
I'm not saying the US didn't trigger wars and their casualties. It's of course true.
Yandex is only for image search. Implementing a "I don't want to fund Yandex" option would solve the problem for customers trying not to fund this war.
This would even lower the cost of the user's actions.
Not doing so is a strong take.
Do we live in Ecotopia ? Did I miss the news ? Hopefully yes.
Well there are millions of European trying to avoid US tech. It's hard. A lot harder than Russian tech.
As for the comparison, I don't think it's fair. The US has not yet invaded its neighbor, Canada, leading to millions of deaths and heavy casualties. Let's not adopt your binary view on this matter.
They have been confirmed by the CEO of Kagi and its docs. https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
On the censor bit all companies operate within the law of the country they are in .
Yes, that's why I don't want my money poured from Kagi to Yandex, a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its neighbour and doing war crimes.
Is Kagi still using Russian government owned tech (Yandex) that censors informations about the illegal Ukraine war crimes ?
If so, even if I do agree with your claims about the need to avoid ads so that the user is not the product, I believe there's a double standard in action here.
I really liked the product before having to cancel my subscription for this reason.
Now I'm stuck with boring Qwant and Ecosia...
Well hopefully Oursie.com based on Staan with a subscription system will be a good alternative soon.
This first chart is very hard to read, in dark mode and thin lines and text.
Because France wants to be sovereign ?
Please pass that law in France too.
Is this based on ATproto ? I personnaly see new silos as something less interesting than ATProto apps.
I hope some people remain to build the services that we still use more every day than LLMs.
Edit : and money. I guess most founders follow the money here.
Of course it should have been a Webpage. You can even code a whole modern map application on the Web, that's under 3 Mo gzipped, instead of the 600 Mo Java applications that we're served.
Yes, that's the problem.
I don't think they were very edge-y from what I remember... but I'll double check. And will get a screenshot if I disagree - maybe it's something about window size or display density.
For some reasons, the results drawn on the map are more numerous than the ones we show in the result list. I've raised an issue to investigate this. https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2480
But if that category search is not enabled, why doesn't it find business name matches? And why are the results far outside the viewing window?
Good question. It's a Photon (our search API) problem as far as I know. We probably did set a local search ponderation too low for this use case.
In case the user chose the (default) "search here" option, we could also add a proximity ranking.
I do agree with your last big paragraph : we don't have Google's budget, hence the "search here" option which already solved lots of dead ends. Thanks a lot for this discussion !
Thanks a lot for your report !
The shaking is probably caused by an aggressive option in Firefox : see this issue https://codeberg.org/cartes/web/issues/2095.
We can't really act on this, it appears to break a lot of websites :/ Maybe we should try to auto-detect it and show a dialog to the user.
for below, all have "here" selected (not "everywhere") and this same view: https://cartes.app/#12.41/43.0435/-87.89962
Thanks, it lets me understand the bugs that make coffees impossible to be found for you. The first problem is that for performance reasons, we don't enable category discovery and search at high zoom. They only appear at zoom 13 (https://cartes.app/#13.7/43.04398/-87.911), and your link was at zoom 12.41. This category suggestion would have let you show all coffee places on the map. But not yet filter your searches to this category only, that will be a game-changer feature we're working on.
The zoom limitation is a known problem, but probably worse in the US where cities are less dense than in Europe. I'll prioritize it, thanks.
2nd problem is that the "coffee" word doesn't trigger the coffee category. It should, I'll investigate too.
On your link, two Valentine coffee are shown on the map with the query "valentine", but none are in the search results list, and they're on the edges of the map. Interesting bug : probably a side effect of adding address search last week, I'll investigate.
You're probably our first US-user test, thanks again :)
Thanks !
We're not using Bluesky, but Atproto ;) So place reviews is federated and open-source : we use Eurosky/Mu.social daily for our social accounts. Also, Bluesky itself is open-source.
but I think the international version is still work in progress, so I'll gladly return in the future.
Yes sorry, we're working on it, daily !
Do you know of any of these public bodies that would have the agility and competence to back such a project ? I don't.
In France, where cartes.app is built and incorporated, the government is far from being ideologically equipped to envision the launch a (privacy-focused) general public map application. IGN provides map, but they are still far from a general public usage, they're more useful for experts.
Even the professional office suite dedicated to agents (LaSuite) is in risk because it's said to destroy French companies (trying to) deliver these tools.
Meanwhile, a private company, if necessary with capped profits and salaries, seems by far the most practical solution in my experience. Hence the choice.
So you want the public to fund your business and what it gets in return is the honour of improving your business and "compete with Big Tech"?
To fund an open-source and open-data business, yes.
I think there's a strong incentive to take their chances with Big Tech until a better alternative pops up.
How do you think an alternative to duopolistic apps valued hundreds of billions could emerge without funding ? The problem is hard, we know it. We think the startup way, raising millions for a map app to compete with Google, has less chances of success than building a modern common.
In my view, a public service should benefit (and be controlled by) the public.
Isn't open-source software the closer model to what you desire ? A "public" map app in the sense of "developed and hosted by the government" could enable large funding, but could also be quite frightening.
Actually, it's one of the reasons some Europeans want to quit Google & Apple maps : on top of being economic mastodons, they are excessively close to the US, a state that has gone the way of government corruption, to say the least.
Was it tested on a road in a car ?
Main developer of cartes.app here. We've internationalised the app. Expect some traces of French but we're working on it :)
But yes, the development force remains mostly French for now. Waiting for more European contributions...
You're right. Last holidays, I went to beautiful place in Spain. A way covered in Ferns was marked as an OSM path. I guess it was, but did not get cut this year or the later. So we tried and failed 30 m after.
It's important to keep some mysteries despite precise maps.
That's why I'm at the same time fascinated by 3D "splats", but also worried to be spoiled.
They're great for places we already know (inspect your roof's shape for instance), but they spoil discovery.
It's basically Comaps but not open-source, right ?
In the app I'm developing, cartes.app, we acknowledged this lack of pictures.
We show local Wikimedia common pictures, osm tag pictures, og:image pictures of the website if any, Wikipedia article infobox pictures, Panoramax for street-view, and last but not least, any picture dropped by an ATproto place review.
Lots remain to be done, especially building the latter community of reviews.
One of these viewpoints maybe ?
Thanks a lot !
Could you try https://cartes.app and share your search terms and expectations ? We're using Photon, an OpenSearch search engine. We've build a dictionary of place categories to help in-browser with FuseJS.
Also thinking about using embeddings to complement this.
Hi ! Yes, was freezed by gedankenstuecke's comment. But yes you're right, I'll write an update.