I can't imagine how this is possible. Imagine I have a string of words (a quote from a book or an article, a fragment of an error message, etc), and I want to find the full text where it appears (or pages discussing it). How would you do that without a search engine?
Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
11–20 of 395 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#12Finding information has never been trivial and until you can read people's minds to see what they really mean when they search for 'cookies' when they really mean "how to clear my internet browsing history for the past hour" it will continue to be non-trivial. The work Google has done in the search space is damn near magical. Your question belittles the literal billions of dollars and millions of man hours that have gone into making the current and previous implementations of Google's search engine almost good enough.
This is not simple, and your Ask HN reeks of ideology and contempt without so much as an inkling of the technical realities that would have to be overcome for such a thing to happen. That goes for both old and new internet.
/rant
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#13[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#14The deeper problem is advertising. It is sort of a prisoner's dilemma: all commercial entities have a shouting contest to attract customer attention. It's expensive for everybody.
If we could kill advertisement permanently, we can have an internet as described in the question. This will almost be like an emergent feature of the internet.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#15We would still need search engines, but we could change the business model. For example we could make a protocol to associate URL with content and search keywords.
Something similar to DNS associated with distributed Elasticsearch servers
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#16What about Xanadu?
Internet is very broken but almost no one seems to care (for a reason). Idea of more p2p web is there for a while but at the end of the day user don't care to much about anything so it probably never happen.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#17i guess if we had a highly regulated and one site for one type of service it would be possible but i would not really want that. you could have a algorithm that would parse your query and send you directly to a site of course it could get it wrong where you may need to refine you query just like now sometimes. of course thats still a search engine but more direct. bookmarks are already a form of web without re-search…
AOL [1] among others in the early days did exactly that. Without using a search engine, you could access whatever type of content you wanted. Similar to a communism vs capitalism argument, you don't quite the same amount of variety but you trade that for instant access to what you need.
[1][https://www.trbimg.com/img-5320a78f/turbine/orl-0312aol-1996...]
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#18Most of the search engines now days have the advantage of being closed source (you don't know how their algorithm actually work). This makes the fight against unethical SEO practices easier.
With a distributed open search alternative the algorithm is more susceptible to exploits by malicious actors.
Having it manually curated is too much of a task for any organization. If you let user vote on the results... well, that can be exploited as well.
The information available on the internet is to big to make directories effective (like it was 20 years ago).
I still have hope this will get solved one day, but directories and open source distributed search engines are not the solution in my opinion unless there is a way to make them resistant to exploitation.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#19This is what we had in early internet days, directories of links. Early Yahoo was the perfect example of this. You jumped from one site to another, you asked other people, you discovered things by chance. You went straight to a source, instead of reading a post of a summary of a site that after 20 redirections loaded with advertising and tracking gets you to the intended and actually useful destination. Most web site…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#20Search engines are not required: there are directories out there with tonnes of links. It is just that search engines are damn convenient. And googles search is light years ahead of any websites own search.
I turn to search engines mostly when entering a new knowledge domain! E.g. learn about a specific product. Sometimes when im just lazy.
For routine stuff i tend to have established resource starting points, like documentation, official/community sites, blogs/news feeds, and yes: link directories (like awesome lists).