Also we should keep hiding from big brothers to save our data from companies and government and pay for it. VPN I mean. But first you need to find a proper one, I waste enough time on it. https://vpn-review.com/found one here
Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
101–110 of 395 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#102The question should be how can we create a new internet where we don't need a centralized 3rd party search engine not a new internet where there is no search engine. You can't find anything if there is no search (engine) and you can't change that.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than a completely new approach for producing value such as the 'Freeism' one described in the article suggested in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282851 (which I hadn't time to read yet and hence I'm neither in favour of or against) this simply boils down to the questions of who will pay for relevant content and what the business model will be. By and large, people don't seem to be willing…
> Find another way for someone to pay for relevant content and you can do away with advertising. It's as simple as that. Not so simple. What is relevant for me may be irrelevant for you.
You pay for content that's relevant to you. I pay for what's relevant to me.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#104Most 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, tha…
I've been thinking that the only way to get around the bad-actor (or paid agent) problem when dealing with online networks is to have some sort of distributed trust mechanism. I feel like manually curated information is the way to go, you just have to find some way to filter out all the useless info and marketing/propaganda. You can't crowd source it because it opens up avenues for gaming the system. The only solutio…
Domain authority is a distributed 'trust' system?
But you want 'manually curated' but not 'crowd sourced', which suggests you want an individual to or small group to find, record, and curate all pages (? or domains, or , or ...) across more than 60 Billion pages of content??
There's something like 1000 FOSS CMSs - I would be surprised if there's a million domains with relevant info to sift through just for that small field.
There's no way you're curating _all_ that without crowd sourcing.
Of course you don't have to look at everything to curate, but how are you going to filter things ... use a search engine?
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than a completely new approach for producing value such as the 'Freeism' one described in the article suggested in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282851 (which I hadn't time to read yet and hence I'm neither in favour of or against) this simply boils down to the questions of who will pay for relevant content and what the business model will be. By and large, people don't seem to be willing…
> By and large, people don't seem to be willing to pay for content on the web. Hence, advertising became the dominant business model for content on the web. I don't think the causality is right here. People might not be willing to pay for content on the web because advertising enables competitors to offer content for free. If you removed that option, if people had no choice but to pay, it might just turn out that peo…
Huh. That sounds like a free market model.
Isn't this what different newspapers like NYT and WSJ are moving towards? Why can't both models coexist?
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#106The 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.
Maybe if IPFS (~web 3.0) succeeds in the future, you could solve the advertising problem by inventing a meta network, where all the sites involved would agree to follow certain standardized criteria of site purity. You'd tag the nodes (or sites), and then have an option to search only sites from the pure network. Just a thought.
edit: Maybe this would lead to a growing interest in the site purity, and as the network's popularity would grow, you could monetize the difference to its advance.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Find another way for someone to pay for relevant content and you can do away with advertising. It's as simple as that. Not so simple. What is relevant for me may be irrelevant for you.
You pay for content that's relevant to you. I pay for what's relevant to me.
Oh, okay. I was assuming we had someone like the government pay for content.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#108I see a lot of good comments here, I got inspired to write this:
What if this new Internet instead of using URI based on ownership (domains that belong to someone), would rely on topic?
In examples:
netv2://speakers/reviews/BW netv2://news/anti-trump netv2://news/pro-trump netv2://computer/engineering/react/i-like-it netv2://computer/engineering/electron/i-dont-like-it
A publisher of webpage (same html/http) would push their content to these new domains (?) and people could easily access list of resources (pub/sub like). Advertisements are driving Internet nowadays, so to keep everyone happy, what if netv2 is neutral, but web browser are not (which is the case now anyway)? You can imagine that some browsers would prioritise some entries in given topic, some would be neutral, but harder to retrieve data that you want.
Second thought: Guess what, I'm reinventing NNTP :)
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#109Just as a suggestion, this question might be rephrased as can we have an Internet that doesn't require search companies, or even just massive search monopolies.
I'm not sure what the answer is re:search. But, an easier example to chew on might've social media. It doesn't take a Facebook to make one. There are lots of different social networking sites (including this one) that are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of resources/people involved, even adjusting for size of the userbase.
It doesn't take a Facebook (company) to make Facebook (site). Facebook just turned out to be the prize they got for it. These things are just decided as races. FB got enough users early enough. But, if they went away tomorrow.. users will not lack for social network experiences. Where they get those experiences is basically determined by network effects, not the product itself.
For search, it doesn't take a Google either. DDG make a search engine, and they're way smaller. With search though, it does seem that being a Google helps. They have been "winning" convincingly even without network effects and moat that make FB win.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#110Everyone has missed the most important aspect of search engines, from the point of view of their core function of information retrieval: they're the internet equivalent of a library index.
Either you find a way to make information findable in a library without an index (how?!?) or you find a novel way to make a neutral search engine - one that provides as much value as Google but whose costs are paid in a different way, so that it does not have Google's incentives.