Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?

You've just more or less described Solid. https://solid.mit.edu/

I think a lot of people dismiss Solid based on its deep origins in Semantic Web, or because it's a slow project, based on Web standards, intended to solve long term problems.

But being part of the Web is a huge process, and with DIDs it maps just fine into decentralized worlds.

tl;dr the problems are 1) relevancy, 2) integrity, 3) content management/curation.

If you've ever tried to maintain a large corpus of documentation, you realize how incredibly difficult it is to find "information". Even if I know exactly what I want.... where is it? With a directory, if I've "been to" the content before, I can usually remember the path back there... assuming nothing has changed. (The Web changes all the time) Then if you have new content... where does it go in the index? What if it relates to multiple categories of content? An appendix by keyword would get big, fast. And with regular change, indexes become stale quickly.

OTOH, a search engine is often used for documentation. You index it regularly so it's up to date, and to search you put in your terms and it brings up pages. Problem is, it usually works poorly because it's a simple search engine without advanced heuristics or PageRank-like algorithms. So it's often a difficult slog to find documentation (in a large corups), because managing information is hard.

But if what you actually want is just a way to look up domains, you still need to either curate an index, or provide an "app store" of domains (basically a search engine for domain names and network services). You'd still need some curation to weed out spammers/phishers/porn, and it would be difficult to find the "most relevant" result without a PageRank-style ordering based on most linked-to hosts.

What we have today is probably the best technical solution. I think the problem is how it's funded, and who controls it.

Good question. I'm going to run an experiment.

First "go-to" for search will be my browser history.

As long as the site I know I'm looking for is in my browser history, then I'll go there and use the search feature to find other items from that site.

Bookmark all the advanced search pages I can find for sites I find myself searching regularly.

Resist mindless searching for crap content which usually just takes up time as my brain is decompressing from other tasks.

For search which is more valuable to me, try starting my search from communities such as Reddit, Twitter or following links from other points in my history.

Maybe if it's not worth going through the above steps, then it's not valuable enough to look up?

NOTE: Sites such as Twitter may not be much better than Google, but I can at least see who is pushing the link. I can determine if this person is someone I would trust for recommendations.

I bet if I did all of the above, I could put a massive dent in the number of search engine queries I do.

Any other suggestions?

Whatever you replace Search with would be gamed in the same way.

Unless there's a significant change in human behaviour, convenience is always going to trump everything else including privacy - we have seen over and over again that people will happily hand over their personal data in return for a free service that is simple to use. So any solution where you control your own data is going to have to be as convenient as alternatives, otherwise there'll be an opening for a new centralised "we'll do all the hard work of owning your data for you" mega corp tech titan.