We need an alternative internet where anonymity between two parties is impossible.
Not a place for entertainment, but where government or business transactions can be safely conducted.
A search engine would be of secondary importance.
Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
151–160 of 395 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#152Everyone 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 w…
A few years ago there was that blogs thing, with rss... all things that favoured federation, independent content generation, etc. Now it's all about platforms. I understand that "regular people" are more comfortable with Facebook but, other than that, why are blogs and forums less popular now?
I'd argue that forums and blogs require more effort.
Read a cool blog post? Nobody around you will ever give a shit, because in order to do so, they'd have to read it too. Shared a photo from a vacation? It might start a conversation or two with people around you, while you receive dozens or hundreds of affirmations (in the form of likes).
I don't like to use social networks, but that's what I fall back on when I have a few minutes to spare. I rarely look at my list of articles I've saved for later — who has time for that?
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#153One way to replace search is to return to curation by trusted parties. Rather than anyone putting a web page up and then a passive crawler finding it and telling everyone about it, (why should I trust any search engine crawler,) we could "load" our search engine with lists of websites. These lists are published and maintained by curators that we have explicitly chosen to trust. When we type into the search box it can only return results from sites present on our personal lists.
e.g. someone's list of installed lists might look like:
- New York Public Library reference list
- Good Housekeeping list of consumer goods
- YCombinator list of tech news
- California education system approved sources
- Joe Internet's surprisingly popular list of JavaScript news and resources
How do you find out about these lists and add them? Word of mouth and advertising the old fashioned way. Marketplaces created specifically to be "curators of curators". Premium payments for things like Amazing Black Friday Deals 2019 which, if you liked, you'll buy again in 2020 and tell your friends.
There are two points to this. First, new websites only enter your search graph when you make a trust decision about a curator - trust you can revoke or redistribute whenever you want. Second, your list-of-lists serves as an overview of your own biases. You can't read conspiracy theory websites without first trusting "Insane Jake's Real Truth the Govt Won't Tell You". Which is your call to make! But at least you made a call rather than some outrage optimizing algorithm making it for you.
I guess this would start as a browser plugin. If there's interest let's build it FOSS.
Edit: Or maybe it starts as a layer on top of an existing search engine. Are you hiring, DDG? :P
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#154Everyone 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 w…
> or you find a novel way to make a neutral search engine Just because nobody's said it in this thread yet: blockchain? I never bought into the whole bitcoin buzz, but using a blockchain as an internet index could be interesting.
How would Merkle DAGs be relevant?
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#155One way to replace search is to return to curation by trusted parties. Rather than anyone putting a web page up and then a passive crawler finding it and telling everyone about it, (why should I trust any search engine crawler,) we could "load" our search engine with lists of websites. These lists are published and maintained by curators that we have explicitly chosen to trust. When we type into the search box it can…
Kind of like the Good Old Days™? Jokes aside, Search engines are for stuff we don't know... I get my news from some sites, this one for example, and I don't depend o Google for that... But when I want to know about the viability of zipping a UTF-8 encoded text to save space on my DB, there is no way to get may answer without a search engine...
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#156Taking a step back to before search engines were the main driver for finding content online, who remembers webrings? Is there a way to update that idea of websites deliberately recommending each other, but without having it be an upvote/like based popularity contest driven by an enormous anonymous mob? It needs to avoid both easy to manipulate crowd voting like reddit and the SEO spam attacks that PageRank has been t…
I think this is the most promising approach.
I value ratings by X person because they've never upvoted spam. I devalue ratings by Y person because they're a spam shill, and everyone associated with Y person because they're all a hive of spammers. And then https://xkcd.com/810/ .
It would devolve into semi-isolated enclaves of interconnected inter-trusting users, but as you discover them, you could "trust their trust" and instantly include their enclave by reference. Which I think is a good thing -- you'd find a community that's all about some topic, and instantly benefit from their years of content gathering.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you still need a third party to rank the results. I don't just want any page about my error message, I want the best page.
The page rank could be a transparent algorithm, which is regularly updated by a consortium like W3C. The question is whether this would work in an adversarial setting where every party tries to inflate their page rankings by any trick they can find.
Personally, I don't want "The page rank algorithm" I want 100 page rank algorithms made by 100 people. Transparency is important, but I think competition is more important.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#158Good 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 tim…
> but I can at least see who is pushing the link. I can determine if this person is someone I would trust for recommendations.
This doesn't seem true at all to me. Twitter dramatically shapes and modifies timelines to promote whatever they want. They're even more aggressive on modifying the search experience.
All of those constraints are invisible. It's dangerous to think you have more control or insight there.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#159How about this: Internet as a service. Instead of looking for answers You will "broadcast" Your needs. Like "I need a study about cancer". And You will receive a list of sources that answered Your question. maybe with some sort of decentralised rating and maybe Country and author. How about that?
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But heavy feeback like "this is malicious content" could be moderated. // You're just shifting around your trust problem. You need to handle 4chan level manipulation (million of users coordinating to manipulate polls), or Scientology depth (getting thousands of people in to USA government jobs in order to get recognised as a religion). If it's "we'll catch it in moderation" then whoever wants to manipulate it just g…
You can't get around the problem of manipulation if your trustworthiness metric for content will be the same for all people, as it is on reddit, hacker news, or Amazon for example. Having moderators just concentrates the issue into a smaller number of people and you haven't solved the central problem--manipulation is profitable. But think of how we solve this problem in our personal interactions with other people, an…
Any trust needs some kind of root. The big problem is that you need to prevent a billion real users from being "outvoted" in that Bayesian inference by a billion fake agents (augmented by thousands of paid 'influencers') saying that spam is ham and vice versa, and ensuring that they all have good reputation.