171–180 of 395 posts
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And how would you find out if that question has been answered before? That would only work if there was single unified centralised question site. And then we are pretty much back at Google's single search field.
You don't need to. It's not a problem to ask and answer the same question repeatedly. School never had a problem with that.
I think Apple's current approach, where all the smarts (Machine Learning, Differential Privacy, Secure Enclave, etc.) reside on your device, not in the cloud, is the most promising. As imagined in so much sci-fi (eg. the Hosaka in Neuromancer) you build a relationship with your device which gets to know you, your habits and, most importantly in regard to search, what you mean when you search for something and what re…
>, where all the smarts [...] reside on your device, not in the cloud, is the most promising. [...] An on-device search agent could potentially be the best solution [...] Maybe I misunderstand your proposal but to me, this is not technically possible. We can think of a modern search engine as a process that reduces a raw dataset of exabytes [0] into a comprehensible result of ~5000 bytes (i.e. ~5k being the 1st page…
We already have the means to execute arbitrary code (JS) or specific database queries (SQL) on remote hosts. It's not inconceivable, to me, that my device "knowing me" could consist of building up a local database of the types of things that I want to see, and when I ask it to do a new search, it can assemble a small program which it sends to a distributed system (which hosts the actual index), runs a sophisticated and customized query program there, securely and anonymously (I hope), and then sends back the results.
Google's index isn't architected to be used that way, but I would love it if someone did build such a system.
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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?
The problem with forums is that you end visiting 5~10 different forums, each with their own login, and some of them might be restricted at work (not that you should visit them often). So it's easier to have 2~4 aggregators in where all the information you desire resides, even if in each of them there are different forums. A unified entry point helps adoption.
Taking 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 recently configured openring [1] and am liking it a lot. Example of one of my pages with it [2]
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
[2] https://www.jefftk.com/p/adventures-in-upstreaming scroll down to "Recent posts on blogs I like"
I 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 pu…
We could always ask a different question: what would it take for everyone to have a copy of the index? Humans can only produce new text-based content at a linear rate. If storage continues to grow at an exponential rate, eventually it becomes relatively cheap to hold a copy of the index. Of course those assumptions may not be valid. Content may grow faster than linear. Content may not all be produced by humans. Stora…
To pre-empt the "you've just described BitTorrent" comment - only in the vaguest sense; you'd need search functionality on the chunks themselves, and ideally you wouldn't have to copy (or even stream) your peers' search index chunks to search them.
I guess there's a trust / security issue here around "search index poisoning"; to resolve that, you'd probably have to lean on SSL verification and all of its attendant infrastructure for now.
Due to this I think people will have to use site-specific searches, directories, friend recommendations, and personal knowledge-bases to discover and connect things instead of search engines.
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>I welcome any attempts to build a more organized internet. I don't think the communal book pile approach is scaling very well. Let me know if I misunderstand your comment but to me, this has already been tried. Yahoo's founders originally tried to "organize" the internet like a good librarian. Yahoo in 1994 was originally called, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" [0] with hierarchical directories to cu…
> I often see several suggestions that the alternative to Google is curated directories but I can't tell if people are unaware of the early internet's history and don't know that such an idea was already tried and how it ultimately failed. ¿Por qué no los dos? 1) The idea is that a more organized structure is easier for a librarian to index. Today, libraries still have librarians. The book pile just wouldn't take dec…
I think these efforts get bogged down in the huge amount of content out there, the impermanence of that content and also the difficulty in placing sites into ontologies.
And at the end of the day, there's not a large enough value proposition to balance the immense effort.
I think, if you were to do it today, you would want to work on / with the internet archive, so at least things that were categorized wouldn't change or disappear (as much)
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Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. I really hope this point of view gets killed together with advertisement.
> Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. Can you propose any viable alternative?
I am being purposefully vague because I don't think people know what an effective version of that would look like, but its worth exploring.
If you have some data you might ask questions like:
1. Can this network reveal obscure information?
2. When -- if ever -- is it more effective than indexing by words?