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

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

#191

Post by ativzzz »

vfinn wrote: post #106
_nalply wrote: post #14

The 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'…

Be careful what you wish for, as you might get AMP or some propriety Facebook format as a standard instead.

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

#192

Post by asark »

arpa wrote: post #124
narag wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is multiple actually: a) most internet-connected devices these days favor content consumption vs content creation (blogs vs instagram), b) mainstream culture > closely-knit communities (facebook > forums) c) big-player takeovers (facebook for groups, google for search) over previously somewhat niche areas and, actually, internet infrastructure d) if you're not a big player, you don't exist... and back to…

> a) most internet-connected devices these days favor content consumption vs content creation (blogs vs instagram),

You chose Instagram as your example, to make the point that phones favor consumption over creation?

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

#193

Post by davemp »

jasode wrote: post #187
davemp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously a naïve web directory isn't going to cut it. What would make the approach viable is if there were a nice way to automate and crowd source most/all of the effort. Maybe that means changing the idea of what makes a website. Maybe there could just be little grass roots reddit-esque communities that are indexed/verified (google already favors reddit/hn links). Who knows, but it's an interesting problem to kick…

>What would make the approach viable is if there were a nice way to automate and crowd source most/all of the effort. But to me, crowdsourcing is also what Jerry & David did. The users submitted links to Yahoo. AltaVista also had a form for users to submit new links. Also, Wikipedia's list of links are also crowdsourced in the sense that many outside websurfers (not just staff editors) make suggested edits to the wik…

Sometimes it just takes a small changes to make an idea work. Neural networks weren't viable until GPUs/backpropagation. Dismissive comments like this aren't very useful.

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

#195

Post by thekyle »

anchpop wrote: post #179
pif wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. Can you propose any viable alternative?

Ads are placed via an automatic auction upon pageview. GM and Ford both want to show me an ad when I google "what car to buy", and have automatic systems that decide how much they'd be willing to pay to show me that ad based on my likelihood of purchase (income, sex, location, etc). Why not have a system that follows me around and outbids them using funds from my bank account, to show me an ad which is just a transpa…

What you are describing is exactly what Google Contributor is trying to do. We'll have to see how it turns out.

https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

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

#196

Post by asark »

olegious wrote: post #51
_nalply wrote: post #14

The 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.

If we kill advertisement, you can say goodbye to the vast majority of content on the internet. The better approach is to make advertising a better experience and to create incentives for advertisers to spend ad dollars on quality content.

1) Not to most of the best content, 2) other business models may have an actual chance when not competing with "free", 3) actually-free, community-driven sites and services (and standards and protocols—those used to be nice) will have a larger audience and larger creator interest when not competing with "free" (and well-bankrolled).

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

#197

Post by thekyle »

worldsayshi wrote: post #44
_nalply wrote: post #14

The 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.

We could supercharge word of mouth. I've been thinking about an alternative upvote model where content is ranked not primarily based on aggregate voting but by: - ranking content that users you have upvoted higher - ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it p…

> ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher

This is what Reddit originally tried to do before they pivoted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_maki...

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

#198

Post by JD557 »

You could use something like Gnutella[1], where you flood the network with your query request and that request is then passed along nodes.

Unfortunately (IIRC and IIUC how Gnutella works), malicious actors can easily break that query schema : just reply to all query requests with your malicious link. I believe this is how pretty much every query in old Gnutella clients returned a bunch of fake results that were simply `search_query + ".mp3"`.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella

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

#199

Post by pif »

anchpop wrote: post #179
pif wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. Can you propose any viable alternative?

Ads are placed via an automatic auction upon pageview. GM and Ford both want to show me an ad when I google "what car to buy", and have automatic systems that decide how much they'd be willing to pay to show me that ad based on my likelihood of purchase (income, sex, location, etc). Why not have a system that follows me around and outbids them using funds from my bank account, to show me an ad which is just a transpa…

Are you actually proposing for people to gasp! pay gasp! for content?
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