21–30 of 395 posts
The evil big brothers may not be necessary. We just need to expand alternative search engines like YaCy.
This is what we had in early internet days, directories of links. Early Yahoo was the perfect example of this. You jumped from one site to another, you asked other people, you discovered things by chance. You went straight to a source, instead of reading a post of a summary of a site that after 20 redirections loaded with advertising and tracking gets you to the intended and actually useful destination. Most web site…
This is what I did back in 2015 as a project to increase my SEO rank to my business. Basically spam directory (and create my own) just to increase my pagerank.
Most 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…
ODP/DMOZ worked quite well while it was around. I don't think it would work equally well nowadays as a centralized project, because bad actors are so much more common today than they were in the 1990s and early 2000s; and because the Internet is so astoundingly politicized these days that people will invariably try to shame you and "call you out" for even linking to stuff that they disagree with or object to in a political sense (and there was a lot of that stuff on ODP, obviously!). But federation could be used to get around both issues.
1. Finding information is trivial
2. You don't need services indexing billions of rows to find any relevant document
Most 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 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 solution I can think of is some sort of transitive trust metric that's used to filter what's presented to you. If something gets by that shouldn't have (bad info/poor quality), you update the weights in the trust network that led to that action so they are less likely to give you that in the future. I never got around to working through the math on this, however.
I can't imagine how this is possible. Imagine I have a string of words (a quote from a book or an article, a fragment of an error message, etc), and I want to find the full text where it appears (or pages discussing it). How would you do that without a search engine?
I can't imagine how this is possible. Imagine I have a string of words (a quote from a book or an article, a fragment of an error message, etc), and I want to find the full text where it appears (or pages discussing it). How would you do that without a search engine?
You ask a question (possibly on Stack-Something) and don't get ridiculed for not using Google, since you live in a world where search engines don't exist.
I can't imagine how this is possible. Imagine I have a string of words (a quote from a book or an article, a fragment of an error message, etc), and I want to find the full text where it appears (or pages discussing it). How would you do that without a search engine?
You ask a question (possibly on Stack-Something) and don't get ridiculed for not using Google, since you live in a world where search engines don't exist.
I think this gets boring quick...
Most 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…