Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

211–220 of 395 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It says it only works with "participating sites". I wonder why

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

#212
post #192
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes! Instagram has the appearance of a OC/creation platform, but, typically of such platforms (such as twitter/fb) the "content" is low-effort "convenient" opportunistic trivia, and the product consumed is likes, followers, etc.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Oh, interesting!

Makes me think that their original plan could still work if they just put a bit more effort into crafting that algorithm.

For example, the main criticism brought up is that things that you dislike that your peers like keep getting recommended. Why not add a de-ranking aspect into it and try adding downvote-peers in addition to upvote peers.

I imagine you could create this interesting query language that could answer questions like: what things do you like if you like X and Y but not Z? (I kind of remember that something akin to this have been hacked together using subreddit overlap.)

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

#214
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Twitter has a social graph and communities much like Reddit. This adds more information. There are people posting information who I trust and even know IRL. > All of those constraints are invisible. It's dangerous to think you have more control or insight there. And yet you are commenting as if these results aren't invisible to you? The machinery behind Google search results aren't invisible? Are you trying to say th…

> And yet you are commenting as if these results aren't invisible to you? The machinery behind Google search results aren't invisible?

Because of my unique and fortunate work history I understand the internals of these systems better than many people do. I'm objecting to the distinction you're drawing, not suggesting an alternative order of transparency. There really isn't much difference between the two companies output in the regard we're discussing.

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

#215
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, instead of platforms, other option would be a client software for different forums. Like Tapatalk. Is there anything like that but libre and/or desktop?

Reddit really did a good job of moving the masses away from site-specific forums.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is the problem. If you don’t rank in google you don’t exist on the internet. There is an entire economy built on manipulating search that is pay to play in addition to google continually focusing on paid search of natural SERPs. Controlling search right now is controlling the internet.

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

true, but when it was lycos, hotbot, altavista, google, webcrawler, aol, gopher, archy, usenet and so many other sources it was much easier to exist in many ways (harder to dominate) - people used to ‘surf the web’, join “webrings” and share stuff.. now they consume and post memes. so i blame behavior as much as monopoly

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

#217
I think there is a grain of a good idea here.

As i see it - new, "free search" internet would be a specially formatted content for each page published that will make it content easily searchable. Likely some tags within existing HTML content to comply with new "free search" standard.

Open source, distributed agents would receive notifications about new, properly formatted "free search" pages and then index such page into the public indexed DB.

Any publisher could release content and notify closest "free search" agent.

Then - just like a blockchain - anyone could download such indexed DB to do instant local searches.

There will be multiple variations of such DB - from small ones ("Free search", distributed agents will provide clutter-free interface to do detailed search for anyone.

I think this idea could easily be pickup up pretty much by everyone - everyone would be interested to submit their content to be easily searchable and escape any middlemen monopoly that is trying to control aspects of searching and indexing.

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

#218
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 remember trying to get one of my company's sites listed on Yahoo! back in the late 1990s. Despite us being an established company (founded in 1985) with a good domain name (cardgames.com) and a bunch of good, free content (rules for various card games, links to various places to play those games online, etc.), it took months .

That was my experience as well. For old companies and new. Yahoo was just really slow.

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

#219
post #110

Everyone 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…

I think heavy reliance on human language (and its ambiguity) is one of the main problems. Maybe personal whitelist/blacklist for domains and authors could improve things. Sort of "Web of trust" but done properly. Not completely without search engines, but for example, if every website was responsible for maintaining it's own index, we could effectively run our own search engines after initialising "base" trusted webs…

This would be ludicrously easy to game. Crowdsourcing would also be ludicrously easy to game.

The problem isn't solvable without a good AI content scraper.

The scraper/indexer either has to be centralised - an international resource run independently of countries, corporations, and paid interest groups - or it has be an impossible-to-game distributed resource.

The former is hugely challenging politically, because the org would effectively have editorial control over online content, and there would be huge fights over neutrality and censorship.

(This is more or less where are now with Google. Ironically, given the cognitive distortions built into corporate capitalism, users today are more likely to trust a giant corporation with an agenda than a not-for-profit trying to run independently and operate as objectively as possible.)

Distributed content analysis and indexing - let's call it a kind of auto-DNS-for-content - is even harder, because you have to create an un-hackable un-gameable network protocol to handle it.

If it isn't un-gameable it become a battle of cycles, with interests with access to more cycles being able to out-index those with fewer - which will be another way to editorialise and control the results.

Short answer - yes, it's possible, but probably not with current technology, and certainly not with current politics.

Post reply on HN