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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?

#231

Post by wolco »

_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.

To kill advertising would mean the web would live behind many walled gardens where each site requires membership.

For the remaining free sites you will see advertising in different forms (self promotion blog, the upsell, t-shirt stores on everysite, spam-bait).

Advertising saved the internet.

Now tracking.. for advertising or other purposes is the real problem.

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

#232

Post by zzbzq »

https://medium.com/@Gramshackle/the-web-of-native-apps-ii-go...

Cliff's notes:

- Apps should run not in a browser, but in sandboxed App containers loaded from the network, somewhat between Mobile Apps and Flash/Silverlight. Mobile apps that you don't 'install' from a store, but navigate to freely like the web. Apps have full access to the OS-level APIs (for which there is a new cross-platform standard), but are containerized in chroot jail.

- An app privilege ("this wants to access your files") should be a prominent feature of the system, and ad networks would be required to built on top of this system to make trade-offs clear to the consumer.

- Search should be a functionality owned and operated by the ISPs for profit and should be a low-level internet feature seen as an extension of DNS.

- Google basically IS the web and would never allow such a system to grow. Some of their competitors have already tried to subvert the web by the way they approached mobile.

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

#233

Post by kickscondor »

iblaine wrote: post #228

Yes, it was called Yahoo and it did a good job of cataloging the internet when hundreds of sites were added per week: https://web.archive.org/web/19961227005023/http://www2.yahoo... I'm old enough to remember sorting sites by new to see what new URLs were being created, and getting to that bottom of that list within a few minutes. Google and search was a natural response to solving that problem as the number of sites…

Directories are still useful - Archive of Our Own (https://archiveofourown.org/) is a large example for fan fiction, Wikipedia has a full directory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Main_topic_classifica...), Reddit wikis perform this function, Awesome directories (https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome) or personal directories like mine at href.cool.

The Web is too big for a single large directory - but a network of small directories seems promising. (Supported by link-sharing sites like Pinboard and HN.)

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

#234

Post by Nasrudith »

luxuryballs wrote: post #222
izendejas wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Everyone's missing the point of a search engine. We're talking about billions of pages and if not ranked (authority is a good hueristic), filtered (de-ranked), etc then good luck finding valuable information because everyone is gaming the systems to improve their ranking. I think this is part of the reason you get a lot of fake news on social media. It's a constant stream of information (a new dimension of time…

The reverse is a problem too, Google filtering things out based on their political leanings in an attempt to shape public opinion.

I haven't seen any examples which were anything other than runaway persecution complexes of those who found their world view was less popular than they believed - which were greeted with exasperation by testifying engineers who had to explain how absurdly unscaleable it would be to do it manually.

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

#235

Post by albertgoeswoof »

d-sc wrote: post #227

Indexing information is a political problem as much as a technical one. Ultimately there will always be people who will put more effort into getting their information known than others. These people would game whatever technical solution exists.

Thats true. What if you could artificially limit the amount of effort someone can put in to getting content out there? Or even make it known to the consumer how/why the content is ranked highly?

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

#236

Post by hideo »

This isn't an entire solution, but Van Jacobson's Content-Centric Networking concept is fascinating, especially when you consider its potential social impact compared to the way the internet exists today

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150IDS/final_papers/ccasey01.2... http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2009/papers/Jacobson....

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

#237

Post by sonnyblarney »

G is apparently losing a lot of product related search to Amazon, I suggest that the 'siloing' of the web, for better or worse, might yield some progress here.

i.e. when you search, you start in a relevant domain instead of Google so Amazon for products, Stack Exchange for CS questions.

Obviously not ideal either.

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

#238

Post by basch »

izendejas wrote: post #221
basch wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also a spam filter. It's not just an index of whats relevant, but removal of what maliciously appears to be relevant at first glance.

This. Everyone's missing the point of a search engine. We're talking about billions of pages and if not ranked (authority is a good hueristic), filtered (de-ranked), etc then good luck finding valuable information because everyone is gaming the systems to improve their ranking. I think this is part of the reason you get a lot of fake news on social media. It's a constant stream of information (a new dimension of time…

i disagree that there isnt a way, just that nobodies tried a good one yet.

take reddit for example. it should be very easy to establish a few voters who make "good" decisions, and then extrapolate their good decisions based on people with similar voting patterns. it would combine a million monkeys with typewriters with expert meritocracy. you want different sorting, sort by different experts until you get the results you want. it seems every platform is too busy fighting noise to focus on amplifying signal, or are focused on teaching machines to do the entire task, instead of using machines to multiply the efficiency of people with taste who can make a good judgement call with regard to whether something is novel or or pseudo-intellectual. Not to pick on them, but I would suspect an expert to be better at deranking aeon/brainpickings type clickbait than an eruditelike ai, if only because humans can still more easily determine if someone is making an actual worthwhile point, vs repeating a platitude, conventional wisdom, or something hollow.

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

tablethnuser wrote: post #153

One 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…

[deleted]
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