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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#281

Post by dsparkman »

organsnyder wrote: post #147
jasode wrote: 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 not a bad thing. It was curated. Most of the crap never made it in the directory precisely because humans made decisions about what got in. If you wanted in the directory faster, you could pay a fee to get to the front of the queue. The result is that Yahoo could hire people to process the queue and make money without ads.

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

#282

Post by ZeroBugBounce »

Retra wrote: post #278
adrianmonk wrote: post #257

I think it would be helpful to remember to distinguish two separate search engine concepts here: indexing and ranking. Indexing isn't the source of problems. You can index in an objective manner. A new architecture for the web doesn't need to eliminate indexing. Ranking is where it gets controversial. When you rank, you pick winners and losers. Hopefully based on some useful metric, but the devil is in the details on…

Couldn't you just randomize result ordering?

Sure, but then whoever gets to populate the index chooses the winners and losers, because you could just stuff it with different versions of the content or links you wanted to win and the random ranking would should those more often, because they appear in the pool of possible results more often.

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

#284

Post by allworknoplay »

adrianmonk wrote: post #257

I think it would be helpful to remember to distinguish two separate search engine concepts here: indexing and ranking. Indexing isn't the source of problems. You can index in an objective manner. A new architecture for the web doesn't need to eliminate indexing. Ranking is where it gets controversial. When you rank, you pick winners and losers. Hopefully based on some useful metric, but the devil is in the details on…

Spitballing here, but what if instead of a monolithic page rank algorithm, you could combine individually maintained, open set rankings?

===Edit=== I mean to say you as the user would gain control over the ranking sources, the company operating this search service would perform the aggregation and effectively operate marketplace of ranking providers. ===end edit===

For example, one could be an index of "canonical" sites for a given search term, such that it would return an extremely high ranking for the result "news.ycombinator.com" if someone searches the term "hacker news". Layer on a "fraud" ranking built off lists of sites and pages known for fraud, a basic old-school page rank (simply order by link credit), and some other filters. You could compose the global ranking dynamically based off weighted averages of the different ranked sets, and drill down to see what individual ones recommended.

Seems hard to crunch in real time, but not sure. It'd certainly be nicer to have different orgs competing to maintain focused lists, rather than a gargantuan behemoth that doesn't have to respond to anyone.

Maybe you could even channel ad or subscription revenue from the aggregator to the ranking agencies based off which results the user appeared to think were the best.

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

#286

Post by leadingthenet »

alfanick wrote: post #108

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…

To me it seems that you’ve just recreated Reddit.

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

#287

Post by mavsman »

adrianmonk wrote: post #257

I think it would be helpful to remember to distinguish two separate search engine concepts here: indexing and ranking. Indexing isn't the source of problems. You can index in an objective manner. A new architecture for the web doesn't need to eliminate indexing. Ranking is where it gets controversial. When you rank, you pick winners and losers. Hopefully based on some useful metric, but the devil is in the details on…

How about open sourcing the ranking and then allowing people to customize it. I should be able to rank my own search results how I want to without much technical knowledge.

I want to rank my results by what is most popular to my friends (Facebook or otherwise) so I just look for a search engine extension that allows me to do that. This could get complex but can also be simple if novices just use the most popular ranking algorithms.

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

#288

Post by cortesoft »

Retra wrote: post #278
adrianmonk wrote: post #257

I think it would be helpful to remember to distinguish two separate search engine concepts here: indexing and ranking. Indexing isn't the source of problems. You can index in an objective manner. A new architecture for the web doesn't need to eliminate indexing. Ranking is where it gets controversial. When you rank, you pick winners and losers. Hopefully based on some useful metric, but the devil is in the details on…

Couldn't you just randomize result ordering?

That would make it waaaay less useful to searchers and wayyy easier to game by stuffing results with thousands of your own results

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

#289

Post by TaylorAlexander »

allworknoplay wrote: post #284
adrianmonk wrote: post #257

I think it would be helpful to remember to distinguish two separate search engine concepts here: indexing and ranking. Indexing isn't the source of problems. You can index in an objective manner. A new architecture for the web doesn't need to eliminate indexing. Ranking is where it gets controversial. When you rank, you pick winners and losers. Hopefully based on some useful metric, but the devil is in the details on…

Spitballing here, but what if instead of a monolithic page rank algorithm, you could combine individually maintained, open set rankings? ===Edit=== I mean to say you as the user would gain control over the ranking sources, the company operating this search service would perform the aggregation and effectively operate marketplace of ranking providers. ===end edit=== For example, one could be an index of "canonical" si…

Well I suppose Google has some way of customizing search for different people. The big issue for me is that google tracks me to do this. Maybe there could be a way to deliver customized search where we securely held the details of our customization. Or we were pooled with similar users. I suppose if a ranking algorithm had all the possible parameters as variables, we could deliver our profile request on demand at the time of search. That would be nice. You could search as a Linux geek or as a music nut or see the results different political groups get.

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

#290

Post by z3t4 »

Retra wrote: post #278
adrianmonk wrote: post #257

I think it would be helpful to remember to distinguish two separate search engine concepts here: indexing and ranking. Indexing isn't the source of problems. You can index in an objective manner. A new architecture for the web doesn't need to eliminate indexing. Ranking is where it gets controversial. When you rank, you pick winners and losers. Hopefully based on some useful metric, but the devil is in the details on…

Couldn't you just randomize result ordering?

If you find nothing useful, just refresh for a new set. It would also help discovery.
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