31–40 of 395 posts
What about Xanadu? Internet is very broken but almost no one seems to care (for a reason). Idea of more p2p web is there for a while but at the end of the day user don't care to much about anything so it probably never happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
It's a vision for an academic, small scale, network, not for a viable global web.
Finding information has never been trivial and until you can read people's minds to see what they really mean when they search for 'cookies' when they really mean "how to clear my internet browsing history for the past hour" it will continue to be non-trivial. The work Google has done in the search space is damn near magical. Your question belittles the literal billions of dollars and millions of man hours that have…
I don't think this question belittles Google's work.
I feel saying that would be like saying that animals that chose to live on the land were belittling millions of years of evolution in the water.
People working at Google chose to spends their time building a search engine for the world wide web, fine. That does not mean that sharing information accross a network has to be done via { world wide web, google }.
All of this is purely theroical of course, but I'm sure someone more creative than me would find another solution. Maybe not a solution that would exactly fit OP's description, maybe not a solution that would be practical with the current infrastructure.
But a solution that would render Google as-is obsolete ? Yes, I think that would be possible.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And then 5 other users ask the same question because they have no search engine. I think this gets boring quick...
I guess that would be the age of smaller communities centerd around a few websites only? Maybe, I don't know if we can consider google as enabling a real global community as of today. I pretty much browse around the same websites. Anything I want to find without a precise source of information in mind, I use google and stumble upon ads and ads and sometimes ads, but rarely an answer.
I sometimes still search stuff manually browsing through websites indexes. Some things are difficult to find with keywords. Equations of which the name you forgot. Movies with a plot so generic billions of result would be associated with it on a search engine. That piece of music of which you could write the notes on a sheet but don't remember the title.
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?
I think OP's idea is that search services would be built into the Internet, and not provided by a third party. That is, when a website is published or updated, it is somehow instantly indexed and made available for search as a feature of the platform on which it was published.
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.
https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...