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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?

#301

Post by asdff »

r3bl wrote: post #152
narag wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago there was that blogs thing, with rss... all things that favoured federation, independent content generation, etc. Now it's all about platforms. I understand that "regular people" are more comfortable with Facebook but, other than that, why are blogs and forums less popular now?

I'd argue that forums and blogs require more effort. Read a cool blog post? Nobody around you will ever give a shit, because in order to do so, they'd have to read it too. Shared a photo from a vacation? It might start a conversation or two with people around you, while you receive dozens or hundreds of affirmations (in the form of likes). I don't like to use social networks, but that's what I fall back on when I hav…

>I don't like to use social networks, but that's what I fall back on when I have a few minutes to spare. I rarely look at my list of articles I've saved for later — who has time for that?

Plenty of people. Ever push an article to a reader view service and see how long it takes to read? Most articles posted here on HN or the nyt front page can be read in 3-5 mins. Occasionally you'd get a 20 min slog.

I used to use social media way more, and by far my biggest wastes of time on the platform were those spare minutes you get a dozen times a day. On the elevator, waiting for the bus, waiting on food, anytime I could sit still the phone went out and my head went down because that's what everyone around me was also doing while waiting on their coffee.

Eventually I realized I was just idly scrolling and not retaining anything at all from those 30s-2m sessions on instagram. Just chomping visual popcorn. Now, anytime I have a spare 10 mins, I'll read an article or two from my reading list. Anytime I have less than a spare 10 mins, I'll twiddle my thumbs and keep the phone in the pocket.

I used to be much more scatterbrained and had trouble winding down for the evening and getting good rest. Now, I feel like a monk.

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

#302

Post by asdff »

ajot wrote: post #173
JaumeGreen wrote: post #137

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?

rss

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

#303

Post by tudelo »

quelsolaar wrote: post #261

Yes, we need search engines, but they don't need to be monolithic. Imagine that indexing the text of your average web page takes up 10k. Then you get 100.000 pages per Gig. It means that you if you spend ~270USD on a consumer 10 tera drive you can index a billion webpages. Google no longer says how many pages they index, but its estimated to be with in one order of magnitude of that. This means that in terms of hardw…

How would you begin indexing everything?

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

#304

Post by arpa »

fehrnstr wrote: post #260
arpa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

content change signed by creators private key, otherwise merge is rejected? or, wiki approach...

Just signing with a private key isn't a guarantor of anything other than that if you trust that the person with the key is who they say they are, then the actual content is from them. But that would require a massively large web of trust in itself: that all the private keys would be trusted. And if you only let in private keys that you explicitly trusted, then it's very likely you could end up with an echo chamber

good point, but we already have the PKI in place, and use it for SSL.

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

#305

Post by notahacker »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #168
BjoernKW wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you achieve that? By outrightly outlawing advertising? There absolutely are paid options on the web. It's just that they don't seem to appeal to a sufficient number of buyers so advertising could become irrelevant.

> How would you achieve that? By outrightly outlawing advertising? Yes. > There absolutely are paid options on the web. It's just that they don't seem to appeal to a sufficient number of buyers so advertising could become irrelevant. They aren't appealing in the presence of ad-subsidized free alternatives . Remove the latter, and they just might become appealing again.

Few things sound less likely to improve the internet than some entity having the power to content-police the web and remove anything it accuses of the thoughtcrime of advertising...

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

#306

Post by tracker1 »

ovi256 wrote: 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 don't think it would be an issue if Google wasn't creating "special" rules for specific winners and losers (overall). Hell, I really wish they'd make it easy to individually exclude certain domains from results.

The canonical example to me of something to exclude would be the expertsexchange site. After stack overflow, ee was more than useless, and even before it was just annoying. There are lots of sites with paywalls, and other obfuscations to content and imho these sites are the ones that should be dropped/low-ranked.

But the fact that there's no autocomplete for "Hillary Clinton is|has" (though "Donald Trump is" is also filtered). Yes, it's been heavily gamed. It's also had active meddling. And their control over YouTube seems to be even worse, with disclosed documents/video that indicate they're willing to go so far as outright election manipulation. With all indications that Facebook, Pinterest and others are going the same route.

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

#307

Post by bobajeff »

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…

I like the idea of local personalized search ranking that evolves based off of a on device neural network. I'm not sure how that would be work though.

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

#308

Post by Nasrudith »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #166
Fjolsvith wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. That sounds like a free market model. Isn't this what different newspapers like NYT and WSJ are moving towards? Why can't both models coexist?

Because one totally destroys the other. Slave labour, selling poison or dumping waste into rivers are all superior business models too, but that doesn't mean they should exist in a civilized society.

The train also destoyed the horse drawn wagon train for bulk land transport.

Just because it totally destroys another business model doesn't mean it is wrong. Felony interference with a business model protectionism isn't good for societies. Historically this stagnant "stability" gets them lapped and forced into the modern world if lucky or conquered if not no matter how vigorously they insist that it is the only and right way.

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

#309

Post by organsnyder »

dsparkman wrote: post #281
organsnyder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't paying money to jump to the front of the queue just another form of advertising?

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

#310

Post by MadWombat »

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…

I wonder if indexing and ranking could be decentralized. Lets say we design some data formats and protocols to exchange indexing and ranking information. Then maybe instead of getting a single Google, we could have a hierarchical system of indexers and rankers and some sort of consensus and trust algorithm to aggregate the information between them. Maybe offload indexing to the content providers altogether, i.e. if you want your website found, you need to maintain your own index. Maybe do a market on aggregator trust, if you don't like a particular result, the corresponding aggregator loses a bit of trust and its rankings become a bit less prominent.
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