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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?

#361

Post by RyanAF7 »

What a lot of these comments are missing is the "new" part of the OP's question.

The "internet" is a term used to describe connected devices which use a common networking protocol.

The "web" is the domain/namesever www. set of text pages available for access on the internet.

The "Google-verse" is what has become of the web and the internet in which the accessible sites are those that play the game Google created.

So, to answer your question, without getting stuck in the weeds, yes. You can create a new "internet" without Google.

Will anyone want to use it? Well... that depends on how you create it.

The ability to leverage a new Web depends on how well the innovation incentivizes adaption and thus creates an exponential network effect.

Search , !=, =\=, .NE. the internet.

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

#362

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

codeulike wrote: post #357
supernovae wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of other things have changed since then, so the difference in tone you are noticing might not have much to do with search engines. In 1996 there were only about 16 million people on the internet, and usage obviously skewed towards the more technical nerdy crowd. Now there are 4,383 million people on the internet. Which is about 57% of everyone.

I see this a lot on HN. People forget that a lot of things in the early days of the Internet only worked because there were so few people on the Internet.

If you were rich and had a T1 in your home in the days everyone was on dialup, sure you could host a website yourself. But these days, even if you're one of the lucky residents on a gigabit symmetrical connection, there's a limit to how much you can serve. Self-hosting isn't an option unless your website is a niche.

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

#363

Post by supernovae »

codeulike wrote: post #357
supernovae wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of other things have changed since then, so the difference in tone you are noticing might not have much to do with search engines. In 1996 there were only about 16 million people on the internet, and usage obviously skewed towards the more technical nerdy crowd. Now there are 4,383 million people on the internet. Which is about 57% of everyone.

More people and fewer companies dominating how everything is found... i don't think that change is for the better.

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

#364

Post by 8bitsrule »

IME, searching by collections of keywords has become a good strategy. Avoiding using vague/topical keywords ('music', 'chemical'), instead asking for specific words that should/must be found in the search results. If the results start to exclude an important keyword (e.g. '1872' or 'giant' or 'legend'), put a plus sign in front of it and resubmit.

I regularly use DDG (which claims privacy) for this, and requests can be quite specific. E.g. a quotation "these words in this order" may result in -no result at all-, which is preferable to being second-guessed by the engine.

I wonder how 'search engines are not required' would work without expecting the searcher to acquire expertise in drilling down through topical categories, as attempts like 'http://www.odp.org/' did.

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

#365

Post by basch »

cthaeh wrote: post #358
basch wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says it even has the same kingmakers every day? Slashdot solved that part of metamoderation two decades ago. A person might be an expert in cars but not horses. A car expert might be superseded . The seed data creators could be a fluid thing.

This is a technocracy. Noone wants this but Hacker News.

Let's say you have a subreddit like /r/cooking. You think exposing a control in the user agent (browser, app, ui) that let's you sort recipe results by lay democracy, professional chefs, or restaurant critics taste is a technocracy?

Are consumer reports and wirecutter less valuable than Walmarts best sellers? Is techmeme.com worse than Hackernews by virtue of being a small cabal of voters? Should I dismiss longform.org and aldaily as elitist because they aren't determining priority solely from the larger populations preferences. Is Facebooks news algorithm better because it uses my friends to suggest content?

Is it a technocracy that metacritic and rotten tomatoes show both user and critic score? I'm proposing an additional algorithm that compares critic score with user score to find like voters and extrapolate how a critic would score a movie they have never seen. I think that would be useful without diminishing the other true scores. I would find it useful to be able to choose my own set of favorite letterboxd or redef voters and see results it predicts they would recommend, despite them never having actually voted on a movie or article. Instead of seeding a movie recommendation algorithm with my thoughts, I could input others already well documented opinions to speed up the process.

This idea would work better if people voted without seeing each others votes until after they vote. It might be hard to extrapolate Roger Ebert's preferences if voters formed their opinions of movies based on his reviews. You'd end up with a false positive that mimics his past but poorly predicts his future.

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

#366

Post by insulanus »

bitwize wrote: post #253
adrianmonk wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Yahoo back in those days, and it literally proved the point that hand-cataloging the internet wasn't tractable, at least not the way Yahoo tried to do it. There was just too much volume. It was wonderful to have things so carefully organized, but it took months for them to add sites. Their backlog was enormous. Their failure to keep up is basically what pushed people to an automated approach, i.e. the search e…

I found myself briefly wondering if it were possible to have a decentralized open source repository of curated sites that anyone could fork, add to, or modify. Then I remembered dmoz, which wasn't really decentralized -- and realized that "awesome lists" on GitHub may be a critical step in the direction I had envisioned.

I think this could work for small, specific areas of interest. For example, there are only so many people writing about, and interested in reading about, programming language design. Those small communities could stand ready with their community-curated index when an "outsider" wants to research something they know well.

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

#367

Post by topmonk »

What we should have is an open, freely accessible meta-information database of things like, whether user X liked/disliked, what other page/sites linked to this site, what their admins ranked this site as, if they did, etc., etc.

Then we have individual engines that take this data and choose for the user what to display for that user only. So if the user is unhappy with what they are seeing, they simply plug in another engine.

Probably a block chain would be good to store such a thing.

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

#368

Post by onion2k »

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?

I suspect just randomizing the first 20 or so results would fix most problems. The real issue is people putting effort in to hitting the first page, so if you took the benefit out of doing that people would look for other ways to spend their energy.

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

#369

Post by [deleted] »

ScottFree wrote: post #131
arpa wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even better, have something like git for the web - effectively working as an archive.

The problem with git is countering nefarious forces. The blockchain is better in that regard because the consensus algorithm can be used to verify that the listings are legitimate.

[deleted]

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

#370

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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