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…
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#391Building something like this becomes much easier with Xanadu-style bidirectional links. Of course, building those is hard, but eliminating the gatekeeper-censors may finally be the incentive required to get bidi links built.
It's also worth noting that such a system will have to have some metrics for trust by multiple communities (e.g. Joe may think say, mercola.com is a good and reliable source of health info, while Jane thinks he's stuck in the past - People should be able to choose whether they value Joe's or Jane's opinion more, affecting the weights they'll see). In addition (and this is hard, too), those metrics should not be substantially game-able by those seeking to either promote or demote sites for their own ends. This requires a very distributed trust network.