Maybe I'm missing the point. But Instagram, Facebook, Twitter - all of them are not mainly experienced through search but through a feed of endless content, curated by an algorithm. Most regular users don't even search that often, they consume. Maybe there could be an decentralized Internet where you follow specific handles and then they bring their content into your main "Internet" aka feed (= user friendlier RSS).
Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
41–50 of 395 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#42Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#43I think Apple's current approach, where all the smarts (Machine Learning, Differential Privacy, Secure Enclave, etc.) reside on your device, not in the cloud, is the most promising. As imagined in so much sci-fi (eg. the Hosaka in Neuromancer) you build a relationship with your device which gets to know you, your habits and, most importantly in regard to search, what you mean when you search for something and what results are most likely to be relevant to you. An on-device search agent could potentially be the best solution because this very personal and, crucially, private device will know much more about you than you are (or should be) willing to forfeit to the cloud providers whose business is, ultimately, to make money off your data.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#44The 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.
We could supercharge word of mouth. I've been thinking about an alternative upvote model where content is ranked not primarily based on aggregate voting but by:
- ranking content that users you have upvoted higher
- ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher
While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it possible for products and services to spread using peer trust rather than cold shouting.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#45The 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.
We could supercharge word of mouth. I've been thinking about an alternative upvote model where content is ranked not primarily based on aggregate voting but by: - ranking content that users you have upvoted higher - ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it p…
As long as there are big companies making money off their products, you can be sure they'll find a way to advertise them to you.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#46Seems unlikely. Search engines solves a key problem.
To me they are conceptually not the problem. Nor is advertising
This new wave of track you everywhere with ai brand of search engines is an issue though. They’ve taken it too far essentially.
Instead of respectable fishing they’ve gone for kilometer long trawling nets that leave nothing in their wake
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But you still need a third party to rank the results. I don't just want any page about my error message, I want the best page.
The page rank could be a transparent algorithm, which is regularly updated by a consortium like W3C.
The question is whether this would work in an adversarial setting where every party tries to inflate their page rankings by any trick they can find.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#48I wonder if we could rearranged the internet as decentralised nodes exchanging topic maps which then can be queried in a p2p fashion.
I've always imagined a kinda cross between Solid (ontology mapping) and Zeronet (seed hosted) with perhaps Dat for social (mutability) where crowd navigation determines the relations as a feedback. (original pagerank was a simplified version of such)
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#49There is still YaCy [1]. I'm not sure whether it's this one or another distributed search engine I tried 10 years ago, but the results were not very convincing. I believe that's to some extent because of a lack of critical mass, if more people would use these engines, they could improve their rankings and indexing based on usage.
Re: Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
#50Almost definitely not.
Search engines are there to find and extract information in an unstructured trove of webpages - no other way to process this than with something akin to a search engine.
So either you've got unstructured web (the hint is in the name) and GoogleBingYandex or a somehow structured web.
The latter has been found to be not scalable or flexible enough to accomodate for unanticipated needs - and not for a lack of trying! This has been the default mode of web until Google came about. Turns out it's damn near impossible to construct a structure for information that won't become instantly obsolete.