Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 395 posts

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

#61

Post by _nalply »

olegious wrote: post #51
_nalply wrote: post #14

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.

If we kill advertisement, you can say goodbye to the vast majority of content on the internet. The better approach is to make advertising a better experience and to create incentives for advertisers to spend ad dollars on quality content.

Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. I really hope this point of view gets killed together with advertisement.

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

#62

Post by fifnir »

olegious wrote: post #51
_nalply wrote: post #14

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.

If we kill advertisement, you can say goodbye to the vast majority of content on the internet. The better approach is to make advertising a better experience and to create incentives for advertisers to spend ad dollars on quality content.

The vast majority of content is absolute shit though, so speaking strictly for me, I'm willing to try

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

#63

Post by fifnir »

worldsayshi wrote: post #44
_nalply wrote: post #14

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.

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…

> ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher

That's how you make echochambers

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

#64

Post by eterps »

worldsayshi wrote: post #44
_nalply wrote: post #14

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.

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…

I've had similar ideas recently. Especially niche content (or shared research) would probably be notoriously hard (WRT false positives) for machine learning to decide whether it is relevant to you, people with similar interests know that much better.

I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way.

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

#67

Post by codeulike »

That was what the early internet was like (I was there). People built indexes by hand, lists of pages on certain topics. There was the Gopher protocol that was supposed to help with finding things. But this was all top-down stuff, the first indexing/crawling search engines were bottom-up and it worked so much better. And for a while we had an ecosystem of different search engines until Google came along, was genuinely miles better than everything else, and wiped everything else out. Really, search isn't the problem, its the way that search has become tied to advertising and tracking thats the problem. But then DuckDuckGo is there if you want to avoid all that.

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

#68

Post by 0815test »

theon144 wrote: post #50

Almost 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 f…

> A structured web ... has been found to be not scalable or flexible enough to accomodate for unanticipated needs - and not for a lack of trying!

Linked Open Data (the latest evolution of Semantic Web technologies) is actually working quite well at present - Wikidata now gets more edits per unit of time than Wikipedia does, and its data are commonly used by "personal assistant" AIs such as Amazon's Alexa. Of course, these can only cover parts of the web where commercial incentives, and the bad actors that sometimes pursue them, are not relevant.

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

#69

Post by loxs »

worldsayshi wrote: post #44
_nalply wrote: post #14

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.

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…

So, basically Facebook?

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

#70

Post by ntnlabs »

neoteo wrote: post #43

I 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 re…

I think this is not what was the original question. A device that knows You still needs indexing service to find data for You. IMHO.
Post reply on HN