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

How about this: Internet as a service. Instead of looking for answers You will "broadcast" Your needs. Like "I need a study about cancer". And You will receive a list of sources that answered Your question. maybe with some sort of decentralised rating and maybe Country and author. How about that?

We could try and revive and improve the web-ring concept. Or more simply, convince the community to dedicate a page of their site linking to other related/relevant sites.

> In our current internet, we need a big brother like Google or Bing to effectively find any relevant information in exchange for sharing with them our search history, browsing habits etc.

Seems like you could access Google/Bing/etc. (or DuckDuckGo, which'd probably be a better start here) through an anonymizing service.

But, no, going without search engines entirely doesn't make much sense.

I suspect that what you'd really want is more control over what your computer shares about you and how you interact with services that attempt to track you. For example, you'd probably like DuckDuckGo more than Google. And you'd probably like Firefox more than Chrome.

---

With respect to the future internet...

I suspect that our connection protocols will get more dynamic and sophisticated. Then you might have an AI-agent try to perform a low-profile search for you.

For example, say that you want to know something about a sensitive matter in real life. You can start asking around without telling everyone precisely what you're looking for, right?

Likewise, once we have some smarter autonomous assistants, we can ask them to perform a similar sort of search, where they might try to look around for something online on your behalf without directly telling online services precisely what you're after.

This would be the internet that was used in Star Trek I think. The computers they use can just be asked about something and the whole system is searched for that - so the service to find things is inherent to the system itself. In our world things like that are done by entities who try to maximize their profits (like the Ferengi) without thinking too much about effectiveness or ethics.

This phenomena can be seen throughout many systems we built - e.g. use of internet, communication, access to electricity or water. We have to pay the profit-maximizing entities for all of this though it could be covered by global cooperatives who manage this stuff in a good way.

Yes, download data, create indices on your data yourself as you see fit, execute SQL queries.

If you don't have the resources to do so yourself, then you'll have to trust something, in order to share the burden.

If you trust money, then gather enough interested people to share the cost of construction of the index, at the end everyone who trust you can enjoy the benefits of the whole for himself, and you now are a search engine service provider :)

Alternatively if you can't get people to part with their money, you can get by needing only their computations, by building the index in a decentralized fashion. The distributed index can then be trusted at a small computation cost by anyone who believe that at least k% of the actors constructing it are honest.

For example if you trust your computation and if you trust that x% of actors are honest :

You gather 1000 actors and have each one compute the index of 1000th of the data, and publish their results.

Then you have each actor redo the computation on the data of another actor picked at random ; as many times as necessary.

An honest actor will report the disagreement between computations and then you will be able to tell who is the bad actor that you won't ever trust again by checking the computation yourself.

The probability that there is still a bad actor lying is (1-x)^(x*n) with n the number of times you have repeated the verification process. So it can be made as small as possible, even if x is small by increasing n. (There is no need to have a majority or super-majority here like in byzantine algorithms, because you are doing the verification yourself which is doable because 1000th of the data is small enough).

Actors don't have the incentive to lie because if they do so, it will be exposed provably as liars forever.

Economically with decreasing cost of computation (and therefore decreasing cost of index construction), public collections of indices are inevitable. It will be quite hard to game, because as soon as there is enough interest gathered a new index can be created to fix what was gamed.