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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?

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

BjoernKW wrote: post #86
_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.

Other than a completely new approach for producing value such as the 'Freeism' one described in the article suggested in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282851 (which I hadn't time to read yet and hence I'm neither in favour of or against) this simply boils down to the questions of who will pay for relevant content and what the business model will be. By and large, people don't seem to be willing…

> By and large, people don't seem to be willing to pay for content on the web. Hence, advertising became the dominant business model for content on the web.

I don't think the causality is right here. People might not be willing to pay for content on the web because advertising enables competitors to offer content for free. If you removed that option, if people had no choice but to pay, it might just turn out that people would pay.

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

#92

Post by kpbird »

anc84 wrote: post #28
Kaiyou wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask a question (possibly on Stack-Something) and don't get ridiculed for not using Google, since you live in a world where search engines don't exist.

And how would you find out if that question has been answered before? That would only work if there was single unified centralised question site. And then we are pretty much back at Google's single search field.

question and answer site is available - http://quora.com/ but it has the same problem, index and centralized information controlled by one company.

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

#93

Post by supernovae »

codeulike wrote: post #67

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 genuinel…

Search is the problem. If you don’t rank in google you don’t exist on the internet. There is an entire economy built on manipulating search that is pay to play in addition to google continually focusing on paid search of natural SERPs. Controlling search right now is controlling the internet.

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

#94

Post by Fjolsvith »

rglullis wrote: post #54
olegious wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There will always be bottom-feeders as long as there is a market where people are not forced to choose with their wallets. Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly.

> Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly.

I sure hope my content of preference beats out yours for not getting killed.

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

#95

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mhandley wrote: post #87
tjansen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have the storage to store it, but do you have the bandwidth to receive everything that's being produced?

There are 8 billion people. If half of them were awake, and 10 percent of that half are actually typing at 40 words/minute, that would be about 13Gbit/s. I couldn't receive that feed today at home, but my work could. A satellite feed could work today too. And I wasn't really talking about today, but 10-20 years from now. Storage will be a problem for a lot longer than network capacity.

Storage grows geometrically, while network capacity has grown less so. It's possible we will soon have more storage than humans can create content to fill. No problem; automated systems also fill storage!

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

#96

Post by Fjolsvith »

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…

This sounds so much like Facebook.

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

#97

Post by jasode »

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…

>, where all the smarts [...] reside on your device, not in the cloud, is the most promising. [...] An on-device search agent could potentially be the best solution [...]

Maybe I misunderstand your proposal but to me, this is not technically possible. We can think of a modern search engine as a process that reduces a raw dataset of exabytes[0] into a comprehensible result of ~5000 bytes (i.e. ~5k being the 1st page of search result rendered as HTML.)

Yes, one can take a version of the movies & tv data on IMDB.com and put it on the phone (e.g. like copying the old Microsoft Cinemania CDs to the smartphone storage and having a locally installed app search it) but that's not possible for a generalized dataset representing the gigantic internet.

If you don't intend for the exabytes of the search index to be stored on your smartphone, what exactly is the "on-device search agent" doing? How is it iterating through the vast dataset over a slow cellular connection?

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q="trillion"+web+pages+exabyte...

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

#98

Post by worldsayshi »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #96
worldsayshi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds so much like Facebook.

Any "social" ranking algorithm is going to sound at least superficially similar to what's already out there.

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

#99

Post by pavas »

dorusr wrote: post #82
pavas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking that the only way to get around the bad-actor (or paid agent) problem when dealing with online networks is to have some sort of distributed trust mechanism. I feel like manually curated information is the way to go, you just have to find some way to filter out all the useless info and marketing/propaganda. You can't crowd source it because it opens up avenues for gaming the system. The only solutio…

That's very workable.Any agent should have a private key with which it signs it's pushes. Age of an agent and score of feedback for that agent determine its ranking.Though that still leaves gaming possible with the feedback. But heavy feeback like "this is malicious content" could be moderated. (So that people cant just report stuff they don't like).

The reason I mentioned that the trust metric should be transitive and distributed is so that it prevents gaming as much as possible. You wouldn't want to have a trusted central authority (for everyone) because that could always be corrupted or gamed if it's profitable enough. Rather every individual would have a set of trusted peers with different "trust" weights for each based on the individual's perception of their trustworthiness, that could be changed over time.

This trust (weighting) should be able to propagate as a (semi-)transitive property throughout the network to take advantage of your trusted peers' trusted peers. This trust weight propagation would need to converge, and when you are served content that has been labeled incorrectly ("high-value" or "trustworthy" or whatever metric, when you don't see it that way), then your trust weights (and perhaps your peers') would need to re-update in some sort of backpropagation.

The hard part is keeping track of the trust-network in a way that is O(n^c) and having the transitive calculations also be O(n^c) at most. I'm quite sure there are ways of doing this (at least with reasonably good results) but I haven't been able to think through them.

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

#100

Post by Fjolsvith »

supernovae wrote: post #93
codeulike wrote: post #67

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 genuinel…

Search is the problem. If you don’t rank in google you don’t exist on the internet. There is an entire economy built on manipulating search that is pay to play in addition to google continually focusing on paid search of natural SERPs. Controlling search right now is controlling the internet.

If your target audience isn't on Google, then you don't have to rank there.

Almost all of my customers find me through classified advertising websites. Organic and paid search visitors to my site tend to be window shoppers.

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