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The world needs a non-profit search engine

daoudclarke.net

81–90 of 396 posts

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#81
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YaCy just crawls the results [again] locally before showing them to you.

Maybe I misunderstand, but doesn't that mean you lose the benefit of having distributed crawlers if everything has to be crawled (again) locally somewhere?

YaCy can do distributed crawling and exchange the Indexes (in Peer to Peer mode). I have some node's who just receives and send indexes without crawling (much less storage intensive).

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#83

I use duck duck go. Recently someone showed me their screen where they were using google to do a search. I was absolutely aghast. The last time I used google when you searched for something you saw a simple text list of sites (which is how DDG still works). Instead the google results were… a disaster. You had to scroll through some much garbage before finding actual search results - a list of sites. It was like googl…

Tip: When on someone elses computer, type ddg.co/yourquery in the adress field to quickly search on duckduckgo

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have family members who use google to navigate. Instead of writing facebook.com in the URL-bar, they search for facebook and click the first link...

Honestly that is probably safer. Having a typo in the url could Easley give you a phishing link. However, I also have gotten fishing adds when looking websites up so it’s not cut and dry at all.

Google search results and ads have been abused successfully:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-m...

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/scam-bank-google-a...

I think the only solution is education.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have a semi-manual system, with user input. So websites filled with SEO get manually flagged by users. Of course, you need to trust your users as well... this can be done with a Web of Trust-style reputation system: users endorse each other, and you can build a reputation graph/tree that traces reputation and easily cull bad subtrees. If this endorsement system conserves reputation (you give a fraction of you…

why can't all the users that are being paid to promote spam endorse each other? And won't distributed trust systems just make some people "trust billionaires" and others "trust impoverished" though no fault of their own? If everyone trusts Oprah she'll have the types of same power people complain about billionaires people now. Basically influence. Also, anyone who's close to her gets the blessing of her influence whe…

Mutual endorsement, if reputation is conservative, is like giving eachother reputation. If both users reputation is equal, there's no net gain (total reputation is always constant).

If one users reputation is higher, there's redistribution, but algorithms would need to carefully weight reputation linearly in all decisions, making redistribution not advantageous, solving any issues with sybil attacks[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#86

This seems really really naive. Do you really think a non-profit is going to fight the hordes of spammers, scammers, seo masses, mechanical turk hordes, etc that are going to game your system?

Wikipedia has to deal with similar issues. It's not easy, but it should be possible.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#87
This search engine is supported by The Bill (and Melinda?) Gates Foundation, The Organization for Promotion of Democracy, The Organization for Prosperity, The Organization For Truth And Transparency And Against Fake News, The Organization Against Renegade Knowledge, The Organization For Helping Silly Citizens Think Better, The Organization For The Truth About Qatar, The Organization For Freedom And Good Things And Not At All Tied to the CIA, and some other folks.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#89

This seems really really naive. Do you really think a non-profit is going to fight the hordes of spammers, scammers, seo masses, mechanical turk hordes, etc that are going to game your system?

Not sure I missed the sarcasm here. Why would a non-profit not fight spam etc.? Why would a for-profit fight spam do so?

I see the largest internet companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and also Google, fight spam and other harmful content only to the degree absolutely necessary to stay somewhat usable. Which makes sense because it's costly and does not generate profit.

I would expect a non-profit, however, to focus much more on fighting harmful content because it centers around the user experience, hence quality of the content.

I don't see a guarantee this works in practice, but the respective incentives seem clear.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#90
Perhaps a better approach would be building an open source www index or even a full current cache - as an enabler for people to build their own search engines?

Right now it is extremely difficult to build your own web crawler that would compete with Google. And that is not because of the technology, but because multiple sites will prevent your bot from accessing them if you're not Google or Bing - either through robots.txt, or through directly banning your IP if it's trying to crawl and it's not a confirmed google-bot.

Having a non-profit, open source, crawler that keeps an up to date index (or web cache) of the web would help competition spring up.

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