Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

Vectoring Words (Word Embeddings) - Computerphile

https://youtu.be/gQddtTdmG_8?t=835

> Google rewards websites which use keywords in their url, title, headings, and first 100 words

can't say whether this is true for sites but they definitely encourage this behavior in ads -- the ads dashboard will shame you ('poor quality ad! we may not show this' kind of prompts) if you don't obey silly rules about 'how many keywords' appear in your title.

Yet Google encourages this type of search, where Google operates as some sort of oracle.

What seems like an endless army of Google proponents (perhaps they are simply "status quo" proponents) discourage anyone from even attempting to think about how the web could be organised without the need for a Google.

In a library, I can do searches restricted to certain subject areas. I might only be searching certain databases that pertain to certain subjects.

Whether it could ever be feasible to search the www by "subject area" is left as a question for the reader. In any event, if it were I would search for "koh lanta" in a relevant subject area, e.g., "travel reviews". One can search for pages that contain "koh lanta" on www sites using domain names registered from the .hr registry, e.g.,

  "koh lanta" site:.hr

What if all travel sites registered names from some registry, .travelreviews, and one could search pages that contain "koh lanta" on www sites using registered .travelreviews domains.

Even if I could just obtain a list of travel review websites, I could index those sites and then search that index for reviews that contain the terms (a) "croatia", or names of various destinations in Croatia, and (b) "koh lanta". If I was really patient I could use a script that simply performed the same search on each site, either using the site's "search" option or a search engine.

I am still not sure this search even makes sense. It seems to rely on an assumption that some traveller will compare Koh Lanta with some location in Croatia. What could make more sense is to define what are the specific charactersitics of Koh Lanta that one wants to find in a Croatian destination, then search for those. Then I might search not only travel reviews but sites that describe characteristics of Croatian travel destinations.

In any event, it is this sort of catgorisation of sites that is generally missing from the www. I believe it is feasible but "tech" companies like Google and its followers are not interested in promoting such facilities, preferring instead to pursue data collection about www users and programmatic online advertising. If Google is the "front page" of the www, then it can portray the www in the way it sees most beneficial to Google. For example, an endless sea of disorganised information that is impossible to utilise without Google's assistance. I certainly do not need to search billions of web pages to find the "koh lanta of croatia". I only need to search sites with travel reviews. But I do not get to limit a search like that. An advertising company gets to decide what is "relevant" to the terms I input. _Popularity_ (potential value for advertising to a wide audience) dictates what I can and cannot see of the www through Google.

About 10 years ago I started a proof of concept that aimed to catgorise a web (cf. "the" web) via non-ICANN issued domain names issued by a non-commercial domain name registry not governed by ICANN. The idea is that the FQDN can contain 1. a subject matter description (subdomain) 2. a trademark (domain) and 3. a Nice trademark class (TLD). Searches can then be done largely based on FQDN instead of heuristics such as "page rank", popularity or other metrics designed for advertising purposes. This new web has value to me because it is constructed from legitimate organisations that have invested in trademarks, i.e., they have a registered address and they pay their legal bills. Registering a mark suggests they have an existing or future brand to protect, a business that needs a mark to protect consumers from becoming confused about the origin of a product or service. (How many of those Chinese sellers on Amazon today have trademarks.) Ideally, this system filters out those who are not legitimate businesses. The garbage at the top of Google would not be possible. To game this system would require obtaining trademarks, not simply gaming ICANN's system of registries and registrars. (And we know ICANN itself is not a trusted steward of DNS, but a means for a select few to make huge profits from it.)

This prototype web was not meant as a replacement for "the" web, but as an experiment to separate out the commercial entities on the www from the non-commercial ones. Google and its ilk want a www where there is no distinction between commercial and non-commercial www use. All www use is surveilled for commercial purposes.

This mixing of commercial with non-commercial, to me poses one of the biggest threats to the www we started using in the early 1990s being wiped out. In the early days, there was this idea that TLDs would represent different categories of websites. For example, ".org" would be non-commercial websites, ".edu" would be educational institutions, and so on. Things have changed. The root.zone has exploded in size with countless "gTLDs", most of them are purely commercial. History is showing that it is infeasible to demand that TLDs enforce some sort of rules over the contents of websites that use them. One needs "Google" to help figure out what websites are worth visiting.

The prototype web in theory allows one to find legitimate brands on the www by searching registered marks or subject matter descriptions within Nice trademark classes that are contained in FQDNs, not the contents of web pages. It is the antithesis of what one sees on Amazon today, what with a gazillion Chinese knock-offs, including Amazon's own "brands". There is no "SEO" on this new web because the contents of web pages, e.g., "backlinks", are not the basis for search.

But do not worry, the prototype web does not exist and would never work. It is a terrible idea. Google will never die. See you in the Metaverse.

> It is interesting that non commercial sources have more of a voice on these search engines than on Google today.

I sort of agree, I also sometimes use Yandex and am usually positively surprised.

I can immediately see two reasons:

A) SEO efforts are targeted Google/Bing, not other search engines that don't focus on the target market/language/region. Of course that argument can be twisted around: these search engines don't focus on Western languages, so could in theory be more susceptible to SEO trickery. It's interesting that they aren't.

B) Ad money. Google is strongly incentivized to prefer search results that show Google ads. For foreign search engines there is no money to be made, so they can disregard that signal.