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The world needs a non-profit search engine

daoudclarke.net

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Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#91

Post by skitout »

About the funding model, it would be great if normal donation works.

If not, I think the way some WEB3 projects are funded maybe an interesting inspiration (not talking about Ponzi scheme here). Many projects are "non profit" and sale tokens before the service is 100% ready. It funds the amelioration and scaling of the project. And the possibility to resale the tokens at a higher price in the future sometime attract token holders and often increase the "motivation" of the token holders / supporter of the project... fuel the community (money is only part of the motivation). Here token could be associated to symbolic "privileges" (badge, access to early releases), or governance (taking part of some votes).

This system have clearly some drawbacks, but allows sometimes to increase the number of early users and supporters, and get more funding while staying a non-profit.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#92

Post by gnramires »

pronlover723 wrote: post #74
gnramires wrote: post #32

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…

Well, you need to define your objectives. No system is robust to a failure of all its actors. If every user (and even developer) is ill-intended, no system will give good results. So we need some "hopeful" (and accurate) assumptions.

One might be that the typical user can sensibly elect a few individuals to trust -- it could be developers (which are a natural choice for trust), to activist and publicly visible individuals (even close friends). Then presumably you could adopt his trust model (such individuals could be roots in independent conservative trust webs/graphs). I think a very large number of such webs might be computationally expensive, but hopefully you'd be able to find someone you trust or start your own independent graph (if you trust no one, you'd effectively lose all anti-SEO measures I guess). This very naturally leads to a decentralized reputation system!

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#93

Post by kolinko »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #57

> Instead of looking at how long people spend on a site, we would encourage users to give explicit feedback on rankings and use this to improve our ranking system. While they're not wrong about how the way Google determines ranking has its issues, this way has its own set of problems. If you explicitly use user ratings as part of your rankings in some way, people can punish sites they don't like, ala review bombing o…

Bombing is one thing, but you also have a whole SEO industry now that will exploit any way possible to get to the top of the rankings.

The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#94

Post by YetAnotherNick »

unicornporn wrote: post #43
irrational wrote: post #6

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…

> I use duck duck go. You use a proxied Bing. If you want a proxied Google (what I prefer), you can use https://startpage.com

Is DDG proxied bing? I found DDG search results to be much better than bing.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#96

Post by jstummbillig »

_def wrote: post #75
jstummbillig wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is also what DDG is.

Is it?

Yes? Offering ad space (and placing affiliate links) is how they make money.

Difference to Google is how they position themselves in regards to privacy, and that Google actually built a search engine. Both make their money by providing ad space.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#97

Post by nix23 »

kolinko wrote: post #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 robo…

> 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?

That's a excellent idea! In the spirit of open-data, and people can do with it what they want.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#98

Post by dotcoma »

neoglow wrote: post #44
rvz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to finally tell them who DDG really relies on?

I get your point, but the fact remains that the interface is miles ahead of Google, just by not having all the garbage. The results are fine for me in day to day usage and I find that Google will not provide me with better results if I cant find it on DDG. Would it be better if they had their own indexer? Maybe...

Brave, Kagi, Neeva and Mojeek have their own indexes, I think.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#99

Post by kolinko »

ffguuficc wrote: post #17
TheChaplain wrote: post #11

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.

Oh no, it's not. Google's ads have been used to do phishing a lot. And - at least a few years ago, it was extremely difficult to report such ads.

Perhaps it has improved recently, but it used to be a plague in crypto - people getting ads for phishing sites instead of legitimate ones, losing money, and Google being unresponsive to reports.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#100

Post by noisenotsignal »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #47
noisenotsignal wrote: post #45

As the underlying project discussed by this post is a search engine, I searched for “mwmbl” on mwmbl.org [0], and no results were found! Relevant results like the main site and GitHub repo show up when searched on Google or Kagi. [0] - https://mwmbl.org/?q=mwmbl

I searched for "Google" on mwmbl, and while the first page of results found many results, including Google Patents, Google Bug Hunters, and a Google Books page on a 2004 book about Anarchism, it did not find Google's home page. I searched for "Elephant," and I got a Wikipedia page about a specific Elephant statue at Coney Island, a UK elephant charity, and a blog post about Haskell ("the elephant in the room"). It's…

To be honest, I didn’t entirely mean it as a comment on the search quality. But you would expect a search engine to return results about itself, and it was amusing it didn’t!
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