On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 11:40:14PM +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:

Google thus serves as an honesty mechanism, holding people responsible for what they have said and making it more difficult for them to conceal revisions to their published opinions.

Not necessarily. Anyone who wants to post something controversial and deny it later will hide it behind a cgi script or something Google won't index. Google caches catch only those who didn't take precautions.

It's unfortunate that we have to rely on Google. Imagine an ongoing, distributed project to cache the web. Volunteers could keep tabs on a subset of corporate and personal web pages and cache old versions when changes are made. Rewriting history becomes that much harder. And it's certainly a better use of computers than seti@home.

Sounds great. Good luck in starting it. I'm sure you've estimated how much this will cost -- and what market demand will be. -Declan (online since early 1980s, on the Internet since 1988, who still thinks FAQs are a great way to find info)

At 11:40 PM 10/9/01 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:

Google thus serves as an honesty mechanism, holding people responsible for what they have said and making it more difficult for them to conceal revisions to their published opinions.

...

It's unfortunate that we have to rely on Google. Imagine an ongoing, distributed project to cache the web. Volunteers could keep tabs on a subset of corporate and personal web pages and cache old versions when changes are made. Rewriting history becomes that much harder. And it's certainly a better use of computers than seti@home.

Very nice analysis. If you greatly reduce Google's speed of search, what kind of compression-gains can you get? Imagine an archive which is highly compressed [1] but used mostly to counter censorship. [1] That JPGs etc. are already highly compressed means that if you keep pictures, you won't gain as much by trading off search speed for compression.

At 11:40 PM 10/9/2001 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:

You are all missing the point. Google was being praised for its specific feature of acting as an internet-wide cache of old versions of web pages. Prior to 9/11 the page in question held inflammatory content praising bin Laden. Now it's been pulled. The google cache lets us see the previous version, thwarting the efforts of the page owner to hide his earlier sentiments.

Google thus serves as an honesty mechanism, holding people responsible for what they have said and making it more difficult for them to conceal revisions to their published opinions.

All this old-fogey talk about "I remember the days before Google" is nothing but hot air. Sure, things were harder before search engines; of course they were, but it's a trivial observation. The point is that this often-unappreciated cacheing feature of search engines can have a powerful influence on the nature of the Web.

It's unfortunate that we have to rely on Google. Imagine an ongoing, distributed project to cache the web. Volunteers could keep tabs on a subset of corporate and personal web pages and cache old versions when changes are made. Rewriting history becomes that much harder. And it's certainly a better use of computers than seti@home.

This is actually an excellent application front end for a Mojo Nation type system, as the data is redundant and distributed.