Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search

rysiek rysiek at hackerspace.pl
Sat Jan 18 14:00:55 PST 2014


Dnia piÄ…tek, 17 stycznia 2014 10:55:33 Sean Lynch pisze:
> > In Firefox it's called "The Awesome Bar", and it sifts through your
> > history
> > and bookmarks (I bookmark a lot, and tag these pretty exactly, which helps
> > immensely).
> 
> I'm talking about anytime you type into text boxes.

Which "text boxes"? Any form on Teh Intertubes? THe AwesomeBar or SearchBar?

> The goal of this proposal was to return to the hypertextual nature of the
> web in order to reduce our dependence on centralized indexes. However, I
> find your proposal to improve the utility of the AwesomeBar interesting.

It's easy (it just requires a habit of decent tagging), and effective -- when 
I remember an information I found important from a website I visited, it's 
usually in my bookmarks, tagged properly. This means 95% of the time as far as 
information I have already seen is concerned, the AwesomeBar reaching down to 
my bookmarks is enough to get what I need, no need to go to Google here.

> > The downside, of course, is that it works only for links that I have
> > already
> > visited.
> > 
> > So here's the idea: sharing bookmark tags and links with each other, via
> > some
> > extention for example, and making "The Awesome Bar" (damn, I hate that
> > name)
> > sift through bookmarks/tags of people in your "network" (what that means
> > would
> > have to be defined, but as Mozilla Sync can already store bookmarks, the
> > data
> > can already be on a server, just use it).
> 
> An even simpler proposal: assuming the AwesomeBar doesn't already include
> live bookmarks in its autocomplete functionality, add it. Then anyone can
> simply publish their bookmarks via RSS and anyone else can import them.
> Then someone can just add functionality to create live bookmarks that pull
> signed and possibly encrypted (with Ed25519/Curve25519 of course) RSS feeds
> from a DHT.

Not that easy, as everybody would need to publish their bookmark RSS/Atom 
channels not entirely in accordance with how it is being done usually on the 
'Net. Usually, only the first 10-30 headlines/items are in the RSS/Atom 
channel, the older ones (it is assumed) are already cached in users' RSS/Atom  
readers.

Firefox does not cache live bookmarks, so each time you only get the current 
10-30 items, all older are "lost". This makes sense with regard to the 
intended use of this functionality in Firefox (and other browsers), but 
unfortunately makes it harder to implement interesting bookmarks sharing the 
way you described.

-- 
Pozdr
rysiek
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