Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search

Sean Lynch seanl at literati.org
Wed Jan 1 10:11:23 PST 2014


On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 6:37 AM, Lodewijk andré de la porte <l at odewijk.nl>wrote:

> I'd like to ask people to wonder what Search Engines really do for us.
> Where is the catalog? Where is the cultivated list of good resources?
>

Well, in Google's case, the list is curated by those doing the linking, but
Google is trading richness of metadata for coverage.


>
> Do search engines provide the same level of guidance to its users that a
> written overview can?
>

No, but they cover far more of the Web than a manually curated index ever
could. They can answer questions like "what was that article I read last
week on this topic?" and "what other pictures exist of this person?"
Nobody's going to be writing written summaries of every single news article
and blog post.


> Why don't we create a distributed website catalog? It's harder, as
> anti-spam is the core feature. But competing with Google seems rather
> foolhardy at the moment.
>

I think this is a good idea. Spam can be handled by just signing all the
pages and having signed white and blacklists to create a web of
trust/distrust. Proof-of-work could be used when creating new signing
identities in order to make the blacklists useful.


> Maybe the word catalog isn't right, catalogs are too static and not
> discovery targeted at all.
>

I imagine something as simple as StumbleUpon, just "I like/dislike this",
perhaps with tags. One could add a signed inverted index as well to
facilitate searching by phrase.


> Maybe a Yahoo! answers type of tagging/cataloging would work rather well.
>
> Anyway: think about it guys! I'm sure there's a better way than "this
> keyword is also in this page which links to other good pages"!
>

Been thinking about it for a while ;-)
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