Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search

[Cathal Garvey]

I've been considering this. We all still link, and link richly and
often. It's just that our links no longer take the form of a dedicated
"link index" as they did in the nineties, and are now more often either
inline or colon-ised; either "I just found a [great resource on
whatever]" or "I just found a great resource on whatever: [link]". The
former is more common on blogs, the latter on twitter.

So, to take your idea. An index based on your web browsing habits is, I
feel, not so useful, because we all often follow links to stuff that's
not generally interesting to us, often by anonymous links (2 girls one
kitteh). So the index would be populated with lots of spurious stuff
that'd be forward-indexed and made into nonsense. You type "girls" and
kitteh-scat-porn comes up. :)

However, there's another type of index that at least some of us engage
in that's more likely to be relevant; RSS/Atom feeds, and Microstatus
feeds. The former is interest-based, the latter social-based. By
scanning the stuff we explicitly subscribe to and indexing ahead, we not
only get a curated source by which to infer "trusted" metadata (i.e. if
we follow a medical blog and it links to viagra, we know it's not a
spammer but a trusted person recommending a link), but the links
themselves are likely to be related to our interests.

By then publishing our indexes along with our blogs or microstatus feeds
(borrow an XML callback system from the fairly Byzantine status.net
standard and publish it in your post headers/about me block), we also
get "trusted" access to a web of our friends, follows and favourite
blogs by which to form a social search engine.

This has several advantages. For one thing, the social/subscription web
can be used to infer relative trust. If you follow a person who
recommends a link and several people you know also follow and trust that
person's links, then that link may be given more relative "trust" than
an outlier that only you follow.

So, that seems pretty pie in the sky, right? A standard rather than a
codebase. But there's a huge advantage to this line of thought, if
you'll bear with me. A two-digit fraction of the web right now is
powered by Wordpress.org, who explicitly advocate open/free culture. If
you can convince them to include a social search/index standard of this
type, which is virtually free in terms of computer resources, then you'd
have it deployed across the web in days as the next update rolled out.

Indeed, even if Wordpress seemed reluctant, a wordpress plugin could
probably be written quickly enough to enable such a thing and make it
available for casual use. Suddenly, a bunch of PHP-powered sites around
the web start committing small bits and pieces of resources to a social
search engine based on human-curated attestations of trust that flow
through a web, helping to confine spammers to the fringes and to users
with stupid taste.

Also worthy of consideration is Jekyll, though that's a static site so
index compilation would be more costly per-publication (you'd have to
recompile with each blogpost) and there's no scope for an active
callback where readers can suggest index additions back.

Thoughts welcome, I don't even code PHP so it's all speculation here. :)

On 02/01/14 21:04, Sean Lynch wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 3:46 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>> As a matter of fact, it still does work.
>>
> 
> It works far less, though, since most people expect others to rely on
> search engines, so they don't bother to link anymore.
> 
> Here's a thought: browser extension that stores your "personal" web index,
> and gives you a typeahead menu when you write about concepts in your index,
> prompting you to convert phrases to links. Like the way Facebook always
> wants to convert the names of people and pages to tags. Even if it were
> just primed with Wikipedia, that would drastically reduce the amount of
> Google searching people need to do when reading stuff you write.
> 
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