On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 6:37 AM, Lodewijk andré de la porte
   <[1]l@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 ;-)

References

   1. mailto:l@odewijk.nl