Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant? - <AUTHOR> If we were to design a brand new internet for today's world, can we develop it such a way that:
1- Finding information is trivial
2- You don't need services indexing billions of pages to find any relevant document
In our current internet, we need a big brother like Google or Bing to effectively find any relevant information in exchange for sharing with them our search history, browsing habits etc.  Can we design a hypothetical alternate internet where search engines are not required? <comment><USER4> I think it would be helpful to remember to distinguish two separate search engine concepts here: indexing and ranking.

Indexing isn't the source of problems. You can index in an objective manner. A new architecture for the web doesn't need to eliminate indexing.

Ranking is where it gets controversial. When you rank, you pick winners and losers. Hopefully based on some useful metric, but the devil is in the details on that.

 _The thing is, I don 't think you can eliminate ranking._ Whatever kind of site(s) you're seeking, you are starting with some information that identifies the set of sites that might be what you're looking for. That set might contain 10,000 sites, so you need a way to push the "best" ones to the top of the list.

Even if you go with a different model than keywords, you still need ranking. Suppose you create a browsable hierarchy of categories instead. Within each category, there are still going to be multiple sites.

So it seems to me the key issue isn't ranking and indexing, it's who controls the ranking and how it's defined. Any improved system is going to need an answer for how to do it.

<comment><USER5> How about open sourcing the ranking and then allowing people to customize it. I should be able to rank my own search results how I want to without much technical knowledge.

I want to rank my results by what is most popular to my friends (Facebook or otherwise) so I just look for a search engine extension that allows me to do that. This could get complex but can also be simple if novices just use the most popular ranking algorithms.

<comment><USER6> That would bring to an even bigger filter bubble issue, more precisely to a techno élite which is capable, willing and knowledgeable enough to feel the need go through the hassle, and all the rest navigating in such an indexed mess that would pave the way to all sort of new gatekeepers, belonging to the aforementioned tech élite. It's not a simple issue to tackle, perhaps a public scrutiny on the ranking algorithms would be a good first step.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. The people who don't know anything and are unwilling to learn wouldn't be any worse off than they are today and everyone else would benefit from an open source "marketplace" of possible ranking algorithms that the so called "techno elite" have developed.

<comment><USER6> I think the proposed improvement to the web in its intentions should mostly benefit the "ignorants", not those that can already navigate through the biases of today's technological gatekeepers. Please note, ignorants are not at fault for being so. Especially when governments cut funds for public education, and media leverages (and multiplies) ignorance to produce needs and sales, fears and votes. Any solution must work first to make the weak stronger, more conscious. A better and less biased web can help people grow their unbiased knowledge, and therefore exercise their right of vote with a deeper understanding of the complexity. Voting ignorants are an opportunity for the ill intentioned politicians, as much as are a problem for me, you and the whole country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, it was called Yahoo and it did a good job of cataloging the internet when hundreds of sites were added per week: [https://web.archive.org/web/19961227005023/http://www2.yahoo...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961227005023/http://www2.yahoo.com/)

I'm old enough to remember sorting sites by new to see what new URLs were being created, and getting to that bottom of that list within a few minutes. Google and search was a natural response to solving that problem as the number of sites added to the internet grew exponentially...meaning we need search.

<comment><USER9> Directories are still useful - Archive of Our Own ([https://archiveofourown.org/](https://archiveofourown.org/)) is a large example for fan fiction, Wikipedia has a full directory ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Main_topic_classifica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Main_topic_classifications)), Reddit wikis perform this function, Awesome directories ([https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome)) or personal directories like mine at href.cool.

The Web is too big for a single large directory - but a network of small directories seems promising. (Supported by link-sharing sites like Pinboard and HN.)

<comment><USER10> How about this

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists)

<comment><USER9> Yes! But, of course, for directories outside of Wikipedia. This is very interesting for its classification structure. It's so typical of Wikipedia that a 'master list of lists' (by my count, there are 589 list links on this page) contains lists such as "Lists of Melrose Place episodes" and "Lists of Middle-earth articles" alongside lists such as "lists of wars" or "lists of banks".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everyone has missed the most important aspect of search engines, from the point of view of their core function of information retrieval: they're the internet equivalent of a library index.

Either you find a way to make information findable in a library without an index (how?!?) or you find a novel way to make a neutral search engine - <USER2> that provides as much value as Google but whose costs are paid in a different way, so that it does not have Google's incentives.

<comment><USER12> The problem is that current search engines are indexing what is essentially a stack of random books thrown together by anonymous library goers. Before being able to guide readers to books, librarians have to the following non-trivial tasks over the entire collection:

\- identify the book's theme

\- measure the quality of the information

\- determine authenticity / malicious content

\- remember the position of the book in the colossal stacks

Then the librarian can start to refer people to books. This problem was actually present in libraries before the revolutionary Dewy Decimal System [1]. Libraries found that the disorganization caused too much reliance on librarians and made it hard to train replacements if anything happened.

The Internet just solved the problem by building a better librarian rather than building a better library. Personally I welcome any attempts to build a more organized internet. I don't think the communal book pile approach is scaling very well.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification)

<comment><USER13> _> I welcome any attempts to build a more organized internet. I don't think the communal book pile approach is scaling very well._

Let me know if I misunderstand your comment but to me, this has already been tried.

Yahoo's founders originally tried to "organize" the internet like a good librarian. Yahoo in 1994 was originally called, _" Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web"_[0] with hierarchical directories to curated links.

However, Jerry & David noticed that Google's search results were more useful to web surfers and Yahoo was losing traffic. Therefore, in 2000 they _licensed Google 's search engine_. Google's approach was _more scaleable_ than Yahoo's.

I often see several suggestions that the alternative to Google is curated directories but I can't tell if people are unaware of the early internet's history and don't know that such an idea was already tried and how it ultimately failed.

[0] [http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/57977a3188e4a714088...](http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/57977a3188e4a714088bac98/jerry- yang-and-david-filo-created-yahoo-back-in-january-1994-while-studying-at- stanford-university-they-renamed-it-yahoo-in-march.jpg)

<comment><USER14> I remember trying to get one of my company's sites listed on Yahoo! back in the late 1990s. Despite us being an established company (founded in 1985) with a good domain name (cardgames.com) and a bunch of good, free content (rules for various card games, links to various places to play those games online, etc.), it took _months_.

<comment><USER15> That was not a bad thing. It was curated. Most of the crap never made it in the directory precisely because humans made decisions about what got in. If you wanted in the directory faster, you could pay a fee to get to the front of the queue. The result is that Yahoo could hire people to process the queue and make money without ads.

<comment><USER14> Isn't paying money to jump to the front of the queue just another form of advertising?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think Apple's current approach, where all the smarts (Machine Learning, Differential Privacy, Secure Enclave, etc.) reside on your device, not in the cloud, is the most promising. As imagined in so much sci-fi (eg. the Hosaka in Neuromancer) you build a relationship with your device which gets to know you, your habits and, most importantly in regard to search, what you mean when you search for something and what results are most likely to be relevant to you. An on-device search agent could potentially be the best solution because this very personal and, crucially, private device will know much more about you than you are (or should be) willing to forfeit to the cloud providers whose business is, ultimately, to make money off your data.

<comment><USER13> _> , where all the smarts [...] reside on your device, not in the cloud, is the most promising. [...] An on-device search agent could potentially be the best solution [...]_

Maybe I misunderstand your proposal but to me, this is not technically possible. We can think of a modern search engine as a process that reduces a raw dataset of _exabytes_ [0] into a comprehensible result of ~5000 bytes (i.e. ~5k being the 1st page of search result rendered as HTML.)

Yes, one can take a version of the movies & tv data on IMDB.com and put it on the phone (e.g. like copying the old Microsoft Cinemania CDs to the smartphone storage and having a locally installed app search it) but that's not possible for a generalized dataset representing the gigantic internet.

If you don't intend for the exabytes of the search index to be stored on your smartphone, what exactly is the "on-device search agent" doing? How is it iterating through the vast dataset over a slow cellular connection?

[0] [https://www.google.com/search?q="trillion"+web+pages+exabyte...](https://www.google.com/search?q="trillion"+web+pages+exabytes)

<comment><USER17> The smarts _living_ on-device is not necessarily the same as the smarts _executing_ on-device.

We already have the means to execute arbitrary code (JS) or specific database queries (SQL) on remote hosts. It's not inconceivable, to me, that my device "knowing me" could consist of building up a local database of the types of things that I want to see, and when I ask it to do a new search, it can assemble a small program which it sends to a distributed system (which hosts the actual index), runs a sophisticated and customized query program there, securely and anonymously (I hope), and then sends back the results.

Google's index isn't architected to be used that way, but I would love it if someone did build such a system.

<comment><USER18> To some extent, doesn't Google already do this? Meaning that based on your location/Google account/other factors such as cookies or search history, it will tailor your results. For instance, searching the same query on different computers will result in different results.

Though to your point, google probably ends up storing this information in the cloud

<comment><USER19> Also instant search results, which were common search terms that were cached at lower levels of the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I see a lot of good comments here, I got inspired to write this:

What if this new Internet instead of using URI based on ownership (domains that belong to someone), would rely on topic?

In examples:

netv2://speakers/reviews/BW netv2://news/anti-trump netv2://news/pro-trump netv2://computer/engineering/react/i-like-it netv2://computer/engineering/electron/i-dont-like-it

A publisher of webpage (same html/http) would push their content to these new domains (?) and people could easily access list of resources (pub/sub like). Advertisements are driving Internet nowadays, so to keep everyone happy, what if netv2 is neutral, but web browser are not (which is the case now anyway)? You can imagine that some browsers would prioritise some entries in given topic, some would be neutral, but harder to retrieve data that you want.

Second thought: Guess what, I'm reinventing NNTP :)

<comment><USER21> Inventing/extending a new NNTP is nice idea too.

The Internet has become synonymous with the web/http protocol. The web alternatives to NNTP won instead of newer versions of Usenet. New versions of IRC, UUCP, S/FTP, SMTP, etc., instead of webifying everything would be nice. But those services are still there and fill an important niche for those not interested in seeing everything eternal septembered.

<comment><USER22> I believe there is/was an extension to NNTP for full text search or at least a draft proposal no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That was what the early internet was like (I was there). People built indexes by hand, lists of pages on certain topics. There was the Gopher protocol that was supposed to help with finding things. But this was all top-down stuff, the first indexing/crawling search engines were bottom-up and it worked so much better. And for a while we had an ecosystem of different search engines until Google came along, was genuinely miles better than everything else, and wiped everything else out. Really, search isn't the problem, its the way that search has become tied to advertising and tracking thats the problem. But then DuckDuckGo is there if you want to avoid all that.

<comment><USER24> Search is the problem. If you don't rank in google you don't exist on the internet. There is an entire economy built on manipulating search that is pay to play in addition to google continually focusing on paid search of natural SERPs. Controlling search right now is controlling the internet.

<comment><USER23> Whatever you replace Search with would be gamed in the same way.

<comment><USER24> true, but when it was lycos, hotbot, altavista, google, webcrawler, aol, gopher, archy, usenet and so many other sources it was much easier to exist in many ways (harder to dominate) - people used to 'surf the web', join "webrings" and share stuff.. now they consume and post memes. so i blame behavior as much as monopoly

<comment><USER23> A lot of other things have changed since then, so the difference in tone you are noticing might not have much to do with search engines. In 1996 there were only about 16 million people on the internet, and usage obviously skewed towards the more technical nerdy crowd. Now there are 4,383 million people on the internet. Which is about 57% of everyone.

<comment><USER25> I see this a lot on HN. People forget that a lot of things in the early days of the Internet only worked because there were so few people on the Internet.

If you were rich and had a T1 in your home in the days everyone was on dialup, sure you could host a website yourself. But these days, even if you're one of the lucky residents on a gigabit symmetrical connection, there's a limit to how much you can serve. Self-hosting isn't an option unless your website is a niche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think in one sense the answer is it always depends who or what you are asking for your answers.

The early Web wrestled with this, early on it was going to be directories and meta keywords. But that quickly broke down (information isn't hierarchical, meta keywords can be gamed). Google rose up because they use a sort of reputation system based index. In between that, there was a company called RealNames, that tried to replace domains and search with their authoritative naming of things, but that is obviously too centralized.

But back to Google, they now promote using schema.org descriptions of pages, over page text, as do other major search engines. This has tremendous implications for precise content definition (a page that is "not about fish" won't show up in a search result for fish). Google layers it with their reputation system, but these schemas are an important, open feature available to anyone to more accurately map the web. Schema.org is based on Linked Data, its principle being each piece of data can be precisely "followed." Each schema definition is crafted by participation from industry and interest groups to generally reflect its domain. This open world model is much more suitable to the Web, compared to the closed world of a particular database (but, some companies, like Amazon and Facebook, don't adhere to it since apparently they would rather their worlds have control; witness Facebook's open graph degeneration to something that is purely self-serving).

</comment><comment><USER27> The deeper problem is advertising. It is sort of a prisoner's dilemma: all commercial entities have a shouting contest to attract customer attention. It's expensive for everybody.

If we could kill advertisement permanently, we can have an internet as described in the question. This will almost be like an emergent feature of the internet.

<comment><USER28> We could supercharge word of mouth. I've been thinking about an alternative upvote model where content is ranked not primarily based on aggregate voting but by:

\- ranking content that users you have upvoted higher

\- ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher

While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it possible for products and services to spread using peer trust rather than cold shouting.

<comment><USER29> > ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher

This is what Reddit originally tried to do before they pivoted.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_maki...](https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_making_the_internet_boring/c6m9sy8/)

<comment><USER28> Oh, interesting!

Makes me think that their original plan could still work if they just put a bit more effort into crafting that algorithm.

For example, the main criticism brought up is that things that you dislike that your peers like keep getting recommended. Why not add a de-ranking aspect into it and try adding downvote-peers in addition to upvote peers.

I imagine you could create this interesting query language that could answer questions like: what things do you like if you like X and Y but not Z? (I kind of remember that something akin to this have been hacked together using subreddit overlap.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yes, we need search engines, but they don't need to be monolithic. Imagine that indexing the text of your average web page takes up 10k. Then you get 100.000 pages per Gig. It means that you if you spend ~270USD on a consumer 10 tera drive you can index a billion webpages. Google no longer says how many pages they index, but its estimated to be with in one order of magnitude of that.

This means that in terms of hardware, you can build your own google, then you get to decide how it rates things and you don't have to worry about ads and SEO becomes much harder because there is no longer one target to SEO. Google obviously don't want you to do this (and in fairness google indexes a lot of stuff that isn't keywords form web pages), but it would be very possible to build an open source configurable search engine that anyone could install, run, and get good results out of.

(Example: The piratebay database, that arguably indexes the vast majority of avilable music / tv / film / software was / is small enough to be downloaded and cloned by users)

<comment><USER31> Google's paper on Percolator from 2010 says there are more than 1T web pages. 9 years later there is surely way more than that.

[https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36726](https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36726)

The real issue would be crawling and indexing all those pages. How long would it take for an average user's computer with a 10Mb internet connection to crawl the entire web? It's not as easy a problem as you make it seem.

<comment><USER30> I'm not saying its easy, its not, but people tend to think that because Google is so huge, you have to be that huge to do what Google does. My argument is that in terms of hardware google need expensive hardware because they have so many users, not because what they do requires that hardware to deliver the service for one or a few users.

I have a gigabit link to my apartment (go Swedish infrastructure!). At that theoretic speed I get 450 gigs an hour, so I could download ten tera in a day. We can easily slow that down by an order of magnitude and its still a very viable thing to do. If someone wrote the software to do this, one could imagine some kind of federated solution for downloading the data, so that every user doesn't have to hit every web server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Almost definitely not.

Search engines are there to find and extract information in an unstructured trove of webpages - no other way to process this than with something akin to a search engine.

So either you've got unstructured web (the hint is in the name) and GoogleBingYandex or a somehow structured web.

The latter has been found to be not scalable or flexible enough to accomodate for unanticipated needs - and not for a lack of trying! This has been the default mode of web until Google came about. Turns out it's damn near impossible to construct a structure for information that won't become instantly obsolete.

<comment><USER33> > A structured web ... has been found to be not scalable or flexible enough to > accomodate for unanticipated needs - and not for a lack of trying!

Linked Open Data (the latest evolution of Semantic Web technologies) is actually working quite well at present - Wikidata now gets more edits per unit of time than Wikipedia does, and its data are commonly used by "personal assistant" AIs such as Amazon's Alexa. Of course, these can only cover parts of the web where commercial incentives, and the bad actors that sometimes pursue them, are not relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've had this idea floating in my head for a while, that one thing that might make the world better is some kind of distributed database, and a gravitation back to open protocols (though instead of RFC's... maybe we could maintain an open source library for the important bits) I was thinking the architecture of DNS is a good starting point. From there we can create public indexes of data. This includes searchable data, but also private data you want to share (which could be encrypted, and controlled by you (think PGP). I'd modify browsers so that I don't have to trust a 3rd party service)

Centralization happens because the company owns the data, which becomes aggregated under one roof. If you distribute the data it will remove the walled gardens, multiple competitors should be able to pop up. Whole ecosystems could be built to give us 100 googles.... or 100 facebooks, where YOU control your data, and they may never even see your data. And because we're moving back to a world of open protocols, they all work with each other.

These companies aren't going to be worth billions of dollars any more.... but the world would be better.

<comment><USER26> You've just more or less described Solid. [https://solid.mit.edu/](https://solid.mit.edu/)

I think a lot of people dismiss Solid based on its deep origins in Semantic Web, or because it's a slow project, based on Web standards, intended to solve long term problems.

But being part of the Web is a huge process, and with DIDs it maps just fine into decentralized worlds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The 2 core flaws of the Internet (more precisely the World Wide Web) are lack of native search and native payments. Cryptocurrencies have started to address the second issue, but no one that I know of is seriously working on the first.

Fast information retrieval requires an index. A better formulation of the question might be: how do we maintain a shared, distributed index that won't be destroyed by bad actors.

I wonder if the two might have parts of the solution in common. Maybe using proof of work to impose a cost on adding something to the index. Or maybe a proof of work problem that is actually maintaining the index or executing searches on it.

<comment><USER36> Why does there need to be one central source of truth on the internet? It seems like it would be impossible to implement. Even if google worked like it did 15 years ago and you got decently relevant results to your search terms, that's still not even scraping the surface of the whole internet that is relevant to your search terms.

It's an impossible problem to solve because we don't have good consistent metadata to draw on. Libraries work because they have good metadata to catalog their collections. Good metadata needs to be generated by hand, doing it automatically is bound to lead to errors and special cases that will pollute your search results.

I say we abandon the idea of the ideal search engine, accept the fact that we will never be able to find every needle in every haystack, and defer to a decentralized assortment of thousands of topic-specific indexes of relevant information. Some of them will be shit, but that's fine, the internet has always been a refuge for conspiracy theorists and other zaney interests. The good stuff will shine through the mud, as it's always done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My approach to answering this would entail:

1) Determining what percentage of search engine use is driven by the need for a short cut to information you know exists but dont feel like accessing the hard way

2) Information you are actually seeking.

My initial reaction is that making search engines irrelevant is a stretch. Here is why:

Regarding #1, the vast majority of my search activity involves information I know how and where to find but seek the path of least resistance to access. I can type in "the smith, flat iron nyc" and know I will get the hours, cross street and phone number for the Smith restaurant. Why would I not do this instead of visiting the yelp website, searching for the Smith, set my location in NYC, filtering results etc. Maybe I am not being open minded enough but I don't see how this can be replaced short of reading my mind and injecting that information into it. There needs to be a system to type a request and retrieve the result you're looking for. Another example, when I am looking for someone on LinkedIn, I always google the person instead of utilizing LinkedIn's god awful search. Never fails me.

2\. In the minority of cases I am looking for something, I have found that Google's results have gotten worse and worse over the years. It will still be my primary port of call and I think this is the workflow that has potential disruption. Other than an Index, I dont know what better alternatives you could offer.

</comment><comment><USER38> You'd still want to be able to retrieve "useful" information which can't be tampered with easily which I think is the biggest issue.

You can't curate manually.. That just doesn't scale. You also can't let just anyone add to the index as they wish or any/every business will just flood the index with their products... There wouldn't be any difference between whitehat/blackhat marketing.

You also need to be able to discover new content when you seek it, based on relevancy and quality of content.

At the end of the day, people won't be storing the index of the net locally, and you also can't realistically query the entire net on demand. That would be an absolutely insane amount of wasted resources.

All comes back to some middleman taking on the responsibility (google,duckduckgo,etc).

Maybe the solution is an organization funded by all governments, completely transparent, where people who wish to can vote on decisions/direction. So non profit? Not driven by marketing?

But since when has government led with innovation and done so at a good pace? Money drives everything... And without a "useful" amount of marketing/ads etc, the whole web wouldn't be as it is.

So yes, you can.. But you won't have access to the same amount of data, as easily, will likely have a harder time finding relevant information (especially if its quite new) without having to parse through a lot of crap.

</comment><comment><USER39> If we were to design a brand new DATABASE ENGINE for today's world, can we develop it such a way that:

1\. Finding information is trivial

2\. You don't need services indexing billions of rows to find any relevant document

<comment><USER40> How far can one get with content-addressable storage? It's not obvious to me how to emulate search results ranking (well, anyhow), but it could give you a list of documents satisfying some criteria according to the authors who stored them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> >In our current internet, we need a big brother like Google or Bing to effectively find any relevant information in exchange for sharing with them our search history, browsing habits etc.

The evil big brothers may not be necessary. We just need to expand alternative search engines like YaCy.

</comment><comment><USER42> I can't imagine how this is possible. Imagine I have a string of words (a quote from a book or an article, a fragment of an error message, etc), and I want to find the full text where it appears (or pages discussing it). How would you do that without a search engine?

<comment><USER43> I think OP's idea is that search services would be built into the Internet, and not provided by a third party. That is, when a website is published or updated, it is somehow instantly indexed and made available for search as a feature of the platform on which it was published.

<comment><USER44> But you still need a third party to rank the results. I don't just want any page about my error message, I want the _best_ page.

<comment><USER45> The page rank could be a transparent algorithm, which is regularly updated by a consortium like W3C.

The question is whether this would work in an adversarial setting where every party tries to inflate their page rankings by any trick they can find.

<comment><USER46> Not a chance it would survive. Google has enough problems fighting SEO right now and they don't publish their algorithm and have incredibly deep pockets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Most of the search engines now days have the advantage of being closed source (you don't know how their algorithm actually work). This makes the fight against unethical SEO practices easier.

With a distributed open search alternative the algorithm is more susceptible to exploits by malicious actors.

Having it manually curated is too much of a task for any organization. If you let user vote on the results... well, that can be exploited as well.

The information available on the internet is to big to make directories effective (like it was 20 years ago).

I still have hope this will get solved one day, but directories and open source distributed search engines are not the solution in my opinion unless there is a way to make them resistant to exploitation.

<comment><USER48> I've been thinking that the only way to get around the bad-actor (or paid agent) problem when dealing with online networks is to have some sort of distributed trust mechanism.

I feel like manually curated information is the way to go, you just have to find some way to filter out all the useless info and marketing/propaganda. You can't crowd source it because it opens up avenues for gaming the system.

The only solution I can think of is some sort of transitive trust metric that's used to filter what's presented to you. If something gets by that shouldn't have (bad info/poor quality), you update the weights in the trust network that led to that action so they are less likely to give you that in the future. I never got around to working through the math on this, however.

<comment><USER49> That's very workable.Any agent should have a private key with which it signs it's pushes. Age of an agent and score of feedback for that agent determine its ranking.Though that still leaves gaming possible with the feedback. But heavy feeback like "this is malicious content" could be moderated. (So that people cant just report stuff they don't like).

<comment><USER48> The reason I mentioned that the trust metric should be transitive and distributed is so that it prevents gaming as much as possible. You wouldn't want to have a trusted central authority (for everyone) because that could always be corrupted or gamed if it's profitable enough. Rather every individual would have a set of trusted peers with different "trust" weights for each based on the individual's perception of their trustworthiness, that could be changed over time.

This trust (weighting) should be able to propagate as a (semi-)transitive property throughout the network to take advantage of your trusted peers' trusted peers. This trust weight propagation would need to converge, and when you are served content that has been labeled incorrectly ("high-value" or "trustworthy" or whatever metric, when you don't see it that way), then your trust weights (and perhaps your peers') would need to re-update in some sort of backpropagation.

The hard part is keeping track of the trust-network in a way that is O(n^c) and having the transitive calculations also be O(n^c) at most. I'm quite sure there are ways of doing this (at least with reasonably good results) but I haven't been able to think through them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> VvR-Ox This would be the internet that was used in Star Trek I think. The computers they use can just be asked about something and the whole system is searched for that - so the service to find things is inherent to the system itself. In our world things like that are done by entities who try to maximize their profits (like the Ferengi) without thinking too much about effectiveness or ethics.

This phenomena can be seen throughout many systems we built - e.g. use of internet, communication, access to electricity or water. We have to pay the profit-maximizing entities for all of this though it could be covered by global cooperatives who manage this stuff in a good way.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think "search engines" is misleading. These are relevance engines. And relevance sells - the higher the relevance, the better.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/facebook- google-p...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/facebook-google- privacy.html)

</comment><comment><USER51> This is what we had in early internet days, directories of links. Early Yahoo was the perfect example of this. You jumped from one site to another, you asked other people, you discovered things by chance. You went straight to a source, instead of reading a post of a summary of a site that after 20 redirections loaded with advertising and tracking gets you to the intended and actually useful destination.

Most web sites then also had a healthy, sometimes surprising link section, that has all but disappeared these days.

<comment><USER52> >directories of links.

This is what I did back in 2015 as a project to increase my SEO rank to my business. Basically spam directory (and create my own) just to increase my pagerank.

</comment></comment><comment> d-sc Indexing information is a political problem as much as a technical one. Ultimately there will always be people who will put more effort into getting their information known than others. These people would game whatever technical solution exists.

<comment><USER53> Thats true. What if you could artificially limit the amount of effort someone can put in to getting content out there? Or even make it known to the consumer how/why the content is ranked highly?

<comment> d-sc Most closed platforms do a subset of what you mention: I can only put so many posts on my Facebook before they stop making it to all my friends. If I pay more for higher ranking it's labeled an advertisement.

However, creating rules transitions the contention point to who makes the rules. If you think that my algorithm will rank my sources better than your sources, you may be less interested in my algorithm regardless of its technical merits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I was recently thinking about an open search protocol with some federation elements in two parts. A frontend and an indexer. The idea is that anyone can run his own search frontend or use a community hosted one (like Matrix). And then each frontend has X amount of indexers configured.

Each indexer is responsible for a small part of the web and by adding indexers you can increase your personal search area. And there is some web of trust going on.

Entities like stackoverflow and Wikipedia and reddit could host their own domain specific indexers. Others could be crowdsourced with browser extensions or custom crawlers and maybe some people want to have their own indexer that they curate and want to share with the world.

It will never cover the utility and breadth of Google Search but with enough adoption this could be a nice first search engine. With DDG inspired bang commands in the frontend you could easily retry a search on Google.

With another set of colon commands you can limit a search to one specific indexer.

The big part I am unsure about in this setup is how a frontend would choose which indexers to use for a specific query. Obviously sending each query to each indexer will not scale very well.

</comment><comment><USER55> Just as a suggestion, this question might be rephrased as can we have an Internet that doesn't require search companies, or even just massive search monopolies.

I'm not sure what the answer is re:search. But, an easier example to chew on might've social media. It doesn't take a Facebook to make one. There are lots of different social networking sites (including this one) that are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of resources/people involved, even adjusting for size of the userbase.

It doesn't take a Facebook (company) to make Facebook (site). Facebook just turned out to be the prize they got for it. These things are just decided as races. FB got enough users early enough. But, if they went away tomorrow.. users will not lack for social network experiences. Where they get those experiences is basically determined by network effects, not the product itself.

For search, it doesn't take a Google either. DDG make a search engine, and they're way smaller. With search though, it does seem that being a Google helps. They _have_ been "winning" convincingly even without network effects and moat that make FB win.

</comment><comment><USER56> [https://medium.com/@Gramshackle/the-web-of-native-apps-ii- go...](https://medium.com/@Gramshackle/the-web-of-native-apps-ii-google-and- facebook-ed2ee497302d)

Cliff's notes:

\- Apps should run not in a browser, but in sandboxed App containers loaded from the network, somewhat between Mobile Apps and Flash/Silverlight. Mobile apps that you don't 'install' from a store, but navigate to freely like the web. Apps have full access to the OS-level APIs (for which there is a new cross-platform standard), but are containerized in chroot jail.

\- An app privilege ("this wants to access your files") should be a prominent feature of the system, and ad networks would be required to built on top of this system to make trade-offs clear to the consumer.

\- Search should be a functionality owned and operated by the ISPs for profit and should be a low-level internet feature seen as an extension of DNS.

\- Google basically IS the web and would never allow such a system to grow. Some of their competitors have already tried to subvert the web by the way they approached mobile.

</comment><comment><USER57> You don't remember how it was before search engines, do you?

It was like a dark maze, and sometimes you'd find a piece of the map.

Search coming online was a watershed moment -- like, "before search" and "after search"

<comment><USER19> Yep.

\- You had your web rings, which would cycle from site to site based on a category, some pages having multiple rings.

\- You had your "communities", organizing sites by URL structure, where similar pages were grouped together like a strip mall or something (i.e. _neighborhoods_ for geocities).

\- You had scammy services that would submit your pages to multiple search engines, at a cost, but would guarantee you would show up in results.

\- You had your aggregators, like dogpile, where you would sift through pages of results from different search engines, hoping to find something different.

It wasn't a good time. If you think about the problem that search engines solve today - connecting people with information that they want - we're currently at a peak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Sorry, but this was too tempting: [https://imgur.com/a/6UcAOnF](https://imgur.com/a/6UcAOnF)

But seriously, I'm not sure it is feasible, I wish the internet could auto- index itself and still be decentralized, where any type of content can be "discovered" as soon as it is connected to the "grid".

The advantage would be that users could search any content without filters, without AI tempering with the order based on some rules ... BUT on the other hand, people use search engines because their results are relevant (what ever that means these days), so having an internet that is searchable by default would probably never be a good UX and hence not replace existing search engines. It not just about the internet being searchable, it would have to solve all the problems search engines have solved in the last ten years too

</comment><comment><USER59> We could always ask a different question: what would it take for everyone to have a copy of the index? Humans can only produce new text-based content at a linear rate. If storage continues to grow at an exponential rate, eventually it becomes relatively cheap to hold a copy of the index.

Of course those assumptions may not be valid. Content may grow faster than linear. Content may not all be produced by humans. Storage won't grow exponentially forever. But good content probably grows linearly at most, and maybe even slower if old good content is more accessible. Already it's feasible to hold all of the English wikipedia on a phone. Doing the same for Internet content is certainly going to remain non-trivial for a while yet. But sometimes you have to ask the dumb questions...

<comment><USER60> You may have the storage to store it, but do you have the bandwidth to receive everything that's being produced?

<comment><USER59> There are 8 billion people. If half of them were awake, and 10 percent of that half are actually typing at 40 words/minute, that would be about 13Gbit/s. I couldn't receive that feed today at home, but my work could. A satellite feed could work today too. And I wasn't really talking about today, but 10-20 years from now. Storage will be a problem for a lot longer than network capacity.

<comment><USER61> Storage grows geometrically, while network capacity has grown less so. It's possible we will soon have more storage than humans can create content to fill. No problem; automated systems also fill storage!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The question should be how can we create a new internet where we don't need a centralized 3rd party search engine not a new internet where there is no search engine. You can't find anything if there is no search (engine) and you can't change that.

</comment><comment><USER63> Yes, download data, create indices on your data yourself as you see fit, execute SQL queries.

If you don't have the resources to do so yourself, then you'll have to trust something, in order to share the burden.

If you trust money, then gather enough interested people to share the cost of construction of the index, at the end everyone who trust you can enjoy the benefits of the whole for himself, and you now are a search engine service provider :)

Alternatively if you can't get people to part with their money, you can get by needing only their computations, by building the index in a decentralized fashion. The distributed index can then be trusted at a small computation cost by anyone who believe that at least k% of the actors constructing it are honest.

For example if you trust your computation and if you trust that x% of actors are honest :

You gather 1000 actors and have each one compute the index of 1000th of the data, and publish their results.

Then you have each actor redo the computation on the data of another actor picked at random ; as many times as necessary.

An honest actor will report the disagreement between computations and then you will be able to tell who is the bad actor that you won't ever trust again by checking the computation yourself.

The probability that there is still a bad actor lying is (1-x)^(x*n) with n the number of times you have repeated the verification process. So it can be made as small as possible, even if x is small by increasing n. (There is no need to have a majority or super-majority here like in byzantine algorithms, because you are doing the verification yourself which is doable because 1000th of the data is small enough).

Actors don't have the incentive to lie because if they do so, it will be exposed provably as liars forever.

Economically with decreasing cost of computation (and therefore decreasing cost of index construction), public collections of indices are inevitable. It will be quite hard to game, because as soon as there is enough interest gathered a new index can be created to fix what was gamed.

</comment><comment><USER64> There is an even deeper problem then surveillance, the results of search engines get more and more censored with more and more governments putting pressure on them to censor results according to their individual wishes.

</comment><comment><USER65> Taking a step back to before search engines were the main driver for finding content online, who remembers webrings?

Is there a way to update that idea of websites deliberately recommending each other, but without having it be an upvote/like based popularity contest driven by an enormous anonymous mob? It needs to avoid both easy to manipulate crowd voting like reddit and the SEO spam attacks that PageRank has been targeted by.

Some way to say "I value recommendations by X person," or even give individual people weight in particular types of content and not others?

<comment><USER66> _> who remembers webrings?_

I recently configured openring [1] and am liking it a lot. Example of one of my pages with it [2]

[1] [https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring)

[2] [https://www.jefftk.com/p/adventures-in- upstreaming](https://www.jefftk.com/p/adventures-in-upstreaming) scroll down to "Recent posts on blogs I like"

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> What we should have is an open, freely accessible meta-information database of things like, whether user X liked/disliked, what other page/sites linked to this site, what their admins ranked this site as, if they did, etc., etc.

Then we have individual engines that take this data and choose for the user what to display for that user only. So if the user is unhappy with what they are seeing, they simply plug in another engine.

Probably a block chain would be good to store such a thing.

</comment><comment><USER45> There is still YaCy [1]. I'm not sure whether it's this one or another distributed search engine I tried 10 years ago, but the results were not very convincing. I believe that's to some extent because of a lack of critical mass, if more people would use these engines, they could improve their rankings and indexing based on usage.

[1] [https://yacy.net/en/index.html](https://yacy.net/en/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER68> > In our current internet, we need a big brother like Google or Bing to > effectively find any relevant information in exchange for sharing with them > our search history, browsing habits etc.

Seems like you could access Google/Bing/etc. (or DuckDuckGo, which'd probably be a better start here) through an anonymizing service.

But, no, going without search engines entirely doesn't make much sense.

I suspect that what you'd really want is more control over what your computer shares about you and how you interact with services that attempt to track you. For example, you'd probably like DuckDuckGo more than Google. And you'd probably like Firefox more than Chrome.

\---

With respect to the future internet...

I suspect that our connection protocols will get more dynamic and sophisticated. Then you might have an AI-agent try to perform a low-profile search for you.

For example, say that you want to know something about a sensitive matter in real life. You can start asking around without telling everyone precisely what you're looking for, right?

Likewise, once we have some smarter autonomous assistants, we can ask them to perform a similar sort of search, where they might try to look around for something online on your behalf without directly telling online services precisely what you're after.

</comment><comment><USER69> I think there is a grain of a good idea here.

As i see it - new, "free search" internet would be a specially formatted content for each page published that will make it content easily searchable. Likely some tags within existing HTML content to comply with new "free search" standard.

Open source, distributed agents would receive notifications about new, properly formatted "free search" pages and then index such page into the public indexed DB.

Any publisher could release content and notify closest "free search" agent.

Then - just like a blockchain - anyone could download such indexed DB to do instant local searches.

There will be multiple variations of such DB - from small ones (<1TB) to satisfy small users giving just "titles" and "extracts" to large ones who need detailed search abilities (multi TB capacity).

"Free search", distributed agents will provide clutter-free interface to do detailed search for anyone.

I think this idea could easily be pickup up pretty much by everyone - <USER3> would be interested to submit their content to be easily searchable and escape any middlemen monopoly that is trying to control aspects of searching and indexing.

</comment><comment><USER70> [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1436](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1436)

</comment><comment><USER71> The problem isn't search engines per se.

The problem is closed algorithms, SEO, and advertising/marketing.

Think about it for a minute. Imagine a search engine that generates the same results for everyone. Since it gives the same results for everyone, the burden of looking for exactly what you're looking for is put back exactly where it needs to be, on the user.

The problem though, is you'll still get networks of "sink pages" that are optimized to show up in every conceivable search, that don't have anything to do with what you're searching for, but are just landing pages for links/ads.

Personally, I liked a more Yellow Pageish net. After you got a knack for picking out the SEO link sinks, and artificially disclose them, you were fine. I prefer this to a search provider doing it for you because it teaches you, the user, how to retrieve information better. This meant you were no longer dependant on someone else slurping up info on your browsing habits to try to made a guess at what you were looking for.

</comment><comment><USER72> One way to replace search is to return to curation by trusted parties. Rather than anyone putting a web page up and then a passive crawler finding it and telling everyone about it, (why should I trust any search engine crawler,) we could "load" our search engine with lists of websites. These lists are published and maintained by curators that we have explicitly chosen to trust. When we type into the search box it can only return results from sites present on our personal lists.

e.g. someone's list of installed lists might look like:

\- New York Public Library reference list

\- Good Housekeeping list of consumer goods

\- YCombinator list of tech news

\- California education system approved sources

\- Joe Internet's surprisingly popular list of JavaScript news and resources

How do you find out about these lists and add them? Word of mouth and advertising the old fashioned way. Marketplaces created specifically to be "curators of curators". Premium payments for things like Amazing Black Friday Deals 2019 which, if you liked, you'll buy again in 2020 and tell your friends.

There are two points to this. First, new websites only enter your search graph when you make a trust decision about a curator - trust you can revoke or redistribute whenever you want. Second, your list-of-lists serves as an overview of your own biases. You can't read conspiracy theory websites without first trusting "Insane Jake's Real Truth the Govt Won't Tell You". Which is your call to make! But at least you made a call rather than some outrage optimizing algorithm making it for you.

I guess this would start as a browser plugin. If there's interest let's build it FOSS.

Edit: Or maybe it starts as a layer on top of an existing search engine. Are you hiring, DDG? :P

<comment><USER73> Kind of like the Good Old Days™? Jokes aside, Search engines are for stuff we don't know... I get my news from some sites, this one for example, and I don't depend o Google for that... But when I want to know about the viability of zipping a UTF-8 encoded text to save space on my DB, there is no way to get may answer without a search engine...

<comment><USER72> If there's anything the modern internet has taught me it's that the Good Old Days were doing some things right! We don't know how to scale trust to internet-sized communities yet so a little tribalism may be warranted.

The way this solution solves the I Don't Know What I Don't Know Problem is by making you curate your own list of experts. For your example query, a colleague may have told you about a popular list that thousands of DBAs subscribe and contribute to. So when you search that query it has the sites to crawl and find the material

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Why don't we get rid of tracking instead of getting rid of search engines. Why can't I just have my ad settings set by myself. I should be able to say, I'm interested in tech, fashion, watches, online backup solutions etc. Show me only these ads. It would get rid of all kinds of tracking.

Can anyone tell me why such an approach wouldn't work?

<comment><USER75> I could put "aviation" as one of my interests but I'm nowhere close to being able to afford a plane or any aviation related accessories unless they're R/C models (even then that's pushing it).

Just because I see ads I'm interested doesn't mean I'll want to buy what they're selling. Whereas if a system that tracked me can deduce that I'm a private pilot, it can make an educated guess towards my income and adjust the type of items it shows me correspondingly. I doubt many people would be willing to provide this information (demographics, location, income) that advertisers care about most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> IME, searching by collections of keywords has become a good strategy. Avoiding using vague/topical keywords ('music', 'chemical'), instead asking for specific words that should/must be found in the search results. If the results start to exclude an important keyword (e.g. '1872' or 'giant' or 'legend'), put a plus sign in front of it and resubmit.

I regularly use DDG (which claims privacy) for this, and requests can be quite specific. E.g. a quotation "these words in this order" may result in -no result at all-, which is preferable to being second-guessed by the engine.

I wonder how 'search engines are not required' would work without expecting the searcher to acquire expertise in drilling down through topical categories, as attempts like '[http://www.odp.org/'](http://www.odp.org/') did.

</comment><comment><USER77> Good question. I'm going to run an experiment.

First "go-to" for search will be my browser history.

As long as the site I know I'm looking for is in my browser history, then I'll go there and use the search feature to find other items from that site.

Bookmark all the advanced search pages I can find for sites I find myself searching regularly.

Resist mindless searching for crap content which usually just takes up time as my brain is decompressing from other tasks.

For search which is more valuable to me, try starting my search from communities such as Reddit, Twitter or following links from other points in my history.

Maybe if it's not worth going through the above steps, then it's not valuable enough to look up?

NOTE: Sites such as Twitter may not be much better than Google, but I can at least see who is pushing the link. I can determine if this person is someone I would trust for recommendations.

I bet if I did all of the above, I could put a massive dent in the number of search engine queries I do.

Any other suggestions?

<comment><USER78> > but I can at least see who is pushing the link. I can determine if this > person is someone I would trust for recommendations.

This doesn't seem true at all to me. Twitter dramatically shapes and modifies timelines to promote whatever they want. They're even more aggressive on modifying the search experience.

All of those constraints are invisible. It's dangerous to think you have more control or insight there.

<comment><USER77> Twitter has a social graph and communities much like Reddit. This adds more information. There are people posting information who I trust and even know IRL.

> All of those constraints are invisible. It's dangerous to think you have > more control or insight there.

And yet you are commenting as if these results aren't invisible to you? The machinery behind Google search results aren't invisible? Are you trying to say that one invisible thing is more "X" than another invisible thing?

<comment><USER78> > And yet you are commenting as if these results aren't invisible to you? The > machinery behind Google search results aren't invisible?

Because of my unique and fortunate work history I understand the internals of these systems better than many people do. I'm objecting to the distinction you're drawing, not suggesting an alternative order of transparency. There really isn't much difference between the two companies output in the regard we're discussing.

<comment><USER77> I agree that Twitter may not be much different from Google if you are relying on the algo. Notice that I mentioned Twitter as a community next to Reddit though. Everyone has different usage patterns for these services. I follow (and have been an active participant) in a number of niche communities on Twitter. In some cases, I could do a search for a term and most results would be from people I have interacted with through Twitter and other channels. Each of those people carried a reputation within that niche and some I knew better than others. I wouldn't use Twitter as a general search returning a large number of untrusted results. Sure, even search results on a specific user could be biased, but at least it would be from familiar territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Like others here I don't have too much problem with indexing.

What I would like to see is a human layer of infrastructure on top of algorithmic search, one the leverages the fact that there are billions of people who could be helping others find what they need. That critical mass wasn't available at the beginning of the internet, but it certainly is now.

You kind of have attempts at this function in efforts like the Stack Exchange network, Yahoo Questions, Ask Reddit, tech forums etc. but I'd like to see more active empowerment and incentivization of giving humans the capacity to help other humans find what they need, in a way that would be free from commercial incentives. I envision stuff like maintaining absolutely impartial focus groups, and for commercial search it would be nice to see companies incentivized to provide better quality goods to game search rather than better SEO optimization.

</comment><comment><USER80> How about this: Internet as a service. Instead of looking for answers You will "broadcast" Your needs. Like "I need a study about cancer". And You will receive a list of sources that answered Your question. maybe with some sort of decentralised rating and maybe Country and author. How about that?

<comment><USER81> Broadcasting your searches seems, if anything, even worse for privacy, and an invitation for just-in-time spam.

<comment><USER34> That's a workable issue. If a random and unique guid is asking for results, it would be hard to correlate users.

Of course there would defiantely be an issue with how you generate the guid (for example if it was generated by the users MAC + some predictable random number generator that might be reversible). So you would keep that in mind. But these seem like workable issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> As others have commented, the problem here is the ranking algorithm and how it can be gamed. Essentially, trust.

'Web of trust' has its flaws too: a sufficiently large number of malicious nodes cooperating can subvert the network.

However, maybe we can exploit locality in the graph? If the user has an easy way to indicate the quality of results, and we cluster the graph of relevance sources, the barrier to subverting the network can be raised significantly.

Let's say that each ranking server indicates 'neighbours' which it considers relatively trustworthy. When a user first performs a search their client will pick a small number of servers at random, and generate results based on them.

* If the results are good, those servers get a bit more weight in future. We can assume that the results are good if the user finds what they're looking for in the top 5 or so hits (varying depending on how specific their query is; this would need some extra smarts).

* If the results are poor (the user indicates such, or tries many pages with no luck) those servers get downweighted.

* If the results are actively malicious (indicated by the user) then this gets recorded too...

There would need to be some way of distributing the weightings based on what the servers supplied, too. If someone's shovelling high weightings at us for utter crap, they need to get the brunt of the downweighting/malice markers.

Servers would gain or lose weighting and malice based on their advertised neighbours too. Something like PageRank? The idea is to hammer the _trusting_ server more than the _trusted_ , to encourage some degree of self-policing.

Users could also chose to trust others' clients, and import their weighting graph (but with a multiplier).

Every search still includes random servers, to try to avoid getting stuck in an echo chamber. The overall server graph could be examined for clustering and a special effort made to avoid selecting more than X servers in a given cluster. This might help deal with malicious groups of servers, which would eventually get isolated. It would be necessary to compromise a lot of established servers in order to get enough connections.

Of course, then we have the question of who is going to run all these servers, how the search algorithm is going to shard efficiently and securely, etc etc.

Anyone up for a weekend project? >_>

</comment><comment><USER83> This is to broad a question to answer. There are really to many different uses of the Internet to try and fashion a solution that works in all areas. Not to mention the fact that it's to academic to begin with. How do you get such a large group of people to change a behavior that works for them already? And very generally most people are not bothered by the privacy aspect as much as tech people (always whining about things) are or even the media. People very generally like they can get things at no cost and don't (en masse) care anywhere near as much about being tracked as you have been led to believe. And that's when tracking is not even benefiting them which it is often. This is not 'how can we eliminate robo calls'. It's not even 'how can we eliminate spam'.

</comment><comment><USER84> Seems unlikely. Search engines solves a key problem.

To me they are conceptually not the problem. Nor is advertising

This new wave of track you everywhere with ai brand of search engines is an issue though. They've taken it too far essentially.

Instead of respectable fishing they've gone for kilometer long trawling nets that leave nothing in their wake

</comment><comment><USER85> This isn't an entire solution, but Van Jacobson's Content-Centric Networking concept is fascinating, especially when you consider its potential social impact compared to the way the internet exists today

[https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150IDS/final_papers/ccasey01.2...](https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150IDS/final_papers/ccasey01.2/FinalReport/FinalReport.html) [http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co- next/2009/papers/Jacobson....](http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co- next/2009/papers/Jacobson.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER86> To get rid of search engines like Google and Bing we don't need to build a new internet - we just need to build new search engines.

E.g., how about an open source spider/crawler that anyone can run on their own machine continuously contributing towards a distributed index that can be queried in a p2p fashion. (Kind of like SETI@home but for stealing back the internet).

Just think about all the great things that researchers and data scientists could do if they had access to every single public Facebook/Twitter/Instagram post.

Okayokay ... also think about what Google and FB could do if they could access any data visible to anyone (but let's just ignore that for a moment ;)

<comment><USER36> You know google has been crawling for years and probably already has accessed any public data

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Yes, out of sheer necessity. Search results have become either a crapshoot when looking for commercially adjacent content due to SEO, or "gentrified" when looking for anything even remotely political, obscure, or controversial. Google used to feel like doing a text search of the internet, but it sometimes acts like an apathetic airport newsstand shopkeeper now (& with access to only the same books and magazines).

Due to this I think people will have to use site-specific searches, directories, friend recommendations, and personal knowledge-bases to discover and connect things instead of search engines.

</comment><comment><USER88> I think there is only two options.

1) Have an index created by a centralized entity like google 2) Have the nodes in the network create the index

The first option is the easiest but can be biased on who gets to be on the index and their position on the index.

Option two is hard because we need a sort of mechanism to generate the index from the subjective view of the nodes in the network and sync this to everyone in the network.

The core problem here is not really the indexing but the structure of the internet, domains/websites are relatively dumb they can not see the network topology, indexing is basically trying to create this topology.

</comment><comment><USER89> You could use something like Gnutella[1], where you flood the network with your query request and that request is then passed along nodes.

Unfortunately (IIRC and IIUC how Gnutella works), malicious actors can easily break that query schema : just reply to all query requests with your malicious link. I believe this is how pretty much every query in old Gnutella clients returned a bunch of fake results that were simply `search_query + ".mp3"`.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella)

</comment><comment><USER90> Search engines are not required: there are directories out there with tonnes of links. It is just that search engines are damn convenient. And googles search is light years ahead of any websites own search.

<comment><USER91> I turn to search engines mostly when entering a new knowledge domain! E.g. learn about a specific product. Sometimes when im just lazy.

For routine stuff i tend to have established resource starting points, like documentation, official/community sites, blogs/news feeds, and yes: link directories (like awesome lists).

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> The EU has a funding call open for Search and Discovery on the Next Generation Internet.

[https://nlnet.nl/discovery/](https://nlnet.nl/discovery/)

</comment><comment><USER93> It was thought that one way of finding information is to ask your network (Facebook and Twitter would be examples), and then they would pass on the message and a chain of trusted sources would get the information back to you.

I am being purposefully vague because I don't think people know what an effective version of that would look like, but its worth exploring.

If you have some data you might ask questions like:

1\. Can this network reveal obscure information?

2\. When -- if ever -- is it more effective than indexing by words?

<comment><USER94> This seems significantly laborious. Not sure that the utility of this kind of network recommendation scales to incentivise participation beyond a few people. i.e.: We already have user groups on sites like reddit, FB etc, where experts or enthusiasts answer questions when they feel like it. But this is a slow process that relies on a group that contains enough distributed knowledge, but isn't overwhelmed with inquiries. As a counter example, the /r/BuildaPC subreddit long ago exceeded the size where it could answer a significant proportion of build questions, and most remain unanswered despite significant community engagement.

Not convinced any kind of formalised 'question answering network' could replace search. It would be both slow, and require an enormous asymmetric investment of time, for a diffuse and unspecified reward.

<comment><USER93> I don't think it would be questions.

Suppose you like fountain pens, and you recommend certain ones. One of your friend looks for fountain pens that their friends recommend and finds the ones you like.

That is just one example of things that don't require explicit questions.

Another one might be you have searched for books or other things and then they follow the same "path". So long as you have similar interests it might work.

People haven't solved this issue, but there is a lot of research out there on networks of connections potentially replacing certain kinds of search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find myself not need to do a 'generic' Internet search that much anymore

For long-term facts and knowledge lookup: Wikipedia pages (with proper annotation)

For real-time World happens: A mix of direct news websites

For random 'social' news: <\-- the only time I direct direct Google/Bing/DDG search

The results from the search engines nowadays are so filled with (labeled) promoted results and (un-labeled) SEO results that I have become cynical and jaded to the value of the results

</comment><comment><USER95> There'd be a feedback loop problem, but are DNS query logs a potential source of ranking/priority?

Over time the domains that users genuinely organically visit (potentially geo- localized based on client location) should rise in query volume.

Caveats would include DNS record cache times, lookups from robots/automated services, and no doubt a multitude of inconsistent client behavior oddities.

A similar approach could arguably be applied even at a network connection log level.

</comment><comment><USER96> Maybe I'm missing the point. But Instagram, Facebook, Twitter - all of them are not mainly experienced through search but through a feed of endless content, curated by an algorithm. Most regular users don't even search that often, they consume. Maybe there could be an decentralized Internet where you follow specific handles and then they bring their content into your main "Internet" aka feed (= user friendlier RSS).

</comment><comment><USER97> An idea I've had for a long time is a .well-known/search standard (REST) endpoint. Where your browser, or a search aggregator combines results from many sites like stack overflow, MDN, news sites, i duvidual blogs, etc. That way search engines doesnt have to create a index. It would be up to the sites to create the search result. This means searching would be parallel and distributed.

</comment><comment><USER98> my ideal internet would be more like a set of concentric rings per user, a ring would represent different preferences, filters, and data, i could choose to include certain users access to parts of my rings, and i could access other parts of other user's rings. obviously there should be an open ring that every user can access which would need a search engine run by a company or set of companies, this would be like today's internet, but that would not be the same ring, i could switch between rings with ease. i think this maybe somewhat what tim berners lee is doing with the decentralized web, or perhaps bits of dark net interwoven with the internet.

an example use case would be like a set of apps that my family could use for photo sharing, messaging, sending data, links to websites, etc. perhaps another set of apps for my friends, another for my company, or school. the protocols would not require public infrastructure, dns, etc. perhaps tethering of devices would be enough. there would be a need for indexing and search, email, etc.

</comment><comment><USER99> I feel like Linked Data Fragments provides a solution to this: [http://linkeddatafragments.org/](http://linkeddatafragments.org/)

You're effectively crawling portions of the web based on your query, at runtime! It's a pretty neat technique. But you obviously have to trust the sources and the links to provide you with relevant data.

</comment><comment><USER100> What about Xanadu? Internet is very broken but almost no one seems to care (for a reason). Idea of more p2p web is there for a while but at the end of the day user don't care to much about anything so it probably never happen.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

<comment><USER101> Xanadu assumes good players. It will be decimated by the very first spammer / advertiser that appears...

It's a vision for an academic, small scale, network, not for a viable global web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> I've said this before: I dearly miss Alta Vista. It indexed, but the user had to provide the ranking, which required actually thinking about what was wanted. I would construct searches of the pattern (word OR word) And (word NEAR word) with great success. Naturally Google, requiring far less thinking to use, won.

</comment><comment><USER103> Lately, I've been turning over an idea that in order to advance, the next generation of the Internet should be designed so that third-party advertising is impossible to implement. I believe that as a consequence, this requirement will prevent crawler-based search engines from operating which presents a source discovery problem.

Discovering new sources of information in this kind of environment is difficult, and basically boils down to another instance of the classic key distribution problem - out-of-band, word-of-mouth, and QR codes.

Search engines like Google and Bing solve the source discovery problem by presenting themselves as a single source; aggregating every other source through a combination of widespread copyright infringement and an opaque ranking algorithm.

Google and Bing used to do a great job of source discovery, but the quality of their results have deteriorated under relentless assaults from SEO and Wall Street.

I think it's time for another version of the Internet where Google is not the way that you reach the Internet (Chrome) or find what you're looking for on the Internet (Search) or how you pay for your web presence (Adsense).

</comment><comment><USER104> We already have it, and it's called BitTorrent. DNS as well.

What you call Internet is actually World Wide Web, just another protocol (HTTP) on top of Internet (TCP/IP), which was designed to be decentralised but lacked any worthwhile discovery mechanism before two students designed the BackRub protocol.

</comment><comment><USER105> To everybody who wants to tackle this challenge: start by considering how you would protect your 'new internet' against SPAM and SEO attacks.

For example, if you build on a decentralized network, ask yourself how you can prevent SEO companies from adding a huge amount of nodes to promote certain sites.

</comment><comment><USER106> There's been a few mentions of the PageRank algorithm already...FWIW, Google's patent just expired. [https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en)

</comment><comment><USER107> See Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rules)

Point 4 allows a user to search and retrieve documents on the network.

</comment><comment><USER108> If you look at usage patterns, social media has replaced search engines for many use cases.

For example, if you want to know where to eat tonight, instead of searching "restaurants near me" you might ask your friends "where should I eat tonight" and get personalized suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER109> Your two points really don't fit with your follow-up explanation.

If you don't believe finding information is currently trivial using Google, that's going to be a tough nut to crack.

What would you use for information retrieval that doesn't involve indexing or a search engine?

</comment><comment><USER110> We would still need search engines, but we could change the business model. For example we could make a protocol to associate URL with content and search keywords. Something similar to DNS associated with distributed Elasticsearch servers

</comment><comment><USER111> The good one post which you have to share. [https://www.lowcostwebhostings.com/dealstore/webhostingpad](https://www.lowcostwebhostings.com/dealstore/webhostingpad)

</comment><comment><USER112> I'll be pessimistic here and say no, that is an impossible pipe dream. For any such system design you can come up with, a centralized big brother controller system will be more more efficient and have better user experience.

</comment><comment><USER113> You could make a browser plugin that effectively turned everyone into a spider that sent new chunks of the index to some decentralized blockchain-esque storage system for all to query with its own blockchain-esque micro payments

</comment><comment><USER114> I think once really good AI becomes a commodity and can fit in your phone AND

Once we have really fast 5?G networks, there is a good possibility that some type of distributed mesh type search solution could replace the big players.

</comment><comment><USER115> I think this is the long game with respect to blockchains and establishing trust in general.

You will be able to trust data and sources instantly. There will be no intermediaries and trust will be bootstrapped into each system.

</comment><comment><USER116> What if we just make a program that Googles a bunch of random stuff constantly so that there is so much garbage in their algorithms that they can't effectively figure out real vs synthetic searches.

</comment><comment><USER117> We need an alternative internet where anonymity between two parties is impossible.

Not a place for entertainment, but where government or business transactions can be safely conducted.

A search engine would be of secondary importance.

</comment><comment><USER118> i guess if we had a highly regulated and one site for one type of service it would be possible but i would not really want that. you could have a algorithm that would parse your query and send you directly to a site of course it could get it wrong where you may need to refine you query just like now sometimes. of course thats still a search engine but more direct. bookmarks are already a form of web without re-searching.

it sounds like what you really want is a decentralized search engine and anonymous by default as apposed to no search engine.

<comment><USER119> AOL [1] among others in the early days did exactly that. Without using a search engine, you could access whatever type of content you wanted. Similar to a communism vs capitalism argument, you don't quite the same amount of variety but you trade that for instant access to what you need.

[1][[https://www.trbimg.com/img-5320a78f/turbine/orl-0312aol-1996...](https://www.trbimg.com/img-5320a78f/turbine/orl-0312aol-19960829)]

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> We could go back to Gopher.

</comment><comment><USER121> I still remember gopher [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_\(protocol\))

<comment><USER122> Some of us still use it...

Shameless plug: [http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for- wind...](http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows)

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> That was the original Internet. Search engines evolved to make finding things possible.

Another original intent: that URLs would not need to be user-visible, and you wouldn't need to type them in.

</comment><comment><USER124> We could try and revive and improve the web-ring concept. Or more simply, convince the community to dedicate a page of their site linking to other related/relevant sites.

<comment><USER125> Webrings are still there, they're just implicit. People link within their content to the same resources over-again, or have more explicit footer blocks or aside link stacks.

Search engines use this structure for domain authority.

A search for "link:example.com -site:example.com" would have found that webring in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> You want to create another [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web) ?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this the same as asking if we can create a telephone system with no phone books, or a city with no maps? Where is our shared understanding of the system's state?

</comment><comment><USER127> Can you walk through a complete use case?

A user wants to find a "relevant document".

What is that? What information does the user provide to specify the document?

Why does the user trust the result?

</comment><comment><USER128> How can I help? Dumped most of centralized solutions in favor of self-hosted (mostly ActivityPub-based) services and still can't get rid of search.

</comment><comment><USER129> I'm too late, but yes, it is not easy but it definitely seems doable: [http://comboy.pl/wot.html](http://comboy.pl/wot.html)

I'm sorry it's a bit long, TL;DR you need to be explicit about people you trust. Those people do the same an then thanks to the small world effect you can establish your trust to any entity that is already trusted by some people.

No global ranking is the key. How good some information is, is relative and depends on who do you trust (which is basically form of encoding your beliefs). And yes, you can avoid information bubble much better than now but writing more when I'm so late to the thread seems a bit pointless.

</comment><comment><USER130> I wonder if we could rearranged the internet as decentralised nodes exchanging topic maps which then can be queried in a p2p fashion.

<comment><USER131> I've always imagined a kinda cross between Solid (ontology mapping) and Zeronet (seed hosted) with perhaps Dat for social (mutability) where crowd navigation determines the relations as a feedback. (original pagerank was a simplified version of such)

</comment></comment><comment><USER132> Yes, it's called "Facebook", and it already exists.

Probably not what you had in mind, though. Be careful what you wish for.

</comment><comment><USER133> Two-way links would help. I can't locate the information now but it seems that it was proposed initially.

</comment><comment><USER134> It is a huge problem. It's not possible to fix it some other way without putting in the same effort.

</comment><comment><USER135> Didnt we? It is called "ask your friends". It s a great way to turn your friends into enemies.

</comment><comment><USER136> Maybe we should all just learn a graph query language and live on WikiData ;)

</comment><comment><USER137> Are any academic groups still researching search engines?

</comment><comment><USER138> I guess nowadays the web IS the internet

</comment><comment><USER139> Yes because nobody will be using it.

</comment><comment><USER140> tl;dr the problems are 1) relevancy, 2) integrity, 3) content management/curation.

If you've ever tried to maintain a large corpus of documentation, you realize how incredibly difficult it is to find "information". Even if I know exactly what I want.... where is it? With a directory, if I've "been to" the content before, I can usually remember the path back there... assuming nothing has changed. (The Web changes all the time) Then if you have new content... where does it go in the index? What if it relates to multiple categories of content? An appendix by keyword would get big, fast. And with regular change, indexes become stale quickly.

OTOH, a search engine is often used for documentation. You index it regularly so it's up to date, and to search you put in your terms and it brings up pages. Problem is, it usually works poorly because it's a simple search engine without advanced heuristics or PageRank-like algorithms. So it's often a difficult slog to find documentation (in a large corups), because managing information is hard.

But if what you actually want is just a way to look up domains, you still need to either curate an index, or provide an "app store" of domains (basically a search engine for domain names and network services). You'd still need some curation to weed out spammers/phishers/porn, and it would be difficult to find the "most relevant" result without a PageRank-style ordering based on most linked-to hosts.

What we have today is probably the best technical solution. I think the problem is how it's funded, and who controls it.

</comment><comment><USER141> Author of the npm module search-index here.

"1- Finding information is trivial"

The web already consists, for the most part, of marked up text. If speed is not a contraint, then we can already search through the entire web on demand, however, given that we dont want to use 5 years on every search we carry out, what we really need is a SEARCH INDEX.

Given that we want to avoid Big Brother like entities such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and also given, although this is certainly debatable, that government should stay out of the business of search, what we need is a DECENTRALISED SEARCH INDEX

To do this you are going to need AT THE VERY LEAST a gigantic reverse index that contains every searchable token (word) on the web. That index should ideally include some kind of scoring so that the very best documents for, say, "banana" come at the top of the list for searches for "banana" (You also need a query pipeline and an indexing pipeline but for the sake of simplicity, lets leave that out for now).

In theory a search index is very shardable. You can easily host an index that is in fact made up of lots of little indexes, so a READABLE DECENTRALISED SEARCH INDEX is feasable with the caveat that relevancy would suffer since relevancy algorithms such as TD-IDF and Page Rank generally rely on an awareness of the whole index and not just an individual shard in order to calculate score.

Therefore a READABLE DECENTRALISED SEARCH INDEX WITH BAD RELEVANCY is certainly doable although it would have Lycos-grade performance circa 1999.

CHALLENGES:

1) Populating the search index with be problematic. Who does it, how they get incentivized/paid, and how they are kept honest is a pretty tricky question.

2) Indexing pipelines are very tricky and require a lot of work to do well. There is a whole industry built around feeding data into search indexes. That said, this is certainly an area that is improving all the time.

3) How the whole business of querying a distributed search index would actually work is an open question. You would need to query many shards, and then do a Map-Reduce operation that glues together the responses. It may be possible to do this on users devices somehow, but that would create a lot of network traffic.

4) All of the nice, fancy schmancy latest Google functionality unrelated to pure text lookup would not be available.

"2- You don't need services indexing billions of pages to find any relevant document"

You need to create some kind of index, but there is a tiny sliver of hope that this could be done in a decentralized way without the need for half a handful of giant corporations. Therefore many entities could be responsible for their own little piece of the index.

</comment><comment><USER142> l

</comment><comment><USER143> G is apparently losing a lot of product related search to Amazon, I suggest that the 'siloing' of the web, for better or worse, might yield some progress here.

i.e. when you search, you start in a relevant domain instead of Google so Amazon for products, Stack Exchange for CS questions.

Obviously not ideal either.

</comment><comment><USER144> No. Search is a consequence of data volume.

</comment><comment><USER145> a New New Internet

</comment><comment><USER146> No

</comment><comment><USER147> Also we should keep hiding from big brothers to save our data from companies and government and pay for it. VPN I mean. But first you need to find a proper one, I waste enough time on it. [https://vpn-review.com/found](https://vpn- review.com/found) one here

</comment><comment><USER148> Finding information has never been trivial and until you can read people's minds to see what they really mean when they search for 'cookies' when they really mean "how to clear my internet browsing history for the past hour" it will continue to be non-trivial. The work Google has done in the search space is damn near magical. Your question belittles the literal billions of dollars and millions of man hours that have gone into making the current and previous implementations of Google's search engine _almost good enough_.

This is not simple, and your Ask HN reeks of ideology and contempt without so much as an inkling of the technical realities that would have to be overcome for such a thing to happen. That goes for both old and new internet.

/rant

<comment><USER149> > Your question belittles the literal billions of dollars and millions of man > hours that have gone into making the current and previous implementations of > Google's search engine

I don't think this question belittles Google's work.

I feel saying that would be like saying that animals that chose to live on the land were belittling millions of years of evolution in the water.

People working at Google chose to spends their time building a search engine for the world wide web, fine. That does not mean that sharing information accross a network has to be done via { world wide web, google }.

All of this is purely theroical of course, but I'm sure someone more creative than me would find another solution. Maybe not a solution that would exactly fit OP's description, maybe not a solution that would be practical with the current infrastructure.

But a solution that would render Google as-is obsolete ? Yes, I think that would be possible.</comment></comment>


Apple belatedly patches App Store vulnerability  - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/3/8/4080644/apple-belatedly-patches-app-store-vulnerability

<comment><USER2> They probably want us to treat it as a feature :)</comment>


Ask HN: What will be "uber-ified" next? - <AUTHOR>

It seems like a current trend is to rent out things / provide services of your own. Uber, couchsurf, airbnb, homeaway, etc... I wanted to ask HN what you think will be uber-ified next? <comment><USER2> The labor market/knowledge economy => Uber for your brain.

Key drivers:

1) Large amount of idle intellectual capital.

2) Changing affinity between employer and employee.

3) High acquisition cost of intellectual capital.

4) Inefficient pricing of expertise.

5) Inefficient validation of expertise.

Further explanation: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uber-your-brain-fitih- cinnor-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uber-your-brain-fitih-cinnor-phd)

</comment><comment><USER3> One hour deliveries of most things in Stockholm, Sweden [http://urb- it.com/](http://urb-it.com/)

An easy thing to export to other cities

<comment><AUTHOR> I see Amazon is getting into a similar space.

<comment><USER4> Already are. [http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8729023011](http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8729023011)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's some ideas:

Laundering Clothes:

Please somebody find a way to do this affordably for laundry. There's Wash.io and local laundromats that deliver, but it can't possibly cost several hundred dollars to wash and fold a few dozen tees, hoodies, and jeans.

Maid Service:

This is essentially what Task Rabbit has become already, but their review system is lacking and there's no guarantee someone won't steal your TV. There an established market here, but it needs a reputation system and some sort of small insurance backing.

Yes, I need to clean my apartment right now.

<comment><USER6> Here in NYC I see the van for these guys all over the friggin place, not sure how affordable tho (I have laundry in my building): [http://flycleaners.com/](http://flycleaners.com/)

For maid service [https://www.homejoy.com/](https://www.homejoy.com/) is a YC company

<comment><USER7> Nobody use flycleaners, they are a joke. Look up their Yelp reviews, almost all are 1-star and many have lost thousands of dollars of clothes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some thoughts I've had:

\- Pets on-demand. Want a puppy for a half hour?

\- Shovel out my car. A little too seasonal however.

\- Serious one: Healthcare and on-demand tech is going to be huge, particularly for geriatrics, but regulation is probably going to make it slow- going. There are a few players in this space but it needs an explosion of adoption. Boomers are aging and there are going to be a _lot_ of immobile old people out there.

Tangential sidebar - if anyone here is working on a business in this space, reach out to me.

A great engineer and myself are exploring specializing in "Uber for X" infrastructure - either consulting services or developing reusable software packages around it and we'd love to talk to you.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.puppiesforrent.com/](http://www.puppiesforrent.com/) already exists

<comment><USER6> Dammit!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw "uber for movers" the other day, struck me as a good idea. ([http://lu.gg](http://lu.gg))

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks like Uber uberified the cargo business.

[http://blog.uber.com/UberCARGO](http://blog.uber.com/UberCARGO)

</comment><comment><USER11> Prostitution.

<comment><USER12> Isn't that what Tinder is? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Waste / Refuse collection.

</comment><comment><USER14> Crime.</comment>