[HN Gopher] search.marginalia.nu: A Theoretical Justification ___________________________________________________________________ search.marginalia.nu: A Theoretical Justification Author : notpushkin Score : 30 points Date : 2022-08-24 21:53 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (memex.marginalia.nu) (TXT) w3m dump (memex.marginalia.nu) | marginalia_nu wrote: | Just a warning, this text is both fairly dated with its | description of how the search engine works, and fairly | incomplete. Was just today thinking about expanding on it. | | There's a lot to be said about how search engines not only | mediate the Internet as it exists, but actually shape what gets | created. If you want free and independent websites, you need a | free and independent internet mediator that lets people find and | partake in such a community online. That is not Google, nor | Reddit, nor Facebook, nor Twitter. | | Right now, while a sort of stubborn counter-culture exists in the | fringes of the internet, it's just a shadow of what the internet | could be. Small websites just can't compete against the SEO- | industry on Google. So they're almost impossible to find, and | struggle to find visitors. It's a real tragedy how many brilliant | and fascinating websites are languishing in obscurity. Instead we | get listicles, content farms, click funnels. | | I think ultimately, for the sake of both culture and democracy, | what we need is a service akin to a public library, to complement | the shopping mall that is Google Search. (Although even the | commercial side of search is pretty lacking, but that is a | separate problem) | cmeacham98 wrote: | I hate SEO-optimized garbage as much as the next person, but I | don't see how this avoids that problem other than being small | enough that nobody is optimizing for your search engine. | | If this was to become popular I suspect it would be overflown | with SEO garbage just like Google. I guess that means we can | use it while it lasts. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced I'll ever get big enough | for that to be a problem. Even if I'm 5 times bigger than | every current competitor to Google combined, I've only got | few percent of the market share. | | But sure, even if that would happen, I have an ace up my | sleeve. An devastating and incredibly simple way of limiting | spam, which is to go for the wallet and de-rank sites for | having ads. | | Google could and would never do that, of course, because they | are selling the same ads. It would undermine their entire | business model. This conflict of interest is the core of | Google's search engine spam problems. | qsort wrote: | SEO only exists because search engines are user-hostile | garbage. Imagine being able to blacklist domains from your | results. That would basically solve the problem, because the | first time you encounter spammy garbage you'd simply nuke it | forever. | | You could even have pre-made open source lists. Basically | ublock origin for SEO crap. | | In a very real sense, it only happens because it's being | allowed to happen. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-24 23:00 UTC)