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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
by alangibson 7y ago
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.
- asdff 7y agoWhy 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.