5 ms·

From the article: "But what about those nasty filter bubbles that trap people in narrow worlds of information? Making Google’s index public doesn’t solve that

From the article: "But what about those nasty filter bubbles that trap people in narrow worlds of information? Making Google’s index public doesn’t solve that problem, but it shrinks it to nonthreatening proportions. At the moment, it’s entirely up to Google to determine which bubble you’re in, which search suggestions you receive, and which search results appear at the top of the list; that’s the stuff of worldwide mind control. But with thousands of search platforms vying for your attention, the power is back in your hands. You pick your platform or platforms and shift to others when they draw your attention, as they will all be trying to do continuously." But this is a huge problem. I'd rather have 10 independent search providers instead of 10 companies proxying the results of google. It's worse, if I don't even know from which index the results come from. I guess, many people don't know, that Startpage shows you Google results. I don't want Google results! I want different web crawlers ordering the results according to my taste without tracking each and every page impression of me. Give me that and I'll switch in a heartbeat.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jd_nlp 7y ago
The other problem with this is that it still can't change human nature. Ok, so this plan is implemented and any site can serve google results and order them as they want with an API. People are still going to go to their favorite far right or far left outlets, which can now access google results and show only the articles that they know their users want to see. The "filter bubble" problem could even be worse than it currently is in this scenario.
- Loughla 7y ago
  That was my first thought. So this is a thing, and now we have dedicated search engines to showing you the 'true' search results from either the left or right. And it's that much easier to stay completely enveloped in the echo chamber.
foota 7y ago
> I don't want Google results! I want different web crawlers ordering the results according to my taste Okay, great, we'll see how you browse and use that to determine... > without tracking each and every page impression of me. Give me that and I'll switch in a heartbeat. Uh? How exactly do you want them to do that?
- zubspace 7y ago
  The search engine basically owns an index of all websites. I assume, that crawling websites and storing an index is a solved problem. Not trivial on that scale and expensive. But conceptually solved. What google does really well are two things: 1) It ranks those pages according to the well-known PageRank algorithm, although the details are kept secret. They also learned how to punish sites, which try to mislead the algorithm (Duplicate content, excessive SEO, link farms, etc) 2) What they also do well is returning search results in a very short time, based on a relevancy of your search term combined with the precalculated ranking. It also looks at your history in this step and the data it tracks about you. My preferred search engine would open up both bullet points, giving you the option how pages are ranked and how relevancy is determined. For example: Rank personal blog posts higher or rank news higher or only use an inbound link count. Or you could get fancy and crowd source ranking (similar to hacker news). You could also configure search term relevancy. For example: did you ever search google for something specific and it automatically adjusted your term to something similar, more popular? You could open up all those decisions and give the user options. Google on the other hand keeps everything secret and uses your personal data in unknown ways. I would love to have a search engine which is configurable. Yeah, not an easy thing to do. But it would be awesome.
  - foota 7y ago
    While you may be able to open up some switches, I don't think you can build a reasonable user experience on something like that, since anything that allows you significant control over how the results are chosen (beyond the simple control you've mentioned, like prefer certain types of results) will be both too complex for anything other than like distributed common sets of options (like a plugin that comes with presets) and/or have so many knobs as to make tuning for good results infeasible. I would argue Google already supports some of what you want, like allowing you to search just for news, although additional filters based on something like the niche you're looking for or the type of content don't hurt.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jd_nlp 7y ago

The other problem with this is that it still can't change human nature. Ok, so this plan is implemented and any site can serve google results and order them as they want with an API. People are still going to go to their favorite far right or far left outlets, which can now access google results and show only the articles that they know their users want to see. The "filter bubble" problem could even be worse than it currently is in this scenario.

Loughla 7y ago
That was my first thought. So this is a thing, and now we have dedicated search engines to showing you the 'true' search results from either the left or right. And it's that much easier to stay completely enveloped in the echo chamber.

foota 7y ago

> I don't want Google results! I want different web crawlers ordering the results according to my taste Okay, great, we'll see how you browse and use that to determine... > without tracking each and every page impression of me. Give me that and I'll switch in a heartbeat. Uh? How exactly do you want them to do that?

zubspace 7y ago
The search engine basically owns an index of all websites. I assume, that crawling websites and storing an index is a solved problem. Not trivial on that scale and expensive. But conceptually solved. What google does really well are two things: 1) It ranks those pages according to the well-known PageRank algorithm, although the details are kept secret. They also learned how to punish sites, which try to mislead the algorithm (Duplicate content, excessive SEO, link farms, etc) 2) What they also do well is returning search results in a very short time, based on a relevancy of your search term combined with the precalculated ranking. It also looks at your history in this step and the data it tracks about you. My preferred search engine would open up both bullet points, giving you the option how pages are ranked and how relevancy is determined. For example: Rank personal blog posts higher or rank news higher or only use an inbound link count. Or you could get fancy and crowd source ranking (similar to hacker news). You could also configure search term relevancy. For example: did you ever search google for something specific and it automatically adjusted your term to something similar, more popular? You could open up all those decisions and give the user options. Google on the other hand keeps everything secret and uses your personal data in unknown ways. I would love to have a search engine which is configurable. Yeah, not an easy thing to do. But it would be awesome.
- foota 7y ago
  While you may be able to open up some switches, I don't think you can build a reasonable user experience on something like that, since anything that allows you significant control over how the results are chosen (beyond the simple control you've mentioned, like prefer certain types of results) will be both too complex for anything other than like distributed common sets of options (like a plugin that comes with presets) and/or have so many knobs as to make tuning for good results infeasible. I would argue Google already supports some of what you want, like allowing you to search just for news, although additional filters based on something like the niche you're looking for or the type of content don't hurt.