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"One reason democracy is hard is that people are very motivated to game your system. That makes being transparent about how it works a fool's errand." That's a
by tremon 4y ago
"One reason democracy is hard is that people are very motivated to game your system. That makes being transparent about how it works a fool's errand."
That's a major fallacy you're opening with. If something is important to us (as a society), we will find ways to make it serve us well even when it's under attack. The rest of your post even makes a similar point: the social value of well-working search is greater than the economic value for even the biggest search monopolist on the planet. So why not socialize it?
- xani_ 4y agoWell, on one side we have zero examples of open engines actually working well, on other we have long nuanced history of SEO vs search engine fighting unending battle, with SEO side trying to circumvent every way the search engine is trying to stop them from poisoning the search results. And barely edging out on that. Being idealistic about it won't change the outcome.
- account42 4y agoDo we have any examples of search engines not run by ad companies having problems fighting SEO?
- rjmunro 4y agoAltavista was initially a demo of the capabilities of DEC Alpha CPUs. It was initially amazing. It got taken over by SEO rubbish, and beaten by Google who invented PageRank to get good results again. PageRank was initially much less prone to SEO shenanigans because it relied on signals from other sites (incoming links) to decide how important a result was. Of course, as Google became more popular, people started sharing links on other pages and so on to cheat the PageRank algorithm. And Google have been caught in a fight with SEO ever since.
- simiones 4y agoDo we have any example of an open engine working badly? ' As far as I know, this hasn't really been tried, definitely not with the kinds of resources this project will have available.
- Guidii 4y agoDemocracy has some intentional opacity though. Consider the impact of making your personal voting choice public. AFAIK, nobody has ever tried that because of the dangers of vote buying and coercion. Essentially, gaming the system. (I don't think this proves anything! Simply wanted to suggest that comparing search to democracy doesn't significantly change the analysis wrt opacity.)
- quickthrower2 4y agoI like the idea of opaque citizens and open government/search company though.