5 ms·

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

DougN7 3y ago
Brilliant idea!
wintermutestwin 3y ago
Until ChatGPT came along, I figured it was inevitable that human curated search came back into ascendancy as the crawler model has become such a failure. Now we can use ChatGPT to filter through Google's infested mess, but this double edged Sword of Damocles will be able to create infinite attempts to bury genuine content with ad spam.
drpixie 3y ago
You might have stumbled onto a practical and useful application of LLMs. Yahoo (or whoever) could crawl the web, categorise each page, and provide a genuine "Index". Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub--sub-sub...category with something like the original page-rank. Now if Yahoo (or whoever) could avoid the enshitification trap ... imagine what a fabulous resource that could be.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) Now that is an awesome idea. I really do think we need to have category-based indexing as well as page search.
symonda 3y ago
This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.
- noizejoy 3y ago
  > User managed or curated indices … Do you mean self-managed? Everything else is effectively the influencer scene. Which is increasingly deplorable as well. Anything with wide enough reach becomes cost-effective for gaming. So one would have to return to a highly fragmented world to make gaming the system cost prohibitive. And that would get us to a pre-Internet world. But then again, it’s not entirely unthinkable that we’re headed towards increasing Internet fragmentation if various governments get their way.
jnurmine 3y ago
I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites. That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year wow, Search really isn't worth developing.
  - jnurmine 3y ago
    I might pay more if they didn't sniff any other data from me. Search is just one color of light from the prism, so to speak. Edit: not beam but color
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- llamaLord 3y ago
  Can't remember exactly where I saw it, but last number I saw said that Google makes ~$12 a year per user. Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium". Fuck it, I'd pay $15 a year to have a Google search that puts as much effort into finding me the shit I actually want as Google does today in serving me BS ads I never pay attention to.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    > Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium" They announced "Google Contributor" at one point but it never went anywhere
  - praptak 3y ago
    First thought is that it's the most profitable users who would choose adless. The ads industry would not like their reach to be limited to those not paying for premium search.
DeathArrow 3y ago
I thought Altavista was the dominant search engine, not Yahoo.

DougN7 3y ago

Brilliant idea!

wintermutestwin 3y ago

Until ChatGPT came along, I figured it was inevitable that human curated search came back into ascendancy as the crawler model has become such a failure. Now we can use ChatGPT to filter through Google's infested mess, but this double edged Sword of Damocles will be able to create infinite attempts to bury genuine content with ad spam.

drpixie 3y ago

You might have stumbled onto a practical and useful application of LLMs. Yahoo (or whoever) could crawl the web, categorise each page, and provide a genuine "Index". Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub--sub-sub...category with something like the original page-rank. Now if Yahoo (or whoever) could avoid the enshitification trap ... imagine what a fabulous resource that could be.

flyinghamster 3y ago
> Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) Now that is an awesome idea. I really do think we need to have category-based indexing as well as page search.

symonda 3y ago

This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.

noizejoy 3y ago
> User managed or curated indices … Do you mean self-managed? Everything else is effectively the influencer scene. Which is increasingly deplorable as well. Anything with wide enough reach becomes cost-effective for gaming. So one would have to return to a highly fragmented world to make gaming the system cost prohibitive. And that would get us to a pre-Internet world. But then again, it’s not entirely unthinkable that we’re headed towards increasing Internet fragmentation if various governments get their way.

jnurmine 3y ago

I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites. That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year wow, Search really isn't worth developing.
- jnurmine 3y ago
  I might pay more if they didn't sniff any other data from me. Search is just one color of light from the prism, so to speak. Edit: not beam but color
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
llamaLord 3y ago
Can't remember exactly where I saw it, but last number I saw said that Google makes ~$12 a year per user. Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium". Fuck it, I'd pay $15 a year to have a Google search that puts as much effort into finding me the shit I actually want as Google does today in serving me BS ads I never pay attention to.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium" They announced "Google Contributor" at one point but it never went anywhere
- praptak 3y ago
  First thought is that it's the most profitable users who would choose adless. The ads industry would not like their reach to be limited to those not paying for premium search.

DeathArrow 3y ago

I thought Altavista was the dominant search engine, not Yahoo.