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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

> That is literally what Google was founded on.

Hooray! Pre-Google search sucked. It was really bad.

> The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers.

I don't know what this means. Humans have never audited/controlled what gets indexed by crawlers. It's always automata unleashed on the data. It would be terribly unproductive to prune or tune the index with humans. However, using humans as a part of a feedback loop to tune an algorithm is a good idea [presumably all search engines do something like this].

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Digital computers aren't even 100 years old. Human civilization has existed for thousands of years. We have been able to curate and distribute information without computers, and it involved human gatekeepers.

Even in the early days of the internet, there were manually constructed listing of pages. Then, as the internet grew, there were manually curated listings. Then, these manually curated listings started to compete with crappy search engines. Eventually, as these search engines improved, the manual curation was delegated to a smaller niche of the information distribution market.

We could, in principle, go back to manual curation as the dominate method. That has been the status quo for almost all of human civilization. Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason).

Yes, I misunderstood the point.

> Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason).

IMO this is what renders this part of the discussion moot. Given this conclusion, it's not a valuable thread to pursue.

> the manual curation was delegated to a smaller niche of the information distribution market

I'd say manual curation is bigger than ever, at least for news, it just happens via sites like reddit and HN.

The post you’re replying to is talking about pre-internet means of distributing information like magazines / newspapers and television which are 100% controlled by human decision makers.

I see. Yes, that's clear to me now.

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