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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

The Internet needs a good non-profit search engine that has no conflicts of interest. It could be funded by a foundation like Wikipedia or by the government like PBS, but the world sorely needs this resource.

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Most people forget (or never realized) that the main benefit page rank had over previous search engines was that it briefly bypassed pay for placement.

At this point, if search results are dominated by SEO paid placement, then Google search should be as ripe for disruption as the search engines it replaced.

I think a non-profit, curated index is a good first step to disintermediating this whole shady (and spammy) industry.

Yep. That was Google in the early days before they got into the advertising business and before their IPO.

Wouldn't that be "optimized" for as much as any other? Seems like google wants non-SEO results as much as us, if only so that advertisers are forced to spend their money directly with Google.

> Wouldn't that be "optimized" for as much as any other?

Not with good algorithms and curation. Sure, it will be an arms race. But another benefit is that it would be completely open, so people could build better algorithms on top of it without having to write their own crawlers, which nobody can do now with Google (at least not for free.)

I don't think it's a conflict of interest; we're just seeing sites tuning themselves to rank highly in google. I also think google doesn't actually like the extreme SEM optimization, but rather can't figure out how to discourage it.

It is a well known fact that Wikipedia has bias in how articles are moderated[1]. It is a really bad example to emulate. The last thing you want is search to be controlled by a non-profit organization with bias towards the content. I rather the bias be towards money rather than towards content. The former allows for competing views while the latter doesn't. The former is also highly regulated. The latter isn't.

[1] https://evolutionnews.org/2017/12/wikipedia-co-founder-calls...

I don't think the problem is lack of conflicts of interest. The issue is that content creators have far different needs than content consumers. I'm not convinced that Google isn't incentivized to address this, or that a non-profit would have better results (at least not without heavy, expensive curation)

Do nonprofits really lack conflicts of interest? Mozilla for example? I have no idea.

Probably nobody has no conflicts of interest ever. But right now Google is heavily biased toward advertising and data collection which is not good for -- pretty much everybody.

Then how do you propose companies market their products/services? You want us all to go back to pre-90s era where advertising was controlled by few media conglomerates who favoured only the giant corporations? Today, a mom-and-pop store has as much an equal footing as a big-box store when it comes to advertising their products/services online.

Spammy articles should be dealt with the way spam is dealt with in email. Pruning is the way forward in my opinion. Consistent cleaning of the search results of spam and ensuring high quality results should be the priority. I don't understand why the tech crowd is so anti-advertising. I rather the tech crowd focuses on coming up with solutions to remove bad advertising methods rather than do away with advertising all together. The latter will just cause big job losses and the ones affected won't be the large corporations but small business that rely on these cost-effective advertising solutions.

I don't think advertising is bad, provided:

1. It's easy for people to tell the difference between advertising and not-advertising.

2. The collection of private information is strictly opt-in, owned by the collectee, and deletable by the collectee.

3. Advertising is a healthy competitive industry with no one company controlling a majority of the business.

None of those things is true in the Googleverse today.

I agree with all your points! Makes sense.

I don’t think it’s searching for things that’s the problem, it’s creating things of value. There’s no reason to create a great piece of content if no one sees it. To get people to see it you need to fill it with fluff for google.

The very existence of 'things of value' is what motivated people to build crawlers and search engines in the first place. There are many reasons to create 'a great piece of content', even if nobody else is likely to see it (e.g. for my personal reference, consolidating my understanding, just for fun, etc.). Filling it with fluff simply reduces its 'greatness'.

I think the problem is figuring out how we systematically identify things of value.

My personal feeling is that the solution lies in having good 'seed' URLs with which to build indexes. This might be done using curated lists, as a number of people here suggest, or perhaps through crawling and scoring the content.

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