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Comment by mgh2 | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't like my search results mingled with the advertising industry: there is bias in all results, you can't trust in information if it is not impartial. People used to create content to advance knowledge, but the amount of crap nowadays motivated my money (even if it is good quality) concerns me about the education of the human civilization as a whole. "The love of money (greed) is the root of all evil": Google, Amazon, Facebook all are already deep down this hole. Apple might be the only company that still has some decency left.

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Agreed totally

there are parts of Microsoft that are also very honest

For that matter there are even divisions within Google that want to do good stuff

However, Amazon, Facebook and 90% of Google are basically just the precursors of The Matrix now

Their ideal is that all people are mindless zombies, living on universal basic income, like vegatbles/animals, and spending all their money on AmazooogleBook

I think there's a great opportunity now for a new search engine that evaluates the general spamminess of a site, and then punishes sites that link to spammy sites.

This has already been in place for a long time. So much so in fact that you used to be able to attack a sites rankings by creating, or stealing, many low quality sites and publishing links on them to the victim's site. The victim, if they were lucky enough to know about theses things, would then have to create a Search Console account (for Google) and declare that the sites have nothing to do with them and Google should ignore them for ranking purposes.

These days there are more attributes to add subtlety to your outbound links of you want the search engines to take you seriously.[1] I'm sure other search engines make similar judgements based on them.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

I was aware of that, and it's exactly backwards. Google is punishing sites for having low-quality sites point to them (even if they have no control of them). What I'm suggesting is the opposite, that a site be punished for its outward links, if they point to low-quality sites.

(One could do this separately for various kinds of undesirable content and let the users choose whether they want to avoid spam, hate speech, plagiarized content, nsfw content, misinformation, Rick Astley videos, and so on.)

Punishing slow complicated sites and sites with annoying newsletter or cookie notifications would be nice too. Promote simple, fast readable sites with no dark patterns.

There's plenty of room for improvement in search. DDG is already edging ahead because it searches for what I want, not what it thinks I want.

I’d be interested if I could alternate which sort of weights to apply-like you and sibling comment suggest.

Google already does this. It's an NP hard problem for sure.

I wonder if there'd be any value in a search engine that recognized popular third-party ad networks and simply did not add to its index any page which includes them. (Or, at least, provided users an option to filter those results out.)

It's a constant high stakes cat and mouse game though. A good idea for sure but the ad networks will expend incredible effort to avoid the filters

How would a search engine that doesn't have pretty much any major publication and a lot of content-driven websites gain any traction at all? There is so much it couldn't find, and while you may be fine with that, I doubt many people would be.

> "The love of money (greed) is the root of all evil": Google, Amazon, Facebook all are already deep down this hole. Apple might be the only company that still has some decency left.

While I largely agree with your impressions, I find it ironic to see Apple mentioned in that context. They are the third most valuable company on Earth, worth about $1.3 trillion: https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl...

There is a difference in how you make that money: the end does not justify the means. You can become rich by righteous means (although harder). Apple is not perfect, but at least for now, they did not sell out yet. Microsoft is a close 2nd, after some redemption lol

Don't forget that Apple is a multinational megacorp, and is user centric only when it suits them. Consider Tim Cook speaking at the conference used by the Chinese government to promote internet regulation, saying that the vision of the conference is one that Apple shares, and also the handing over of user data to Chinese servers (encrypted, but still out of their control).

They are currently the most valuable company in the world: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-now-wor...

So the 2T dollars company is the decent one?

Buy books then.

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