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"a new search engine that cannot be gamed"

So you mean a search engine that's 100% human curated? Or rather, a directory, it wouldn't really be a search engine.

Any algorithmic signal can be gamed. Although I'd be curious to hear how I'm wrong about that.

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Am I crazy to think a "human curated X" is less impossible than we think it is, even at scale?

Imagine if you could upvote/downvote Google search results, and got rewarded for being "right" or something...

I agree there has to be a way, but it'll have to be cleverer than what you suggested. App stores already rank apps based on user reviews, and reddit ranks posts based on user voting. Both are manipulated to hell, and I've read reports of third world sweatshops dedicated to churning out those reviews. Since the farmed reviews are written by humans, they don't get filtered by AI reading the text or watching people's mouse movements or whatever.

The word "right" in my comment is doing a lot of work, heh...

It only fails on large subreddits. The key is scale. Reddit still has the best content on the web despite a few scale problems.

why wouldn't it be just as easy to game a human?

The issue with "human curated X" isn't the X-factor, but the "human" one. Even an upvoting system like you're suggesting can be abused by bad actors who want to bury legitimate results in favor of seedier ones. At the end of the day, your best bet is to take a combination approach: using RSS for news/reading is a pretty good upgrade, and switching to a decentralized search engine like searx will at least provide a benevolent result.

Totally, it would be curated by people who’ve read the results and though it had its place on the board. We could call it "ReadIT".

You joke, but searching with “site:reddit.com” is half the battle to getting good results on Google. See also: stackoverflow, HN, various forums, basically any user generated + user voted content.

A user-voted search engine is a good idea, I think.

Totally agree, point is they already exist in some form.

Am I crazy to think a "human curated X" is less impossible than we think it is, even at scale?

Once upon a time, back in 1994, a startup used this idea as their first product. It was very popular, very useful. It was called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web.

But, as the WWW grew insanely fast in the 1990s, the human approach couldn't keep up with the algorithms. Eventually it was abandoned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory

This used to exist and was called DMOZ. The search engines used to give more credit to dmoz sites at the time as well. There weren't enough moderators and gatekeeping was a big issue. I wonder if it could work today.

That also was abused - there where DMOZ category editors who took $ to add sites

Humans are also readily gamed. See, for example, Troy.

And Reddit with the top 100 subs moderated by the same ~dozen people who are almost certainly making a living out of it from back channel advertising/marketing/bribery.

And Wikipedia, where power tipping super editors can control whatever they want.

Is this a reference to the Iliad/Aeneid/Odyssey and how humans were gamed by gods into fighting each other pointlessly for ten years? Or is there something else called Troy?

I have to assume this was specifically a reference to the Trojan Horse, although I like your interpretation better.

Yahoo was originally almost entirely human curated. I remember having to pay around $500 to get a business listing for a mortgage broker added.

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