I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
Think about it - some human element of trust and vouching for someone being added to the ring.
(Ultimately, this is a bad facsimile of human group behavior - all the way up to shunning people who deeply violate group norms. And I don't think it'll scale super-well. )
And I'd still say pagerank did work really well in an Internet where there was overwhelmingly trust. But in a world where default-trust is a bad stance, I believe there needs to be an equivalent of what "You can trust X" does in small in-person groups. (Or, alternatively "Sheesh, X went off and just destroyed all trust")
I do think it'll need to be more than a single metric, too. Trust is multidimensional by topic(E.g. "I trust the NYTs data science folks, I have zero trust for the OpEds"), and it is somewhat personal. (E.g. I might have experienced X lying to me, while they've been 100% honest to you - maybe in/outgroup, maybe political alignment, maybe differing beliefs, etc. Ultimately, what we call trust in an indirect situation is "most of my directly trusted folk vouch for that person)
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
There's no way this won't get abused, but the SEO stuff is out of control. Not even spammer blogs, but if you have a quick question like "how do I check tire pressure" you will only get articles that start with a treatise on the entire history of car tires and the answer is deeply buried somewhere in the article. My guess is that Google sees that we're on the page for a longer time than we would spend on pages that just return the answer, and they assume that "more time on page" == "better content" or something.
Most egregiously I will search for something very rare (e.g. about programming) and DDG will return me results regarding my city's tourist/visitor info. It's as if it just keeps ignoring words from the search prompt that return no results until it runs out of keywords then it's just the geoIP results.
This is sort of what I've been trying to do with Marginalia Search, except I don't really believe a voting system would work. It's far too easy to manipulate. Been playing with the thought of having something like an adblock-list style system where domain shitlists can be collaborated on and shared without being authoritative for the entire search engine.
My search engine is still pretty rough around the edges and limited but I think it works well enough to demonstrate the idea has some merit.
Even just personal shitlists would be golden and make just about everyone happy.
I miss 90s Internet in general. It wasn't the ugly battleground and desolation planet that the current net has become.
I want this too, but I think an often understated aspect of this issue is that by this point Google has absolutely trashed the web of that era. In these threads people will say "the content you want isn't out there, it's all on social media now" -- and they're largely right, but I think Google is the party most responsible for mutilating the web to the state it is in now, and users fled to social media partly because it seemed like a safe haven.
What we need is a concentrated effort to rebuild the web. Take the best parts of what we've learned and combine with the best parts of what we've left behind and try to build something better, for humans, not for advertisers and hyper-capitalists.
That will take time, energy, and people who remember what we lost and believe we can build something better. A better search engine alone is not enough.
When rates of change were slower, you might only have to “move” once in your life, but with increasing rates of change in our human experience, staying nimble is arguably of ever increasing importance.
Google just doesn't know that they exist anymore, or rather doesn't want us to know, because those sites are not commercial enough or big enough.
Almost without fail, no matter what you search for, it tries its best to turn it into a search for a product or service. And those content oriented websites don't fit that, so it just pretends they don't exist.