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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Even if there were some kind of AI search on the horizon that would completely dispense with the shitty, SEO-bolstered sites (the faux-web) Google, etc. would still find a way to post-process or bootstrap their ads into the results.

I wonder if it will be possible in the near future for a "collective" or "org" to hoist their own search engine paid for by donations. Something to complete a Wikipedia/Archive.org triumvirate and usher in Web 1.5.

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Hopefully more like archive.org and less like Wikipedia or the search results will be as badly biased as most Wikipedia topics are which are even tangentially related to politically contentious subjects.

oh boy, you should look at german wikipedia...

I do, occasionally and seem to notice the same pattern, yes. If ever there were to be created a truly politically neutral LLM it could be used as the back end for a browser extension or wikipedia proxy which would add bias markings to all wikipedia-hosted content. Creating a truly neutral LLM would be truly hard though given the biased nature of the training set.

Sorry, to be clear I wasn't suggesting either of those sites have good search engines — just that they represent the good Web content we deserve.

Nor was I referring to the quality of the search functions on those sites but rather to the quality of the content they provide - the very content you just dubbed the good Web content we deserve. Wikipedia does have some good content but it is a steaming pile of ${excrement} when it comes to anything even remotely politically contentious as those articles tend to be hijacked by activist editors who allow nothing but their own narrative to remain. For such articles the talk and history pages are far more informative than the agitprop in the article.

archive.org does not editorialise content so they are the better example here. They may be selective in which content they archive but I have not yet noticed any specific bias there - which I consider to be a good thing.

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