Perhaps it’s becoming clear that search needs to become a common cooperatively managed infrastructure similar to Wikipedia. That this is in the best interest of everyone but advertisers and spammers.
Truly. I wonder if ActivityPub could be utilized to create a resilient search engine that shares the cost among federated instances. We already have something like that in Lemmy and Mastodon where federated data can be search from any instance. If the data is pages crawled by some automatic crawler which is then federated across instances which in turn allow to search through it, perhaps it might resemble a search engine. Page ranking beyond text matching could even be done by peoples up/down votes instead of some arbitrary algorithm. Similar to how voting works on StackExchange or Lemmy. 🤔 I’m sure someone is thinking about this.
One answer that’s proven to work is by involving a lot of people’s labor in the editorial/curation process. Similar to how posting/commenting/voting/moderation work on Lemmy, how it’s worked on Reddit and other human-driven platforms. Corporations have proven on multiple occasions that paying for this labor is not feasible and so a system that depends on it should be corpo-resistant or capital-resistant.
Perhaps it’s becoming clear that search needs to become a common cooperatively managed infrastructure similar to Wikipedia. That this is in the best interest of everyone but advertisers and spammers.
Too bad the Mozilla foundation didn’t pivot to that instead of whatever the hell they’re doing with AI
They can’t. Google is their main source of income.
Truly. I wonder if ActivityPub could be utilized to create a resilient search engine that shares the cost among federated instances. We already have something like that in Lemmy and Mastodon where federated data can be search from any instance. If the data is pages crawled by some automatic crawler which is then federated across instances which in turn allow to search through it, perhaps it might resemble a search engine. Page ranking beyond text matching could even be done by peoples up/down votes instead of some arbitrary algorithm. Similar to how voting works on StackExchange or Lemmy. 🤔 I’m sure someone is thinking about this.
The answer to your question is no, federation is not an appropriate model for internet scale search.
Yeah I think you need a centralized system with decentralized ownership, so that no single party can fuck it up by themselves
so a Search DAO? :)
I mean yeah exactly
the biggest question would be how to defend it from spammers and corporations with potentially much more money.
One answer that’s proven to work is by involving a lot of people’s labor in the editorial/curation process. Similar to how posting/commenting/voting/moderation work on Lemmy, how it’s worked on Reddit and other human-driven platforms. Corporations have proven on multiple occasions that paying for this labor is not feasible and so a system that depends on it should be corpo-resistant or capital-resistant.
well reddit did that and was full of shills and bots, vote manipulation, and more, this approach completely failed for them.