How do people find good information on the internet these days?
How do people find good information on the internet these days?
It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect.... It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It's no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it's early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
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This is exactly the reason I've been considering if it's possibly the time to start and launch a brand new search engine, especially now subscription based systems are so common.
With at the core a pledge to not record and/or share any user data or interaction and supported by a subscription service for who wants to pay and really oldschool tier selfhosted "sidebar" ads for the rest.
None of this "insert ads into content" shite.
For the algo, also far more oldschool "less intelligent", where keywords and content matter (backed by a curation of good/bad sites) and options for users to report sites, that will then be re-curated.
For adding sites, allow subscribers to suggest sites that then get listed to other subscribers (or if it grows large enough to support employees, subscribers AND employees) for validation.
If a site is then later found to be questionable, everyone that suggested and validated it can get a negative validation score, which will be used for future reference when selecting users to validate new sites.
Something like they get +1 for every validation they do.
But -1 for 1 bad validation, -11 for 2, -31 for 3, -61 for 4, -101 for 5, etc, so if they validate 100 sites and validate 5 incorrectly, they are no longer allowed to validate new sites.
And for validation, once there are enough subscribers, you take 100+ random subscribers, of which 50% needs to respond to validate and if 90% of responders validate positively, it passes. If less than 90% validate positively, it goes for manual review by the administration.
Etc etc.
The problem with search engines isn’t the search engines themselves. The problem is that sites game the system. Everybody want to be at the top of the search results, so they do whatever it takes to get there.
You can start a brand new search engine, but if it get popular enough it will also be gamed to the point it’s useless again.
There just needs to be actually human eyes on this kind of shit. Especially if it's a subscription service like dude was saying. Algorithms will get gamed. Everything will get gamed. But a gamer can spot another gaming faster than anything I know of. You need a bullshitter to call ballshit on any and every letter-not-the-spirit of the rule, bad faith motherfucker out there. Ban hammer vigilance almost always wins out, and besides a person's data can be cross referenced to pings in cell towers. A crafty bot (maybe not entirely leeeeegal) can auto block from IPs around marked IMEIs, so wherever bitchass goes, if he's got his phone, no go.
And if you wanted too, by the time they got wise and got a new number, you'd already know their habits and have deduced the number switch anyway. People are amazingly, and frighteningly easy to identify by just a few repeated locations in a week.