Cory DoctorowFeb 24, 2023

In 1998, two Stanford kids published a paper in *Computer Networks*: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

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The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – Google Research

Google Research
Show threadChuck Munson
@pluralistic In 1998, several of us activists, developers, programmers, and technologists started a federated search engine project called Freesearch. It sadly didn't get off the ground because the tech stack wasn't there yet. Google wasn't on our radar (Alta Vista was the hot search tool) but we anticipated most of the problems coming with Big Search. I even published a prescient analysis in my zine that year about the dangers of walled corporate digital gardens.
Feb 24, 2023 at 5:09pmWeb