RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116606460885131034
So we *really* need to come up with solutions to make the living Internet (the part with real people) navigable, huh?
This isn't just obnoxious. This is an effort to make sure you don't find anything on your own or stumble into anything unexpected.
I used to be an expert at using Google to find stuff, but it's been years since any of that worked.
I don't know that the solution is another search engine, at least not one that resembles what search engines are now.
I want to be able to find stuff put out by actual human beings, not AI slop or SEO garbage.
How do we make it possible to still find new connections & information in such a hostile space?
To me, it's not a search problem per se. We have to get out of the zombie-web. We have to be able to find & link together the real, living Internet.
I know that the non-corporate web exists, because here I am on Fedi.
Google searches mostly bring me results from what is effectively a different Internet: an empty corporate wasteland. Google doesn't want me to find anything else.
@artemis So I mean - I think we need to think deeply about how we want to manage web indexes.
marginalia-search.com/ - this is an opinionated index that tries to prioritize different things
searx.space/ - tries to use more indexes and indie indexes - and lets you admix your own engine
I think these two approaches are really important if we want to save the web!
Back in the day - everyone used to maintain a list of links on their website, places they loved, many people I knew had that linkdump *for themselves* but it was also published for others - and it meant you could rely on community and currators. Which I really love!
A bunch of years ago a bunch of Fedi-Types started to try to build their own web en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(… - I think Gemini isn't an amazing protocol for this - but it's also an important idea. The web is so enshittified I don't know if it's *worth* saving. I just don't know how to abandon it in a useful way.
I don't know - there's been so many projects to do it - and I don't know how to build an Anarchist Web which we can then bring more people into.
Marginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
Artemis
silverwizard