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.
I guess in a sense I already use Fedi as my search engine.
If I'm not in a rush & don't need a result right now, it works pretty well to post & ask people "where can I find...?"
I will eventually get some people pointing me to real resources that they find valuable.
@artemis
I honestly think this might be the road to the right answer. Think about, pre-smart phones and Internet, how we found things when we were visiting a new town. I come up with two solutions: ask (hopefully helpful) strangers, or pay a bit for some expertise in the form of something like a guide book.
The search engine as we came to know it in earlier phases operated partially like a guide book, but... The worst kind. Like a guide book compiled by the Chamber of Commerce that's just wall to wall ads for whomever could most afford it. Now it's morphing into something else completely, but the point is; maybe we need trustworthy and accountable groups that can curate information for us in a more human-centered way, and probably we should expect to need to pay for this important work.
The other thing I feel like we need to return to, as people with individual web pages, is prominently offering links to other people's pages whom we think are relevant. Word-of-mouth'ing the web. If you're sharing information about some topic, include anyone else's pages on that topic that you think are interesting. Actively connect your sites with your peers'. Stop allowing search engines to gatekeep discoverablity. Bring back web rings, or something similar; little communities of like-minded sites.
@lumecolca @artemis The main tool for finding things on the early web was curated lists of links. For Yahoo, for instance, you had to fill out a form to get your website listed.
The webcrawler approach came later.
In retrospect, we should have been more dubious about establishing the idea that anything posted on the web was meant to be seen by everyone, unless you put layers of authentication in the way, or just used the barely-acknowledged opt-out mechanism of robots.txt.
It's been almost thirty years of Google making enormous amounts of money by undermining the concept of consent.
Artemis
Lúmëcolca
FoolishOwl