[anon1m0us]

It's time for a new search engine -- and no, ddg is not it. We need a search engine that doesn't search the new internet. The instagrams, the pinterests, the wikihows, the seemingly every single blog on the internet that is designed to take your time away from you by hydrating you in droplets between sweat lodges.

We need create a new internet on the internet that does not search the new internet. DDG brings back content from the same sites google and bing does.

I want a new search engine focused on the passionate creatives who produce for the web. The early adopters of the web who have been overshadowed by the adwords and the interstitials and lightboxes.

I want content. I want a recipe site with the ingredients at the top and a list of instructions below it. Not 6 paragraphs of why you want to eat this food because of your grandma making it and then people come NO, just tell me what to put in it and how to do it and that's it and load in .1 seconds instead of 100 seconds and then stall every time I try to scroll because you need to tell your advertisers which part of your page is looked at the most.

Your advertisers are more important than your readers and it's not cool.

[dannyw]

> I want a new search engine focused on the passionate creatives who produce for the web

Serious question: Do you think the 'old Internet' still exists to such a degree? I'm not just talking about link rot (although most of my links from a decade ago sadly no longer work), but also things like outdated content, like a car review of a 2010 Toyota.

I don't know if the old internet exists anymore, as much as I want it. Sure, we are at an old internet site right now (Hacker News), but what more?

[canadaduane]

I think it does, the signal is just overwhelmed by the commercial internet. I imagine the number of creative, interesting people who publish their content is approximately linear growth, while the number of ways the commercial internet tries to "reach out" and expand is geometric.

[jacobobryant]

Shameless plug: I've recently started working on a recommender system/search engine built on RSS/Atom feeds (https://findka.com).

[thepinkelefant]

Check out https://millionshort.com/ Where you can skip the first x sites and exclude lot of sites to skip the promoted and SEOd crap from the results

[mchristen]

Serious question: Would you be willing to pay to access/consume the content found on the search engine?

[hollerith]

I would. I know that because I spent a lot of time on the internet in 1992 and 1993, when the vast majority of internet content was produced by people not expecting any monetary reward.

Today we have the concept of "user-contributed content", which means content produced without expectation of monetary reward, then uploaded to a site operated by an organization with an expectation of monetary reward. In 1992 these for-profit organizations did not exist: the services through which people accessed the content were created and operated without expectation of monetary reward, too.

It was glorious. There are some valuable content and valuable services that weren't produced in 1992 and would not be produced in the future if it became impossible to profit from producing it, so I don't want to remove the profit motive from the internet. But search results from Google (and its competitors) are now almost completely dominated by for-profit actors, and I agree with grandparent that we need a new search engine that essentially specializes in content produced without expectation of monetary reward.

[yesenadam]

> 1992 and 1993, when the vast majority of internet content was produced by people not expecting any monetary reward.

I don't have any figures - that would be interesting - but I guess even today the 'vast majority of internet content' is produced not expecting any monetary reward. It depends how you count the stuff what exact figure you'd arrive at. 99.9% seems closer to what it might be than 50%. Maybe I'm super-wrong about that.

[hollerith]

Good point. The big difference between 1992 and today is the profit-seeking middlemen between the reader and most of the user-contributed content. These middlemen show ads, track people, require people to sign in and force people to shift their attention to the task of getting rid of modal dialogs (e.g., "sign up for our newsletter") before they will display the user-contributed content. They make it hard for the reader to concentrate on the current web page by showing many links to other web pages on the site or on the sites of the middleman's commercial partners. (Even Stack Exchange, named by another comment in this thread as one of the good middlemen, does that.) In contrast, navigating Usenet and the web of the 1990s was a lot more streamlined; to a greater extent than is possible today, a reader could stay focused on the user-contributed content or on his or her reading goal.

Of course there are middlemen today like Hacker News and Wikipedia that pretty much stay out of the reader's way, but they are the middlemen for closer to 0.1% of the user-generated content than 50% of it.

[yesenadam]

Very graceful disagreeing, thank you! I appreciate it. I have a book called Talking Philosophy that says that when a philosopher at Oxford wishes to express disagreement they say "Quite. But at the same time...", and that one in Sydney says "Bullshit!" p.s. I'm in Sydney :-)

[mdorazio]

Yeah this is an important question. A big reason why the internet is the way it is today is because creating and updating quality content takes time and a certain amount of skill, which most people want to be compensated for.

[balls187]

Counterpoints:

* Stack Exchange Sites

* Wikipedia

[srndh]

Compensation does not have to be only monetary. In stack exchange & wikipedia, the contributors are rewards with points & special titles.

[balls187]

While true, this thread was about paying for the "old internet" which implies monetary compensation.

[mdorazio]

Stack Exchange is a private, profitable business. Wikimedia Foundation collects a hundred million dollars in donations each year and spends 40% of it to keep functioning. The contributors are effectively volunteers supporting these companies, which is a lot different than running your own site or channel and pumping content into it regularly.