| I've been thinking along similar lines for a year or so now. There are several puzzling omissions from Web standards, particularly given that keyword-based search was part of the original CERN WWW discussion: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/Search.html IF we had a distributable search protocol, index, and infrastructure ... the entire online landscape might look rather different. Note that you'd likely need some level of client support for this. And the world's leading client developer has a strongly-motivated incentive to NOT provide this functionality integrally. A distributed self-provided search would also have numerous issues -- false or misleading results (keyword stuffing, etc.) would be harder to vet than the present situation. Which suggests that some form of vetting / verifying provided indices would be required. Even a provided-index model would still require a reputational (ranking) mechanism. Arguably, Google's biggest innovation wasn't spidering, but ranking. The problem now is that Google's ranking ... both doesn't work, and incentivises behaviours strongly opposed to user interests. Penalising abusive practices has to be built into the system, with those penalties being rapid, effective, and for repeat offenders, highly durable. The problem of potential for third-party malfeasance -- e.g., engaging in behaviours appearing to favour one site, but performed to harm that site's reputation through black-hat SEO penalties, also has to be considered. As a user, the one thing I'd most like to be able to do is specify blacklists of sites / domains I never want to have appear in my search results. Without having to log in to a search provider and leave a "personalised" record of what those sites are. (Some form of truly anonymised aggregation of such blocklists would, of course, be of some use, and facilitating this is an interesting challenge.) |
I decided it is time for us to have a bouncer-bots portal (or multiple) - this would help not only with search results, but also could help people when using twitter or similar - good for the decentralized and centralized web.
My initial thinking was these would be 'pull' bots, but I think they would be just as useful, and more used, if they were perhaps active browser extensions..
This way people can choose which type of censoring they want, rather than relying on a few others to choose.
I believe creating some portals for these, similar to ad-block lists - people can choose to use Pete'sTooManyAds bouncer, and or SamsItsTooSexyfor work bouncer..
ultimately I think the better bots will have switches where you can turn on and off certain aspects of them and re-search.. or pull latest twitter/mastodon things.
I can think of many types of blockers that people would want, and some that people would want part of - so either varying degrees of blocking sexual things, or varying bots for varying types of things.. maybe some have sliders instead of switches..
make them easy to form and comment on and provide that info to the world.
I'd really like to get this project started, not sure what the tooling should be - and what the backup would be if it started out as a browser extension but then got booted from the chrome store or whatever.
Should this / could this be a good browser extension? What language / skills required for making this? It's on my definite to do future list.