[PREV - BITWASTES_DUMBGOD]    [TOP]

ENGINE_EXP

                                             October 30, 2021
                                             October 04, 2022


   An old idea:

   The baby search engine project:
   have your own customized index of      A still older idea:
   a subset of the web you're likely
   to care about.                         There may be an opening
                                          for tools for experts.

                                             Rather than the common
   The issues with search engines:           run of humanity.

     ENGINE_TROUBLE                             Thought the elite/commoner
                                                distinction brings along its
        BITWASTES_METASTASIZED                  own troubles.

           BITWASTES_DUMBGOD



                                          Someone must be working on this...
                                          I heard that the Brave browser
                                          had some sort of custome search
                                          engine features, but ad-supported
                                          software may be an even worse idea
                                          than ad-supported web sites.

       I sometimes toy with this idea for a                BROKEN_WEB
       "baby google", a search engine that
       you host yourself that only combs
       sites that you already care about.
                                                Everyone having to crawl the
          If you aren't in control of           same pages over-and-over seems
          your own search engine,               pretty nutty though-- does any
          you ceeded control of a lot           one publish their own internally
          of your life.                         generated indexing data?

          Google's precise inner                   That's be a nice thing
          workings are inscrutable;                for the w3.org to
          duckduckgo makes                         standardize.
          pronouncements that they're
          not spying on you, but you
          can't know that's true.


   Thinking further: isn't there a pattern of
   the experts getting seduced by the easy?

   It can be tricky to convince an expert
   that it's worth the trouble to learn
   to set-up a new tool rather than just        E.g. I'm still
   do the same Easy To Use crap everyone        on gmail.
   else is using.

                                           Experts are busy being experts,
                                           And there are a lot of tools out
                                           there competing for attention.



       And further: are we stuck with the tension between
       democracy and elite, or is there some way of elevating
       the common, perhaps recruiting them into the elite?


               Again: social structures matter...



                             SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY

                             FAST_SLOW_AND_SLOWER


--------
[NEXT - BROKEN_WEB]