I’m no fan of Google these days (I use DuckDuckGo) but I’m not sure I can entirely fault them with the decline of search quality. Spamdexing is burying the web in mountains of garbage. Malicious SEO and fraud have exploded and continue to grow at an accelerating rate.
What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but I’m too busy with school right now. I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web: a collection of information connected by hyperlinks. How we get a search engine to achieve that, I don’t know (it may take other tools as well), but I think it’s worth a try.
I feel like Wikipedia is doing a pretty solid job of holding onto that dream: no shouty content, pure information that's maintained by those who are interested in it, and a fairly well outfitted battalion of bots that fend off adversarial edits
Wikipedia is pretty good for its specific purpose but it’s far from the promise of the open web. Wikipedia has a number of authoritarian moderators who will revert people’s changes for opaque and arbitrary reasons.
Maybe if you took all wikis as a collective then you could get something a bit closer. There’s still the matter of finding them so it’s not ideal. Then there’s the matter of ads. Wikipedia doesn’t have them but other wikis are rife with them.
> I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web
What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but I’m too busy with school right now. I would like to see an experiment with static websites that have no JavaScript and no cookies. The kind of thing that was the original promise of the web: a collection of information connected by hyperlinks. How we get a search engine to achieve that, I don’t know (it may take other tools as well), but I think it’s worth a try.