The only way I can imagine this working is by twisting the definition of the words “search engine” enough that you can claim that there aren’t search engines, but really there are still, just under a different name.
Search engines aren’t actually the “problem” that OP is wanting to address, here, though. He just doesn’t like the specific search engines that actually exist right now. What he should really be asking is how a search engine could be implemented that doesn’t have the particular flaws that he’s bothered by.
Plus the web is not the whole internet.
You could stick to Gopher.
Or use other search engines. There are hundreds. Hundreds.
Maybe not as useful as the dominant ones, though.
I have a very difficult time imagining an internet that is both interoperable and ranking-free. Now, that having been said, we are well outside my area of expertise here so I’d love to hear from folks who know more than me.
What about just giving transparency to what the ranking is and letting people control it? Analogous to “sort by new/best/top” bit ideally with more knobs to tweak and a bunch of preset options?
Then it’s just more easily abused by SEO. “Best” according to who? Votes? Number of views? Page rank? All numbers can be manipulated.
That could work, I suppose, but I do wonder how much it would slow everything down.
Yeah, please only include lightweight pages please, with short texts. For example.
Not sure how that can implemented, but I’m sure it will only lead to great amounts of SEO abuse. It only works if everybody are acting in good faith.
Would need human curation to select the best websites in each field.
Yahoo back in the day with its categories, and later Fazed.net with curated links was a nice time for a while
It worked because the web was much smaller.
Pay to play was the problem there. I had the highest ranking joke page on webcrawler for a stint, but Yahoo wanted $500 to put me on top. My 15 year old self was not interested.
That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.
Or AI to rank and filter out the things you need based on public indexing. Preferably there’d be several AI assistants to choose from. Things seem to be moving in that direction anyway.
The problem is that personalization of search results tends to information bubbles. That is the reason why I prefer DDG over Google.
While this is true (and a problem with current engines like Google), I could see having a local LLM doing the filtering for you based on your own criteria. Then you could do a wide-open search as needed, or with minimal filtering, etc.
When I’m searching for technical stuff (Android rom, Linux commands/how it works), it would be really helpful to have some really capable filtering mechanisms that have learned.
When I want to find something from a headline, then it needs to be mostly open (well, maybe filtering out The Weekly World News).
But it really needs to be done by my own instance of an LLM/AI, not something controlled elsewhere.
Ai won’t help since it’ll be programmed to show only what it’s owners want us to see
With your own customization, done locally.
Given that the indices are not available locally, it’d be difficult for your own algorithm of any sort, AI or otherwise, to rank items higher/lower than others.
Couldn’t metasearch engines like metager help with this?
