Comments on: Toward a Public Alternative in Digital Archiving and Search

By: P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Toward a Public Alternative in Digital Archiving and Search

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:47:14 +0000

[...] X-Posted: Concurring Opinions. [...]

By: David Schwartz

David Schwartz — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:11:37 +0000

This probably won’t work for the same reason Wikipedia’s regulation system doesn’t work. Rather than being dominated by a desire to make money by giving people what they want, it will be dominated largely by people who have nothing better to do and have a perverse vested interest in people getting particular results.

Fortunately, Wikipedia’s not that dependent on its regulation system, and there’s not much money in perverting people’s views on political controversial subjects. However, for a search engine ranking, the incentives may well be much different.

In any event, the argument is pretty bogus on its face. Why trust supermarkets with telling us what foods we can and can’t buy? That’s an awful lot of power. Let’s start a chain of non-profit supermarkets, just in case the chain stores someday choose to stop selling our favorite coffee. But why would they do that? Should I really worry that some other coffee maker will pay my local grocery to only offer me coffee I don’t want. How long can they do that?

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:47:23 +0000

As if this conversation is really going to solve anything. As soon as any new search engine opens up, spammers and computer people everywhere will figure out ways to outsmart it. They’re surprisingly creative in getting what they want.

By: James M

James M — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:00:27 +0000

I don’t think this is a problem. There are all sorts of search engines out there. Google is just the most successful because it is user focused and it DOES suppress most search engine spammers.

For any public option to be even close to being useful it must also use some algorithms to suppress the spammers. You have no good technical or legal argument as to why a public or open algorithm would be better than any of the many existing search engines and you have pointed out the one problem with such a suggestion, the spammers would have the source to out game the system.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:47:07 +0000

I lost you somewhere between “Nevertheless, there are some steps that could lead to an infrastructure for a public option in search.”, and when you seemed to advocate for a public digitized BOOK collection. These are very different projects.

Notably, books are static and don’t involve complicated link analysis algorithms.