In Part 1, I discussed the principles of this Hypothetical Search Engine. In Part 2, I will discuss the questions that these principles do not answer.
Its all Relative
A Search Engine is supposed to serve you the objectively most relevant result to your query, right?
Not necessarily.
Relevancy is relative. The best tacos in your area are not the same in my area. So some sort of localization would be necessary. But how do we localize our algorithm, we fall into the same traps that Google is entangled in? How can we be ‘just a search engine’ if we are cataloging things outside the web?
Labor of Love
In a capitalist system , currency is a the only way to trade value. The merits, or lack thereof, withstanding, how do we attract valuable labour only on the basis of of our mission. Open-source contributors have been burned before. Our fierce anti-commercial agenda would mitigate most of the issue, but how do we convince people for real? We are not the first techno-populists to present utopian ideals. This will be a collaborative effort. This is not just limited to technical labour. It also includes evangelism, or ‘marketing’, etc.
Same goes for our users.
Apathy is a Tragedy
In my observation, media literacy is not widespread enough for most people to understand that Google is serving them blogspam to prop up their ads business. So how do we convince people that there is a better way? Users are important to achieve the scale to compete with commercial search engine. Distributed, peer-to-peer technology is the core of this system.
This will be the most important question to answer; if we build it will they come?
Solutions
I understand this essay betrays every writing advice every. I have posed questions and not answered them. At least not yet. The solutions are not there, but that does not mean they won’t be in the future. I will post a part 3 when I have an answer to atleast one of these.
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