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Search engines, and the decline and fall of civilization
Doc, you said: Whether we like it or not Google has become the Microsoft of search — in the sense that they now have a monopoly on the business. Who would even bother to compete at this point? Not even Microsoft. Actually, if you look at the Jupiter Media Metrix stats from March you can see that during that month, 37 percent of Internet users used Microsoft’s MSN Search, while only 29 percent used Google. (This is, no doubt, at least partly because MSN Search is well-integrated with Internet Explorer for both Windows and Mac.) On the other measurements (time spent per visitor, and total search hours), Google does come out on top, but it’s far from a monopoly. However, your point on Web search as infrastructure is well taken. Google is a single point of failure, which is unhealthy. (What if they were bought out by Microsoft? or AOL? or Disney?) One way of decentralizing it would be for our CMSes and/or browsers to build up a local index of the sites we maintain or visit, which could then be searched using a P2P network. To neutralize spammers, such decentralized Web search probably would rely on a Web of trust. Results indexed by (((people trusted by) people trusted by) people trusted by) people you trusted personally would be ranked higher than results from other people. That would have an interesting side effect: results would tend to be biased to your own point of view. For example, an anti-abortionist searching for “abortion” would get results where anti-abortion sites were ranked higher than pro-abortion sites, because the people this person trusted would be more likely to have visited (and therefore indexed) the former. Such false consensus, in turn, would encourage all sorts of varieties of extremism, which would have rather interesting effects on society … But I digress. — mpt
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