One of the biggest problems on the web is search — especially from a privacy perspective. we need to setup our own search engines, so that get more universal results without manipulation. Also could we federate the m? Remember how the original Napster worked?! Perhaps we could setup our search engines to work like Napster.
@awoodsnet would definitely be good to produce user controllable filters that weed out half the cr*p that no one in their right mind would want to look at. Might be the single most significant contribution to the de-enshittification of the web.
@awoodsnet Search has become massively harder as the number of scammy websites has sky rocketed. It's not enough to just "make an index" there is just so much work needed to filter out the bad stuff.
I'm not saying this shouldn't be done, just saying it's incredibly hard.
@scottjenson Yeah, i agree it’s gonna be hard. But I also think there’s opportunity to re-imagine search. Perhaps if there were topic-specific indexes? There would need to be a way to cleanse and evaluate the content before adding web pages and other files to the search indexes.
@awoodsnet Probably a good idea to remember that Napster and subsequent services had a problem with people squatting on keywords with malware-infested payloads.
@kboyd i lost track of what happened with Napster. I just remember liking the search experience in Napster, and liked how library info was shared between the users, so it was easy to find music. An analogue for web pages would be good. Perhaps we learn to guard against the negative outcomes
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