Another Plea for Web Search That Sort of Works: Andrew Carnegie, Where Are You?
July 11, 2022
I am not going to do any history. Oh, well. Not really. Does anyone on TikTok know about Andrew Carnegie? Okay, let’s try another angle. How about a semi-rapacious dude with roots in Scotland who wanted to do good. Please, ignore the Carnegie era Monongahela River. The cheerful Mr. Carnegie came up with the idea of a free public library. Looking up information was a useful thing for poor folks and monopolistic steel barons alike. One person sort of fixed the “problem” of information access.
Flash forward to Backrub. Two bright young sprouts realized that a person had a tough time finding relevant information on Lycos and the other search engines available at “dawn” or the Internet. The fix? Take a little bit of Kleinberg, add a pinch of technology, use available computing resources whether others at Stanford University knew or cared, and mix in continuous feedback to a bundle of mostly automatic rules. More links in, good. Not many links in, meh. Then advertising. Yeah, that worked great for some. For others, ho ho ho.
The result is the weaponized findability environment of good old 2022.
What’s the fix? “Why the World Needs a Non-Profit Search Engine” explains that donors contribute money, and an objective Web search system will return relevant results. The write up states:
Sometimes I forget why I’ve taken on this crazy, huge task. Why am I building a search engine? Will it really be better than Google one day? Will people support it? Will people even use it? And then I read something like The Bullshit Web and I remember, that, yes, there is a point. Even if I make the web better for one person, it’s worth it. Because the way things are is just wrong. Search engines are in a unique position to fix the situation. Not only do we create a view on the world’s knowledge, we influence it too. If we promote bullshit-free sites, then people will create more bullshit-free sites. More importantly, search engines are a filter on the world’s knowledge. Do you really want your filter to be “whatever makes $SEARCH_ENGINE more money”, particularly when that means, “show ads instead of search results, and prioritize search results that also make us more money”? We can and should do better.
I want to point out that what may be required is an Andrew Carnegie type who already has money and a guilty conscience. It is a modern perception that if one can get lots and lots of people to contribute money, one can fund anything.
Nice idea. My response? “Where’s the Andrew Carnegie?”
Why?
Traffic means monetization. Do-gooding is walking on the information highway. One has to speed, and speed is infinitely expensive. Ergo: Monetization lies over the horizon.
Stephen E Arnold, July 11, 2022
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