Category: Web

Bookmark: A look at search engines with their own indexes by Seirdy.

 

The three dominant English search engines with their own indexesnote 1 are Google, Bing, and Yandex (GBY). Many alternatives to GBY exist, but almost none of them have their own results; instead, they just source their results from GBY.

With that in mind, I decided to test and catalog all the different indexing search engines I could find. I prioritized breadth over depth, and encourage readers to try the engines out themselves if they’d like more information.

This is one of the best examinations of search engines with their own indexes, which are quite rare.  Well worth the read.

Are Webrings for Digital Gardens?

Keeping your garden on the open web also sets you up to take part in the future of gardening. At the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven’t figure out how to make them multi-player. But there’s an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to fix that. It’s hard to say what kind of libraries, frameworks, and design patterns might emerge out of that effort, but it certainly isn’t going to happen behind a Medium paywall.

from  A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.

There is currently no way to interconnect digital gardens and other personal knowledge bases, however a stopgap solution might be a webring of the same.  I know this is not quite what the author was eluding to but it triggered the thought.  Also a link is a link.

  1. A webring as a pathway from one garden to another.
  2. Webrings are also a community of a sort.
  3. Webrings are voluntary associations.  The garden owner must want to be associated with the other garden owners.  Must want to have a gate to the garden along the webring path.
  4. Webrings are free, simple and familiar.

Google and the Monotonous Web

Does it ever feel like the internet is getting worse? That’s been my impression for the last decade. The internet feels now like it consists of ten big sites, plus fifty auxiliary sites that come up whenever you search for something outside of the everyday ten. It feels like it’s harder to find amateur opinions on matters, except if you look on social media, where amateur opinions are shared, unsolicited, with much more enthusiasm than they deserve.

Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google.

Good article.  It’s long but there are a lot of moving parts that need to be explained.

My conclusion:  Google has a near monopoly on search.  It’s algorithm has to make judgement calls on which sites rank higher.  Google favors commercial sites and popularity.  This has a tendency to warp the web towards commerce and monotony.  Remember: Google’s ranking is only their opinion (based on perceived popularity.)

Because there is little real competition there are no checks on Google.  Moreover, Google is really an advertising company.  They are going to favor corporations that spend money with them and that ain’t the gal on Neocities.  Word.

SEO’s don’t care, they just want sites to rank so their clients can sell more product.  If Google is the only game in town then they game Google.

I think this all underlines the need for many major search engines.  These search engines should not try and clone Google’s SERPS but should find their own algorithms. Some will be better at long-tail, smaller sites, some commercial but with criteria different from Google.  (eg. Mojeek is fairly good at this right now.  Will it continue to be good at it as it grows ever bigger?)