The Future of Search - Workshop - 27th January

Internet of Humans Events
, , , , ,
14

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
Decentralize!

1 Like
17

You would like to join this I think and check out SEARX and Yacy:

Salon: Future of Information access for search and discovery in @NGI4eu
15:00 16:00 CET Worksop SEARCH Search and Internet of Things
Kickoff by Michael Christen @yacy_search
Go: https://bbb.tbm.tudelft.nl/b/rob-1zv-mco-ci9
Tell us Edgeryders Forms
Seminar Register now!
https://www.ngi.eu/event/ngi-forward-data-search/?instance_id=434
Org @NGIForward @NgiZero
@NGIassure

18

Great idea Nico! Talk soon. I think that was the early idea of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn https://www.theinternetofthings.eu/robert-e-kahn-and-vinton-g-cerf-digital-library-project-volume-1-world-knowbots-draft
Vint Cerf my briefly mention it, we hope, n in this talk.

20

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
We lack a strong foundation of independent open source software that can function as the base for a more diverse ecosystem than we have now. So many of the libraries and software we rely on are maintained either by a single person in their spare time or are firmly in the hand of a single company that may terminate it at any time, just as has happened recently with ElasticSearch.

1 Like
21

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?


22

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
You’re being tracked, ranked, and profiled, which can affect the objectivity of your research.

I think a decentralized search with many nodes, in a p2p network can offer an alternative to big tech surveillance, and create opportunities for new tech entrepreneurship. Yacy.net comes to mind. With the right leadership we can empower individuals to create their own search nodes and make a better internet.

23

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?


24

Welcome, Sarah. What you point out is clearly true, to the point of becoming a joke. I am curious, what do you think should be done to remedy it? Are you thinking of government long term funding for strategic open source projects? Or some form of cooperativism? Or what else?

25

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
PROBLEM. Scaling Ethical digital service practices, adjusted to a unique person’s need.
SOLUTION.
What if we could SEAMLESSLY acquire millions people to NGI by a personal BENEFIT (& to other Ethical AI best practices) - for all public library book users worldwide,

  • as to members of MyData cooperative, Public-Private-People partnership,
  • with SEAMLESS access to NGI.eu,
  • just by opening a (Global library) book’s Jacket
  • in2taps of a jacket’s image from any website (Amazon, a book store, a library)
    Aurasma AR-app_Er ist wieder da.pdf - Google Drive
  • also in2taps of a physical book’s HYBRID Jacket.

It is a HYBRID Jacket, like Data Jackets in Japan (Ohsawa 2013) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275541563_Data_Jackets_for_Externalizing_Use_Value_of_Hidden_Datasets

Mozilla Fest one-pager.pdf - Google Drive

26

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
The search engine ecosystem is dominated by Google and other big tech companies that have a business model to influence the results towards their stakeholders interest. The system is not transparent.
The other challenge is that data needs to be curated at the moment of creation to make it FAIRi. I added the very important i, which stands for integrity/incorruptibility. This part and especially its governance is lacking and therefore search will always be limited and cannot be trusted.

1 Like
27

@VladiKup could you expand on what you men with seamless in this context? Is it an adjective, and if yes, how is that archived or is that shorthand for a specific method?

28

@peterwalgemoed and @user1986 maybe check out this Building my own browser to explore decentralized discovery project by @alcinnz looking into setting up his own browser to regain some of this.

@alcinnz this could be right down your line here :slight_smile:

29

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
The major problem for search of commercial companies, products and services has been that there has been no decentralized registry for digital company endpoints. So while most legal business registration authorities have been recording and most often also publishing physical endpoints (street addresses), society has left digital endpoint registration to platforms like Google (implicit registration), Amazon (creating proprietary endpoints), and price comparison services (explicit registration). This has created a strong dependence on the middlemen (platforms) sustained by two-sided network effects.

Fortunately, an increasing number of business registries now let businesses register their digital endpoints directly, and the EU effort to make registry information widely and freely available to anyone will enable a radically different platform-independent ecosystem.

See: https://www.opendiscovery.biz/

1 Like
30

I don’t think there is a single remedy. I like the recent revival of open source sponsoring platforms. The idea behind them goes into the right direction: businesses share the cost of the software they use. But the question remains if they can provide a sustainable income for anything but the most successful projects and they don’t solve the one-person-project issue. Also, the relevant ones are all located in the US. Some parts of our software infrastructure are fundamental enough to value a long term strategic funding. For the rest it might be better to invest into meta funding, i.e. support organizations that successfully support open source, both financially and by helping projects grow up. This better allows to try out different approaches.

1 Like
31

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?


32

Thanks for asking @MariaEuler.
In my case SEAMLESS access means that we could provide access to service so naturally, that people don’t notice - that a person accesses the needed service via NGI,

  • and the technicalities of this access (like search engine etc.) are AI-managed according to this unique person’s MyData profile, via Self-Sovereign profile, Disposable Yet Official IDentity
  • by simple act of opening his/her book’s HYBRID jacket.
    Because this jacket has machine-readable image, that entails the certain unique path to a certain service,
  • uniquely adjusted to the person’s need, like to his/her certain reading disability (dyslexia type etc.) or to his/her mother language etc.
  • and this unique profile is kept in this person’s own cloud (Personal Data Storage, like PODS of [Inrupt] https://inrupt.com/ ), at the Edge of the HYBRID book
  • that (s)he orders in2clicks from a (Global, in future) public library website
  • even from e.g. ‘user-unfriendly’ Amazon, leveraging adversarial interoperability approach, so that a person would access the book/service locally without paying to Amazon, but with paying royalties to book creators.
1 Like
33

In your experience, what’s the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
Tracking, bias in search result popularity over accuracy), corrupting search entities, lack of confidence in the algorithms due to a loss of consensus, due to volume of weighted data across domains

sharing the cost of software, create more trade associative bodies who have similar goals in open-source infrastructure, empower individuals, local communities, and creating entrepreneurial partnerships to encourage innovation and adoption of alternatives away from networks like Google. We need more humans involved at every level of the process, even hobbyists who have webservers and offer p2p nodes.

I just get a sense that pairing p2p, blockchain, and a plurality of volunteered computing power, could make many an enthusiast an active contributor for a more human internet, regardless of their proficiency, we should encourage everyone who uses the internet to help secure it, and make it more sovereign, private, and compliant to human needs.

The work of economic and political theorist, Kevin A. Carson may be of some benefit here, as well as the domain of metaeconomics, which identifies the role ethics in individual choices.

35

Dear sir @RobvanKranenburg , will the NGI presentations on the future of search be uploaded somewhere after the recordings? I personally missed Mr. Christens talked due to time zone differences.

Best,

1 Like
36

Hello, no we did not record the BBB workshop sessions, Rob

37

Personally I think a lot of it comes down to expectations. We want to have a singular searchbox we can type into without thinking, but those singular searchboxes leads to a single organization judging what it should serve up in response. And leads others to try and game their system.

I think web browsers need to make it easy to combine search results, etc clientside. Which there have long been specs for, but they go against the interests of major players (if I recall correctly even DuckDuckGo is contractually obligated to discourage this) so these useful tools get buried. It shouldn’t be an addon few will install!

I also think that once you’ve got more people cataloguing what’s online (noone should be trying to index the whole web), they can design better UIs for finding stuff within the domains that interest them. I like Hoogle as an example in that it uses the expressiveness of Haskell’s typesystem to provide unique way to find the exact APIs you’re looking for.

So yeah, effectively decentralizing search requires altering the UX away from what people expect in ways that aren’t necessarily detrimental. It’s a design and advocacy challenge.

P.S. I think a uncurated approach like Yacy is only ever going to give you garbage. Yes I’ve used it. I prefer a federated approach even if much of the hosting is peer-to-peer.