@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?
@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 
In your experience, whatâs 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.
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I donât 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 donât 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.
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In your experience, whatâs the most important issue with the current search engine ecosystem? Do you have a story/example to illustrate your point?
Thanks for asking @MariaEuler.
In my case SEAMLESS access means that we could provide access to service so naturally, that people donât 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 personâs MyData profile, via Self-Sovereign profile, Disposable Yet Official IDentity
- by simple act of opening his/her bookâs HYBRID jacket.
Because this jacket has machine-readable image, that entails the certain unique path to a certain service, - uniquely adjusted to the personâs 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 personâs 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. âuser-unfriendlyâ 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.
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In your experience, whatâs 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.
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,
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Hello, no we did not record the BBB workshop sessions, Rob
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 shouldnât be an addon few will install!
I also think that once youâve got more people cataloguing whatâs 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 Haskellâs typesystem to provide unique way to find the exact APIs youâre looking for.
So yeah, effectively decentralizing search requires altering the UX away from what people expect in ways that arenât necessarily detrimental. Itâs a design and advocacy challenge.
P.S. I think a uncurated approach like Yacy is only ever going to give you garbage. Yes Iâve used it. I prefer a federated approach even if much of the hosting is peer-to-peer.