I couldn't agree more. But other than raising some cash to start yet
another search engine I'm not sure how to solve the problem. And it's not
just the search engines, it's Amazon, FB, Walmart and the rest of the
holders of user profile data. Search is simple, the web as a data set
isn't. If the search engine itself isn't salting the results with "cruft"
the website owners themselves will try to skew results in their favor. The
Internet, and more specifically the web - is a bit of a mess.
As a group of technical leaders in the community, and likely early
adopters, we should all help the effort to build something better. Better,
meaning an Internet that better protects user data and privacy. An
Internet that allows you to decide with whom or what you share your data.
If you haven't, please take a look at some of the projects attempting to
create some new models:
The MIT (Tim Berners Lee project) solid:
https://solid.inrupt.com/
0 production apps - but they just finished their React SDK.
Built by an engineer who led a network protocol team at Google:
https://sandstorm.io/
74 production apps
Sandstorm seems a bit like ubuntu snaps but with more data sharing
and security features:
https://snapcraft.io/store
Thousands of production apps
Some people think we can rebuild the web on top of blockchain. That's
crazy crypto cash talking. Sure gRPC is cool, sure a permissioned or
permissionless distributed ledger with immutable records is cool. But web
3.0 it's not.
Today we face the problem of vendor lock-in, not due to proprietary
formats, but due to cloud service lock-in. With all the software giants,
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. offering their services
primarily as free cloud services, this cloud lock-in issue is going to
become more severe in years to come.
It's a new war the software industry needs to fight. It can't be addressed
just by one person, one project or one organization. It needs
collaboration from the entire community.
Unfortunately, I doubt any of this will lead to "better" search results
on the current web.
Kevin
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