Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
…
SEO is not the problem, the problem is that it’s not balanced with opposing interest.
I’ll explain: there’s no mechanism to reward fighting it, and there’s no mechanism to reward providing computing resources to some ideal public search engine, sort of modern take at Archie, that would allow complex queries, would be federated and wouldn’t rate results by some obscure metric.
I mean that if, suppose, some sort of (for public indexes) a mechanism similar to garbage collection in programming existed for search engines, where the referenced objects to be preserved would be those taken from some modern alternative of trusted web rings and directories, and the rest would be discarded as it should, you could have a usable search engine with no obscure metrics.
The problems here are - 1) web rings and directories were not a technical concept, but a social one, a kind of webpages, 2) trust was also social, 3) you need to reward people making these, these can only be made by people.
Which is where I want to say that maybe cryptobros were much better than AI bros, since they have produced some means to make that.
Good rings and directories can be rewarded by cryptocurrency payments. Their consistency can be tracked via blockchains, that’s one of the good uses, I think. And the same thing with trust.
Then the actual content of indexes might be shared via some Kademlia-like network.
In short, you need ability to pay for good things made by people, which was a problem in the golden age of the Web, and you need to make search engines not the enemy of web rings and directories, but something working on top of them.
There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done. There just should have been a different model of layers in that whole “Web” thing. Rings and directories being technical objects and not a kind of webpages, tying together pages and groups of pages, and indexers walking over those of them someone wants to track in a standard way. It just should be structured. Probably links (references) should also be a separate object, containing versions of two pages, the source and the target, position inside them and some display information. Not a link inside the page object.
OK, I’m thinking about this again, what the hell.
That’s fine for interests and hobbies, but if I’m looking for a specific bit of information am I supposed to go diving through a Web ring in hopes I strike it lucky?