Perhaps trolling the entire web is not useful today? I’d love a search engine where I can whitelist sites or take an existing whitelist from trusted curators.
See e.g. the source you linked, which explains the difference.
Methink harder.
>Troll for means to patrol or wander about an area in search of something. Trawl for means to search through or gather from a variety of sources.
We were talking about gathering information from a variety of sources to build a search engine index.
AMP is the perfect way to troll websites into making shitty versions of their content, for no real reason other than just because you feel like it. And then when you’re satisfied with your trolling you just abandon the standard.
That’s the real issue, Google has indirectly infected the web with junk sites optimized for it. Any new search engine now has a huge hurdle to sort through all the junk and if it succeeds the SEO industry is just going to target them.
A more robust approach is simply pay people to evaluate websites. Assuming it costs say 2$ per domain to either whitelist or block that’s ~300 million for the current web and you need to repeat that effort over time. Of course it’s a clear cost vs accuracy tradeoff. Delist sites that have copies and suddenly people will try to poison the well to delist competitors etc etc.
More abstractly SEO is inherently a problem for search engines. Algorithms have no inherent way to separate clusters of websites setup to fake relevance from actually relevant websites. Personally I would exclude Quora from all search results, but even getting to the point your trying to make that kind of assessment is extremely difficult in the modern web. Essentially the minimum threshold for usefulness has become quite high which is a problem as Google continues to degenerate into uselessness.
I'm not convinced that Google's recursive AI algos aren't a functional equivalent. They let you vote by tracking your clicks.
Both curators and algorithms are valuable. This goes for finding books, for finding facts and figures, for finding clothes, for finding dishwashers, and for pretty much everything else.
I love the fact that I have search engines and online shopping, but that shouldn't displace libraries and brick-and-mortar. Curation and the ability to talk to a person are complementary to the algorithmic approach.
It scales extremely poorly. It works very well for situations where there are customers/sponsors are willing to spend lots of money for quality, because then the cost scaling doesn't matter as much; research libraries, Lexis/Nexus Westlaw, etc. all do this, but it's not cheap, and the cost scaling with the size of the corpus sucks compared to algorithmic search.
It is among the approaches to internet search that lost to more purely algorithmic search, because it scales poorly in cost.
That is literally PageRank.
You can apply the algorithm to any graph, and what it does is find the most influential nodes.
Your explanation is not “meritocratic”. The wealthy and powerful largely stay on top with the nuance you provided. The popular have more popular. are able to make what they link to more powerful and thus more popular. There is no meritocracy there.