> I can for example look at the HTML of a document and if it has too many ads or if it has too many tracking elements I can downrank the website for example. Or enable a user to have a check box to say I don’t want to many ads. I prefer content that does not have ads, for example. It is hard to get it perfectly right, but even to remove 75% of the ads that’s still a huge improvement.<p>That's a pretty big opening for a search engine that Google basically cannot fight since it is against their core interests.
> Ten, fifteen years ago you needed a large budget to be able to play in this space. You needed to demonstrate that you were going to be making a profit. Because nobody is going to throw tens of millions of dollars at something just for fun. But now we are at the point where regular human beings can dabble in this space.<p>Great quote. Enabling human-scale experimentation supercharges creativity and discovery.
"We don't have to have a Google and a Twitter and a Facebook."<p>Many years ago, before Facebook or Twitter existed, I recall being promised that a project called "Nutch" would allow web users to crawl the web themselves.<p>Perhaps that promise is similar to the promises being made about "AI" today.<p>The project did not turn out to be used in the way it was predicted (marketed), or even used by web users at all.
I've listen to Viktor's podcast with this organization, I think 1 month ago but since then I got bad COVID so I still feel dizzy....but my take is, he might be right.<p>The biggest problem with Web today perhaps is the search index; if we want to fight the problems of SEO spam, fraud and scams on the web, we need open transparent crawling index so we get better understanding of what websites are and what are they doing. On top of that, open web index would bring the opportunity of better discovery of smaller unknown websites too.<p>I'm not quite optimistic that we can compete with Google and Bing because with their enormous computing resources, they got gigantic scale but we can start with smaller index first and then try to scale up.
I would if the arrival of ChatGPT has sort of taken the wind out of Marginalia's sails as a human-directed search engine. It seems likely that the future of answering one's questions using the internet, is an LLM giving a straightforward, concise answer that is free of the quirks of a human author. Therefore, there is less motivation to search for personal websites and read website makers' own writing.<p>For example, imagine an old-school hobbyist website that contains information about some obscure band or author that can't be found elsewhere on the web, and doesn't readily show up in a Google search. Yet at the same time the author writes terrible prose, uses annoying HTML/CSS, or goes into tiresome political rants, etc. Instead of using a Marginalia-like search engine to discover those sites and read them directly, wouldn't it be a superior experience to have an LLM gorge on all those sites and then tell you just the facts that you care about?