Tuesday 2 February 2010

A world without Google?

The introduction of the iPad made me start to think some strange thoughts. In one way, this is a brilliant device with the most intuitive UI I've seen so far, and I can see this as the perfect 'computer' for anyone who doesn't care about computers and just wants to get to some info. So, somehow this is a window into the Net but it is also its own eco-system that is tightly controlled by Apple (i.e. who gets to put apps on there and who doesn't). I guess there are good and bad side effects of that control but it sure is something worth pondering... But isn't that a bit like what the Internet has become? In a way, Google controls what a user gets to see and what not. Sure there are ways around that (using different search engines) as there will be with the iPad (jailbreaking) but in the case of the Internet that is not really satisfying (i.e. just some other company that controls what you see).

So, I'm wondering: could there be a search engine that is entirely free? Something like Wikipedia - distributed, maintained by volunteers and without a commercial drive. I think there are many parallels between a Wiki and a search engine (of course, there are also differences). You'd need some mechanism to alert the system of changes in a web page (spider or maybe proactively done by the publisher of the web page) or if a new page is added (same) but that isn't too hard to do. So, if the job of cataloguing the web is partitioned and replicated amongst loads of servers, would that be a viable alternative to Google? Given sufficient numbers of volunteers, it might even be possible to get some sort of semantic catalogue (such as what Yahoo! used to be initially but with additional information added).

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