A Stupid Plan for a Stupid Search Engine

20 Aug, 2024

I'm from Italy, once I heard that, here, when you are nominated minister, you have to do 4 things in order to have you job considered "done". Even if these things are stupid, that's totally fine, just do four things, one for each of following categories.

1. make something new
2. revive something from the past
3. abolish something
4. address an emergency

Let's make an example: I get nominated Minister of Fashion.

1. Let's introduce tax deduction for everyone that puts one a sweater instead of turning on heating
2. Bring back cannabis as a fabric (cause there are cannabis variety there are not psychoactive)
3. Abolish dress code, everyone free to go to the office as they prefer
4. Let's manage fast fashion and the enormous amount of waste it produce with better policies Easy! Now population is happy and we can rest comfortably

Ok, in Italy that's the norm, but I think this framework has some potential. Suppose I'm the minister of the fight against Google. I have to kill Google (i know, i m exaggerating, it s just to give you an idea of what i could be aiming for). If I ever wanted to kill Google, I would have to stop it's source of revenue, this can't be done by law... i have to make a better product.

But what should this better product look like? Let's work with the above framework...

• address an emergency
  • it has to handle (aka hide) the enormous amount of slop generated by ai
• abolish something
  • maybe ads (many services are now supported by subscription)
  • maybe data collection (i think it s literally useless, just a little bit for yt suggestions but yt is out of scope we want to beat the search engine)
• revive something from the past
  • what about human curated directory?
• something new
  • i was thinking of something like a search engine that search first in you bookmark / in you history / eventually in something curated by

That's a plan. A cloudy plan, but still a plan. But wait, I can already see a major flow. If Google loves to be the default on every device, there must be a real cost in switching! That's why we need ~a parasite~ an extension.

What if you could install an extension that, when you do a Google search, grabs your query, does a similar search on a small selection of what you are really interested and shows that on top of Google results. The selection could be a set of pages curated by others, your browser history, your bookmarks... anything that you are sure is valuable

Nice side effects:

• slowing down internet death
• surface actually important pages without leaving Google

Unpleasant side effects:

• it needs an extension (which in my head is the same as "i should write a new browser")
• has a lot of privacy problem (i don't know how to safely do search on encrypted page, maybe the solution consist in an extraction of relevant keyword from the page... dunno, also everything local i think is to much of a burden (harder to sync, harder to share with others)

I m still fantasizing, but, meanwhile i started to write something like a proof of concept (nonoiseplease.com)

See you soon Byschii