Open, fair, free, fast search
Yes, openzuka has set itself the audacious goal of replacing google as the dominant search engine. We need the help of programmers of course, but we also need the help of promoters and people who just know what they want in a search engine.
One early proposal, from the founder of the openzuka project, Mitchell Szczepanczyk, is to reward pages and sites on the diversity of links going to them and not just the number of links. This could mean links from sites around the world and also from pages that aren't highly linked to each other. If Nader and the NRA both link to the same site, it's probably of interest, no?
I've put my own bid for openzuka's goals in the title of this post: open, fair, free, and fast.
Google is not open. This leaves its fairness very much a matter of unresolvable debate. For now it is free, except for text ads. And it remains fast. These last two are the big technical challenges the openzuka search engine must meet to put its liberty and justice goals within reach.
Openzuka will concentrate first on creating openzuka.net/news because this is where Google, according to a 2003 patent application, is most likely to become unmistakably unfair in its decisions of to whom to link.
Openzuka's openness, its transparency, is a central tenet of its development and future existence– it's right in the name. This may make openzuka's fairness a topic of endless debate, but at least it will be informed debate. While not falling back on the easy out of a black box, we should steal a page from Google's playbook in using the complete automation of search results to argue for their impartiality and to resist pressure to censor certain sites.
Read Google's explanation of why searching for "jew" brings up anti-semetic sites. (Today I got two beware-the-jew and two convert-the-jew sites in the top 10 results, and this is after a lot of jews and allies mobilized to compete with the hate-mongers on this keyword.) If Google had given in to pressure to remove offending sites from its search results, though, how would this serve the public interest (which includes "know thine enemy")? By going to a system of weighting news sources by human decisions (with no connection to truth or what makes meaningful news anyway), Google would be giving up a great deal of insulation against pressure. What would it be able to do if the attack dogs of the Israeli and U.S. governments' right wing insist that Al-Jazeera be banned? All kinds of subtler self-censorship can come into play in a secret system controlled by a company increasingly dependent on the opinion of those who can afford to advertize and buy stock.
At openzuka, I think the selection of news sources must be solely technical or if there is human input, it must be highly democratic with a bias towards inclusiveness. Either way, the need for technical sophistication is great. Let's get started! But first, what do you want in openzuka?
