Starting Something New

I’ve started a new project new this week with the dream of solving one of my own problems, and with any luck, will help a bunch of other people with the same problem along the way.

The problem is that search results are becoming increasingly shoddy. The noise is now greater than the signal. I’m sure you’ve started to feel this too after searching for a product. The results are full of sites optimized for the SEO game with the right keyword ratios and backlink farming games, not for actually being helpful to you. The rise of AI tools to answer questions helps with this problem somewhat but often times a web search is faster and I still want to see original sources.

The rise of AI tools certainly does not help with the problem of all the junk flooding the internet. We’re entering the ouroboros era with the AI generated content starting to be used to train and reinforce other AI models leading to a human centipede type situation.

We need a way to break out of this mess. One that puts some control back in our hands.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Google and the lot are trying hard to keep their search results good but it’s them vs the world, and the world is winning. I’m not trying to solve for the global optimum and build my own search engine (though the thought did cross my mind when I first had the idea). I know I don’t have the time, patience, or resources to pull that off. I’m just trying build something that will improve my experience.

To do that I think we need a way to do two things:

1. Influence sites ranking based on human votes
2. Categorize content to make it easier to tell the source and predict the quality

If a site is just hosting SEO spam, I want to punish it for wasting my time and put it in the SEO spam box never to be seen again. If a site was not very helpful but could be helpful for other things I want to down vote it so it ranks lower, just like I want to up vote helpful sites that reliably answer my queries.

Right now the game is for sites to build pages with a whole lot of only marginally useful content so you spend a good amount of time on them (never to actually find what you’re looking for) so google counts the engagement and further promotes the site. We need to disincentivize that.

So I’m going to try and build a browser extension that lets you rank and categorize results.

Do you think the idea will work? What other features would you want?

As another experiment I’m going to try to “build it in public” to share what I’ve learned along the way so others can learn and contribute to the process, so tune in again next week!