Why there is a need for a good non-profit internet search engine By Glen Wallace The following is a copy of a blog

post I wrote on my blog on blogger.com: When one thinks of how nice it is for just about anyone with a an internet account to become a published author there are some assumptions in!ol!ed that may not be entirely true. If we think of the term "publish" as being "to make public" or "to make publicly a!ailable" then in the strictest sense that is true but what one has in mind by the idea of "publicly a!ailable" and the reality of the relationship between one"s work that one thinks is now "in the public" may be significantly different. If some other member of the public does a search on the internet in a #uest to find ideas about the subject that you wrote about and made public by publishing on the internet outside of any publishing house then you might tend to think that that other person would not ha!e too much difficulty coming across your work upon doing that search. $y contention howe!er is that the difficulties encountered by that other person in finding your work unless they already knew the e%act title of your work can be so considerable that in many cases the stranger doing the search will be highly unlikely to come across your work. &ow compare such an internet search to someone doing a search at a public or uni!ersity library using the libraries card catalog system of organi'ation. (uch a library search would be many orders of times easier to search and would come across a !ariety of works that the searcher may be entirely unfamiliar with as compared to doing an a comparable search for the same ideas or information on the internet using an internet search engine. )nd I don"t think it is just a matter of the internet ha!ing a higher #uantity of works but rather I belie!e the libraries card catalog is so much more organi'ed that doing a search in what would supposedly be a !ery anti#uated system still pro!ides a much higher #uality search e%perience compared to doing an internet search using an internet search engine. In my opinion the search results using google or any other for-profit

search engine yields !ery messy results. What is returned is just one big hodge podge of different categories of websites from shopping sites to encyclopedias to newspapers to entertainment fluff to uni!ersity professors" papers. *owe!er one trend that I did notice when searching for a subject like "communism" is that the search results seemed moreso skewed towards Wikipedia type descripti!e entries rather than what some might classify as opinion piece like my essay on communism. In my essay I tried to look at the subject of communism from a new uni#ue and inciteful angle that I think might open some minds to the possibility that maybe communism is not only not that bad after all but in some respects it is downright utopian in nature. Which leads me to wonder if that is why it is so hard to find my essay "The freedom that communism brings" -- could it be that the giant corporate behemoth Google can see in my work a potential for a burgeoning meme that could e!entually result in a complete o!erthrow of the capitalistic empire and all those behemoth corportate giants like Google+ But regardless it is still my contention that Google search results are a disorgani'ed mess where one looking at the results will ha!e a hard time sifting through to find the sorts of sites that they ha!e in mind. )ny search engine should ha!e some basic operators as part of the search that through the searches selections categori'e ahead of time the kinds of results the searcher is looking for whether it be purely factual opinion do it yourself instructions helpful hints fiction scientific pop-science or philosophical. I"m thinking also that maybe what the search engine itself searches could be categori'ed in a manner similar to or e!en identical with the old library standard the ,ewey ,ecimal (ystem. I was thinking how nice it would be to ha!e a non-profit internet search engine a!ailable. $y impetus for that wish started by looking at the !iew numbers for this !ery blog. This blogging website pro!ides a nice feature called "stats" where the blog"s creator can !iew the number of !iews for each posting on one"s blog. Well my stats in terms of the number of !iews is rather paltry. While I"!e been blogging with some regularity for about one year now with a total of about -. published posts I"!e only recei!ed around /.. total !isits to my blog o!er the course of that year. But when looking at the number

of !iews for each published essay and add them all up the total number of !iew is much lower still -- maybe around 01.. )nd I think the !iews per post gi!es a more accurate picture of number of real people actually interested in what I"!e written and accessing my blog from a search on the topic I"!e written about in a published post here. (o that got me thinking and wondering how difficult it is to find my essays on this blog if I do a Google search for the keywords co!ered in my essays here. Well I found it rather difficult indeed. &ow keep in mind I wasn"t looking for a confirmation of any conspiracy theory from the start. I know how large the content of the internet is and how easy it is for that content to get "lost" in the mass of internet "noise." But e!en after doing some ad!anced searches where I entered all my keywords along with limiting the results to items published within the shorter time frame that my post I was searching for was published within on at least one search I couldn"t find a link to my essay anywhere in all the results that were returned from the google search. In supposedly helping make it easier for one"s posts to be found by a search engine blogger.com offers something called "labels" where the author of the blog post can write in some keywords the author thinks are rele!ant to what he or she has just written and someone who wants to find the rele!ant essay in a internet search can hopefully do so by typing in some of those label keywords into an internet search engine such as Google.com. (o I searched for those keywords that I had already entered and published in the "labels" field some days before my search presumably gi!ing the search engines bots plenty of time to crawl to the post note those keywords and make my essay a!ailable to be found based on someone searching for those keywords. )nd yet I was entirely unsuccessful in finding my own post after searching using all of what should ha!e been the right words to enter in that search to find my essay. I didn"t think that would happen I wasn"t looking for a conspiracy but I"m left to wonder if maybe I ha!e found one. 2ou may ha!e already guessed where I"m headed with this -- could it be that my posts are being deliberately hidden from search engines because of the nature of the content of my posts+ 3erhaps you may be thinking that I am just flattering myself by thinking little old me with no prestigious

titles or academic or literary reputation could be considered important enough that the words I present need to be effecti!ely censored from widespread public access. Well maybe I am flattering myself but the power of the written word still is !ery great and reason itself is a great e#uali'er that doesn"t recogni'e titles prestige or awards. $emes can be just as effecti!ely infectious in a positi!e way coming from someone with no prestige as someone with a great deal of it. That is because it is the idea itself that takes on a life of its own as a meme in a way that the intellectual milieu of the !ery culture with the propensity to forge a sea-change in the sociopolitical go!ernance that guides the direction of society. )nd a theme can be found through many of my essays here of what some might construe as anticapitalist. While whether or not those posts where anti-capitalism or not is a matter of #uestion but I certainly can see where someone who does not want to see the principles of capitalism and what they see as a "free market" tarnished might want to take measures to pre!ent my essays from being !iewed by anyone who might be influenced by my essays in manner where the ideas presented therein might be spread in an e%ponential manner on into the collecti!e conscious and unconscious of the society at large. 4ne interesting tidbit is that the website I"!e been blogging on blogger.com is owned by the Google 5orporation. I belie!e blogger.com started as an independent organi'ation that was subse#uently bought by Google 5orporation. Which makes me wonder why did they really buy Blogger.com+ Was it for the ad re!enue or did they want an easy access to the idea generators out there like myself that they wanted to be able to keep a close eye on and easily block from search results if they so desire+ 4ne must keep in mind that Google is a publicly traded corporation and as such must abide by certain rules and laws that all public traded businesses must follow. 4ne of the most important rules I belie!e it is a law actually is that a corporation must act in the best financial interest of the shareholders of that companies stock. 6ust imagine what would happen to the !alue of Google stock if the ideas I ha!e presented in the essays I"!e published here were to be implemented into the go!ernance of the 7.(.+ I think it is safe to say that Google owns a great number of patents and thus enjoys the re!enue from those patents. If patents were to suddenly disappear those re!enues

that Google currently enjoys from them will correspondingly also disappear. In one of the essays I ha!e written I openly ad!ocated for the abolishment of patent protection. If my arguments in that essay con!inced enough people then maybe patent protection would finally end and with that presumably so would go the gra!y train Google currently recei!es from they patents it already owns. I ha!e also written essays that ha!e ad!ocated for the e%pansion of a form of communism as a replacement for the current form of capitalistic tyranny we all suffer under. 8et"s face it Google has grown into a behemoth of a corporation with a market cap as of this writing at 9:9 billions dollars. That"s a lot of dollars riding on the success of a corporation that has grown to that si'e largely by tapping into a capitalistic system of commerce by matching up buyers and sellers of goods and ser!ices for the pri!ate enjoyment of the purchaser of those goods and ser!ices. It is hard to tell what the effect of the implementation of my ideas could possibly ha!e on their program of re!enue if my ideas were implemented by law but since I do ad!ocate for less capitalism and more communism I think there is reason to belie!e my ideas if implemented might ha!e a detrimental effect on Google"s ad re!enue. In a capitalistic system of commerce the goal is to seek out profits not benefit mankind. In my essays I ad!ocate for breaking down barriers that ha!e been set up by capitalism for its benefit but ha!e been disguised as being for societies benefit. Those barriers include the patent monopoly protection and our entire system of mainstream medicine. If those barriers were remo!ed then a lot of industries would lose an enormous amount of re!enue. If I did a Google search for for instance patent lawyers I"m sure I would find an abundant number of enhanced search results with ads to the top and to the right of the search results screen for patent lawyers hawking their ser!ices to those doing patent law searches. If patent protection would entirely disappear then presumably there would be no need for patent lawyers anymore and as a result there would no longer be any patent lawyers buying ads from google any longer either. That re!enue would completely disappear for Google if my recommendation for the elimination of patent protection was implemented.

While Google may ha!e the motto ;don"t be e!il; I don"t find that motto any more reassuring than I am reassured by )simo!"s "- 8aws of <obotics." The !alue of the motto and those laws are only as good as the fallible humans that run the corporation or build the robots. In a way the corporation that Google now is is similar in some ways to a robot -- a re!enue seeking robot that the builders and maintainers of which are re#uired by real laws of the land to look after the financial interests of the shareholders but I"m not aware of anything in those laws of the land about ;not being e!il; or following )simo!"s robot laws. 4k I had put this essay on the "back burner" for a while thinking that maybe I was e%aggerating things. (ince I had written this piece =and sa!ed it here but not published it> I did some more searches using Google and had a little more success. )nd my stat numbers were looking e!er so slightly better. But after my most recent published post that to date is my longest one yet and one of what I thought was one of my more important posts about the failings of the moonshot for cancer program I had only recei!ed a grand total of 9 hits to that essay. 7sually I #uickly get at least - !isits within a day e!en if after that for a lot of my essays there is a plateau and may stay at just !isits. But for the moonshot essay it took the full day to reach 9 !iews. Before then there was just one !iew. (o I did a search for some of the keywords in that essay? both "(795" and "$oon (hot" and in separate searches on google that were narrowed down to searching for sites that had been updated within a week I did not get a single search result linking to my moonshot essay@ )re the people at Google trying to mess with me+ 4r am I just flattering myself to think that anyone at such a giant corporation as Google would go out of their way to keep people from finding my blog because of the anti-capitalism arguments that are often found on the essays on my blog+ 4k I just did a word for word Google search without #uotes of the title of one of my blog posts and I am to page 99 of the search results and I ha!e yet to see my essay come up. Instead I am seeing a great myriad of different combinations of those search terms scattered about in the tittles and content of the websites in the results. The only way I can get my essay to come up is to put the title in #uotes and then only my blog comes up

and no other results for any other web sites. Well I guess I got a little sidetracked and ha!en"t yet started talking specifically about what this piece was intended in the first place. While there is a popular non-profit browser called Airefo% and a popular non profit website that offers public domain items that can be streamed or downloaded called )rchi!e.org why is there no non-profit internet search engines+ =Well I just recently ha!e been making some effort to find some non-profit open source search engines and ha!e been largely unsuccessful at least in terms of finding anything like a nonprofit e#ui!alent of Google.com where someone could go to a web page and punch in a few terms and see a listing of other web pages that supposedly reflect or match your search. While there does appear that some indi!iduals ha!e made an effort to start something similar to what I ha!e in mind I"m still not finding any working web site that is comes !ery close to what I ha!e conceptuali'ed.> It seems like if e!er there was a need for a non-profit in the world of the internet it would be in the form of a search engine. )fter all 5hrome and Internet B%plorer are not really any worse at opening a non-profit or communist website than Airefo%. It"s not as though when one tries to go to )rchi!e.org using Google"s 5hrome browser to legally download public domain mo!ies or music that some screen pops up saying something like ;wouldn"t you rather go to )ma'on or &etfli% to download the latest releases for nominal fee+; &othing like that happens at all if you use a browser built by a for-profit software company. But it seems like to make the most out of the internet as a free e%change of ideas from across the world an impartial search engine without a conflict of interest as a median of idea e%ploration would be preferable the current search engine choices. )s it is you can decide between a !ariety of for-profit search engines it is like if you had a radio station and you were told you had a selection because you could choose between one of the two stations -- either the country station or the western one. It is rather hard to tell what the algorithm Google uses to determine which websites get top billing in any gi!en search result such that the top billed site ends up at or near the top of any search result listing for any gi!en search or in my case whether my blog gets any billing

whatsoe!er. I think Google keeps there search algorithms as a !ery closely guarded secret. That kind of secrecy just raises the suspicions of a conspiracy theorist like myself. &ow I wouldn"t necessarily ha!e problems with such secrecy if the algorithm was just for commerce searches where the determination was for what sites end up near the top of anyone"s shopping search result. But I do ha!e a problem with Google as a de facto internet search engine that keeps secret the reasons why the search results come up as they do for all information and ideas on the internet whether or those ideas or information are being put forth for commercial purposes or just because someone like me is trying to create a better world through their ideas.