Premises for a better search engine - Overcoming the Google paradigm
For more than a decade now Google has been the dominant search engine, currently used for 67% of global Internet searches (84% in the US) according to NetMarketShare. During this decade there have not been any serious attempts to challenge the market dominance of the company that claims to be on a mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. As outlined before (see this article) it is highly unlikely that Google will succeed in doing so.
The following is an attempt to describe the fundamental premises needed for a successful, sustainable information management strategy (“Search”) or for flippantly put a concept for ‘building a better search engine than Google‘.
Premise One: Information is a natural resource. Like all natural resources no single person, entity, group or culture can claim exclusive rights to information. Just as physical access to water needs to be available to any human being the information how to get to this resource is inseparably attached to it.
Premise Two: Access to information is a human right. To protect and promote essential human interests, especially the unique human capacity for freedom (see Andrew Fagan) access to information has to be free. Censorship as well as monopolized information organization is hence a human right’s violation.
Premise Three: Knowledge and access to information are the natural enemies of belief (paraphrasing Plato). Belief is the enemy of progress. Or in my own words: believe is simply the absence of knowledge. An effective information management system will be able to identify and discard information that violate basic principles of objectifiable reality or otherwise claim non-verifiable/falsifiable arguments and thus unscientific theory is not intrinsically false or inappropriate, however, as metaphysical theories might be true or contain truth, and are required to help inform science or structure scientific theories. Simply, to be scientific, a theory must predict at least some observation potentially refutable by observation.
Premise Four: Evolutionary organization of information cannot be democratic and must follow logic (i.e. peer review) not popularism. We are all “standing on the shoulders of giants” (Newton). No progress can be made without understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past. - Social proof is anything but. Google’s philosophy that assumes that democracy on the web works is demonstrably false (read more here). A functional information management system will employ Hebbian theory. Just as biological neuroscience explains the adaptation of neurons in the brain during the learning process the same model can be utilized to describe a basic mechanism for “synaptic” plasticity in connected systems wherein an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from the presynaptic cell’s/nodes (connected ‘brains’) repeated and persistent stimulation of the postsynaptic unit.
Premise Five: Commercial interests corrupt and sway development. Consequently the potential of connected systems and connected knowledge has been underutilized and de facto halted (altruistic) progress as the majority of Internet users have accepted a marketing driven presentation layer – essentially censorship – as ‘status quo’.
Premise Six: DNA before intent and projection. What is needed is a objectified classification of the human element (which I label as “DNA”) within the network. Intent (i.e. Google (“search”)) and projection (i.e. Facebook) are non-directional approaches. A directional approach requires to locate the user on more than just the location level but also include the level of education and knowledge etc.
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