Re^3: RFC: Peer to Peer Conceptual Search Engine

The closest thing I ever came across in terms of an IDEAL search engine was the custom site search for Wiser.org

Over 100,000 groups and organizations and unnumbered individuals, worldwide networked and organized through this social network, which would have been impossible without the unique multifaceted search interface.

What happened to this social network? One day, it was simply announced that the site was shutting down. All that remains, it seems, is some of the non functional static pages archived on the Wayback Machine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiser.org

Here is an Internet Archive page showing the deceptively simple search interface:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120910002106/http://www.wiser.org/all/search?phrase=

It had conceptual indexing of facets such as; "Solutions" (to world problems, issues and concerns) along with Organizations, Groups, People, Events, Resources, etc. Also these facets could be simultaneously searched by language, location and if desired, key word. I really loved that search engine.

I may be a wee bit paranoid or something, but it seems, nearly every trace of the original free, open source WiserEarth API, and all documentation has been scrubbed from the internet. Including the Internet Archive. If anyone has a tip where it can still be found, I'd appreciate that.

So, this brings to the foreground, one of the problems of centralized indexing. If a well organized, worldwide, social activist community becomes problematic, it is all to easy to take out a central server. Or maybe the maintainers of the site just got tired of maintaining it. Either way, something hundreds of thousands of world betterment groups, organizations and individual activists depended, really depended on, vanished.

What essentially pulled all these groups and organizations together was a database with a functional search engine geared towards real human needs.

Tom

Comment on Re^3: RFC: Peer to Peer Conceptual Search Engine

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Re^4: RFC: Peer to Peer Conceptual Search Engine by soonix (Canon) on Jan 29, 2020 at 16:21 UTC
Your "conceptual indexing" sounds a lot like what's today called "social bookmarking", which tries to apply a similiar process to webpages as used in libraries. The Wikipedia page has a section "Comparison with search engines". The Wiser.org Search API probably was derived from (or the same as) the WiserEarth API, which (still) is in the Internet Archive (FAQ and Documentation) I don't think there's active scrubbing going on, the "normal" entropic force is strong enough already, especially if the information in question needs active maintenance.	[reply]
Re^5: RFC: Peer to Peer Conceptual Search Engine by PerlGuy(Tom) (Acolyte) on Jan 30, 2020 at 11:38 UTC
I misspoke. What I meant was the open source WiserEarth platform. The program(s) that ran the site. The backend rather than the frontend. I did just find it on SourceForge,(I think, looks like?). https://sourceforge.net/projects/wiserplatform/files/wiserplatform/ There are, I suppose, some parallels between my program, or indexing system and social bookmarking, but social bookmarking, in practice, requires, generally speaking, some proprietary methodology on some specific platform with an inaccessible database. Delicious has gone by the wayside somewhere after passing through different hands. Along with it went 180 million bookmarks. Presumably, that will happen sooner or later with every such proprietary service or "black box" type database on the internet. What is needed IMO is an internet standard, similar to the Dewey Decimal System for books, in public libraries Read more... (2 kB) What I've endevored to produce is something more along the lines of Ranganathan's "colon classification system". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification Such a faceted metadata structure is compact, concise yet comprehensive, sufficiently flexible and extensible to encompass everything on the internet for the foreseeable future, yet structured enough to be computer readable. i.e. it can be easily and reliably isolated from whatever else appears in the source code of a website (using regular expressions). Tom	[reply]
Re^6: RFC: Peer to Peer Conceptual Search Engine by PerlGuy(Tom) (Acolyte) on Jan 30, 2020 at 18:24 UTC
Significant, from the Wikipedia article is this example of Ranganathan's metadata compacting method: Read more... (1282 Bytes) All that becomes this: L,45;421:6;253:f.44'N5 The particular concepts incorporated into the example are not particularly relevant to internet indexing. Factually, I would say that only three facets are represented; Topic (hierarchically structured), Location (think geocodeing. Google Earth), and Time (Think, event calendar data, scheduled future events included). We can dispense with delimiters, if the pattern structure remains consistent. This style of encoding data could incorporate any number of facets. What else might be included? I've incorporated those I consider important and useful in the program, but it isn't written in stone. Tom	[reply]


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