Public service search engine as an escape from enshitification and tracking
Public service search engine as an escape from enshitification and tracking
89,004 local governments existed in the United States in 2012. By extension, there are a shit-ton of public sector websites including schools and libraries. So why can’t there be a public-funded search engine just for indexing all the public service websites?
Citizens who need to access a public service should not have to visit some shitty Google-like search engine by a surveillance advertiser to find a public resource. Google and Microsoft should not be gateways to public access. They can offer their shitty service for private sector searches but governments should have sovereignty from that. If I have to ask tech giants what is the URL for my secretary of state, it’s a fucked up dependency.
It also shouldn’t just be a search engine. There should also be a hierarchical structured directory. A public service directory plus search engine would be inherently ad-free and tracker free, federally funded.
Progress needed.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but for now ddg has
!govthat will search across us government sites for a search term...!gov environmentor!gov foodand so on.I mean federal government still relies on centralized corporate social media to relay news/updates. No reason they couldn't host their own mastodon server. But they refuse to. They cannot not even get RSS right most of the time.
I agree with you. There should be a separation of Corp and state. But they will just site costs.
Until we get some of the old kodgers out of there who has been squatting in office since the '80s and replaced with tech savvy socially conscious individuals...this may take awhile.
That is academically interesting about DDG !gov. Though I avoid DDG.
I would like to hear the excuse of the world’s wealthiest country that outspends the world cumulatively on defense by a factor of 10 say “we can’t afford to deploy a search engine” even though some dude built stract.com by himself in his off hours.
That’s probably closer to the issue.
Though w.r.t. age, I think the young crowd works against us. In principle the 1980s generation experienced a free and open non-commercialized internet. The millennials and younger started out as corporate pawns and don’t know what a pre-technofeudal internet looks like. But the problem is the leaders are all too low-tech to have experienced the 1990s internet anyway.
/me has a flashback to Neil deGrass Tyson naming off the professional expertise of Congress people and said something like: “business… business… business… law… law… business… where is the rest of life?”
Please don’t put engineers in Congress.we don’t understand how people work