Imagining a beneficent search engine

@danielsgriffin via Twitter on Aug 15, 2022

“Imagining a beneficent search engine: Content advisories and what-if Google were powerful & brave”

HT: now-deleted Twitter account’s thread: “Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Here’s a list…"

Text of image:

screenshot: A mock Google search page: Query: [insert query here]

It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search in our index!

Want help reformulating your query? Check out these free external guides for domain-specific advice from community-experts on identifying and revising queries for your searches.

Need help choosing other search systems? Here is a community-managed open source table for selecting search systems: [insert filterable list of search engines with distinct indexes or filtering/interaction features (inc. Internet Archive, government and library web-based search systems, competitor search engines, experimental search engines), links to and community-written guides to question-asking & exploratory browsing on forums and other social media platforms (inc. expert comments on safety, privacy, & transparency reports like links to Ranking Digital Rights, etc.), links to locale-specific librarian desk reference services, collaboration with Wikimedia: ‘how to search Wikimedia’. [include permalink to this table]]

Want to learn more about this content advisory? Click here to read this last month’s community ombudsperson’s public audit of ‘query-match content advisories’. This includes statistics from our systems and feedback from searchers, representatives of these other search systems, and community stakeholders.

Currently: Google [cetaxisd] “It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search Try using words that might appear on the page you’re looking for. For example,”cake recipes" instead of “how to make a cake.” Need help? Check out other tips for searching on Google."

screenshot: Google search results page for [cetaxisd].

My mockup of a beneficent search engine is not meant to be a suggestion, but a speculation. What if the dominant search engine were such that it would admit such a resource? What if we were such that it would willingly do so? What might we learn from its absence?

Note: “content advisory” is language from a recent Google post. Here is a link to that post (1: see: “Expanding content advisories for information gaps”) & an earlier one re the feature (2). [links are not endorsements]

Inspiration for what-if:

@danielsgriffin via Twitter on Aug 14, 2022

This thread helps me imagine a what-if:

Imagine a beneficent Google that, instead of its OK/patronizing/apologia “content advisories” with “It looks like there aren’t any great matches for your search”, pointed users to other search systems.

@A_Daneshzadeh via Twitter on Aug 14, 2022

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Here’s a list of sites you may have never heard of, it’s how we overcome the madness:

The quoted-tweet is now deleted, but replies and quote-tweets are still available.

The original tweet is also available at Archive.org

This page was published on 2023-06-27.

Updated on 2023-07-11: updated tweet display to cards.