Re: "Voluntary Censorship" vs. Govt Legislation

Ryan Anderson writes:
>The second thing, and most important, is that web search engines need 
>to
>index *every* page, and allow the topical/categorization system as a 
>way
>to further limit searchs.  

You can't make the web search engines do that.  It's a free country.

What you can do is to avoid the ones which have policies you don't
like.  If Altavista starts listing only rated sites, you can use a
different search engine.

Realistically, the percentage of rated sites is probably going to
stay low for some time.  The big ones will rate, though.  So the
question will be whether most people are happy with the "top 1%"
sites, or whether they want access to the whole web.

It seems to me that if you are using a search engine, you probably
need access to more than just the big commercial sites.  Rogue
indexes which don't block unrated sites may have an advantage just
in terms of usefulness, even aside from the politics.

"John

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On Thu, 7 Aug 1997, John Smith wrote:

> >The second thing, and most important, is that web search engines need 
> >to
> >index *every* page, and allow the topical/categorization system as a 
> >way
> >to further limit searchs.  
> 
> You can't make the web search engines do that.  It's a free country.

It's just a matter of convincing the major search engines to use this
system over some others, and to change their opinions on indexing
non-rated sites.

The only problem with rogue indexers is that the drive space for the index
is just enormous (think about how many pages there are on the net, just on
the web, ignoring Usenet entirely... I think most of the serach engines
store at least the first 100 bytes or so of each page, plus all the
indexing... it's rather big..)

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Ryan Anderson - <Pug Majere>     "Who knows, even the horse might sing" 
Wayne State University - CULMA   "May you live in interesting times.."
randerso@ece.eng.wayne.edu                        Ohio = VYI of the USA 
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