[Search-l] twin principles, or what brings us together?

Tue May 8 18:23:06 UTC 2007

Thanks Nathan (and Fred), I absolutely agree on Privacy.  I was  
thinking Privacy was more of a policy than an actual technology, but  
even at the protocol and software levels Privacy can be expressly  
coded, through data distribution frameworks, identifiers (hashing),  
and encryption.  So definitely part of our Four Organizing  
Principles: Transparency, Community/Collaboration, Quality, and Privacy.

I'd love to see the search wiki start improving, I proposed a few  
ideas here and welcome anyone's help/feedback on the wiki:
	http://search.wikia.com/wiki/ 
Talk:Search_Wikia#Revamp_the_main_landing_page.3F

One thing that I've not _really_ found anywhere, was a nice table  
listing all of the known open source search technology projects.  If  
there's anyone good with making a nice wiki table I'd love to get a  
page started on the wiki and start to fill it in, something along the  
lines of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Comparison_of_instant_messaging_clients ?

Some off-the-cuff column ideas: started, last-active, license,  
language, function (crawling, indexing, query handling, etc),  
estimated usage...

Jer

On May 7, 2007, at 7:58 PM, Nathan Braun wrote:

> For the record, I also totally agree with Fred: this is also one of  
> the reasons I'm working on Litepost:
>
> * Why trust a Search company with your email??
>
> It all boils down to trust.  This is where transparency and  
> collaboration help, but privacy is a key factor as well:
> - Privacy is Google's greatest stumbling block.
> - Therefore, it may also represent Wikia's #1 opportunity.
>
> Is this coalescing/evolving into some (semi-)formal set of Wikia  
> principles??  (we might as well do this sooner than later)
>
> WIKIA SEARCH-- FOUR ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
> 1.        Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms  
> operate,
> both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
> 2.       Collaboration - Everyone is able to contribute in some way  
> (as
> individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community  
> focus.
> 3.       Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy  
> of search
> results and the searching experience.
> 4.       Privacy - "Pursuing the Holy Grail of Privacy Protection"   
> A threefold process?:
>         a) decentralizing storage;
>         b) maintaining enough data to keep the project competitive  
> and functional; but
>         c) never too much in one place to facilitate privacy breeches.
>
> I would personally add Personalization or even Hypercustomization  
> to this list, but that could be a subpoint of "quality" depending  
> on how one looks at it.
>
> NB
>
> On 5/7/07, Fred Benenson <fcb at fredbenenson.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>    First let me introduce myself -- my name's Fred. I'm a free  
> culture activist, and student at ITP @ NYU. I brought Jimmy to  
> announce this project at NYU (he claimed it was the first public  
> announcement, but I had heard rumblings before.) as part of a free  
> culture lecture series I was organizing. So I'm really looking  
> forward to seeing how this progresses.
>
> Second, and my real reason for the reply is add/comment on Jer's  
> principles:
>
> What about privacy? If this project wants to compete with big G  
> then we're going to have think hard about a good data retention  
> policy. That is, we'll want to collect enough of the same data  
> (common search terms, errors, effective results, etc.) that Google  
> does, store it somewhere, analyze it, so we can offer competitive  
> services and features, but not compromise anyone's privacy.
>
> Perhaps this is too soon to start worrying, but I fear that Google  
> + others will have a huge advantage over us if we choose not to  
> collect any data as they always have access to their data set, and  
> are always able to run their algorithms and analyses.
>
>  I think we'll probably be able to find some kind of compromise --  
> enough data to keep the project competitive and functional, but not  
> enough to facilitate privacy breeches, but it's still something we  
> have to think hard about, from the beginning, because, ostensibly,  
> the log files will be available for anyone to peruse.
>
>
>
> F
>
>
> On 5/7/07, jer < jeremie at jabber.org> wrote:
> Nobody yet pointed out a completely glaring omission, the obvious
> one, and perhaps the most important unifying principle of the three  
> now:
>
>         Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy  
> of search
> results and the searching experience.
>
> Jer
>
> On May 7, 2007, at 1:59 AM, jer wrote:
>
> > One thing I've spent a lot of time trying to summarize is what is it
> > that really brought us together, what defines this effort in the
> > simplest way?
> >
> > Here's what I've come up with so far as my twin principles:
> >
> >       Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms  
> operate,
> > both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
> >       Collaboration - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as
> > individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community
> > focus.
> >
> > We are a search community built on a shared belief in Transparency
> > and Collaboration... I hope that rings true for everyone else here,
> > it's what I personally believe in as the foundation for a better
> > search.
> >
> > Jer
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