Freedom in Search Engines
My main interest is in open source software (OSS), and I will be speaking on lessons of privacy, freedom, and quality learned from OSS that are relevant to search engines. I will connect several ideas along the path(s) from OSS to search, which may seem unrelated at first: blogs, wikis, peer-to-peer filesharing, and web services.
I am not a lawyer, so I will concentrate on the three social issues above with regard to web search and how we can achieve them to varying degrees with technology. Technical detail will be kept to a minimum in order to make it clear why everyone should care about these issues, not just computer scientists.
I'll assume a little previous knowledge: that you use the web almost every day and have at least heard of the buzzwords above. If you want a little more background information than I can cover in a 30 minute talk, here are some useful readings:
- What Is Open Source?, a good summary by Dan Woods on O'Reilly's OnLamp.com.
- The Long Tail, a Wired article by Chris Anderson on how online businesses can make lots of money from niche markets.
I'll be summarizing the salient points of the references below in my talk, which are really too long and technical for a general audience. I only include the links here for completeness.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the most famous essay on open source by Eric Raymond. Unfortunately some tech jargon is used, but only a sections are relevant to my discussion:
